Page 94 of The Devil Gets His Due

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KEELEY

Iam staggering through my days.

I want to curl into a ball under a blanket and eat ice cream until it all feels bearable, but I can’t. I have a horrible job to get through, day after day, and a baby to prepare for.

Gemma, Mark, Paul, and Jacobson are godsends. Gemma checks on me multiple times a day and convinces Jean to cancel the surprise baby shower she’d planned. Mark helps me set up a 529 plan and a savings account and shows me how much to set aside next year for a nanny.

Paul and Jacobson push Graham’s mattress against the wall when the rest of the baby furniture is delivered and politely suggest I let them know if I need help “moving anything out.”

When they leave, I stand in my daughter’s room. I thought I’d feel better, seeing everything in its place, but with the mattress against the wall and no splashes of color anywhere, it’s all a little grim.

I don’t want to be like my mom—trying to buy us a better life with money I don’t have—but looking at this room simply makes me feel like I’ve failed.

I guess I’d probably feel like that anyway, though.

“You look like shit,” Mark tells me when I bring him his breakfast.

I laugh. It’s kind of nice to have someone refusing to skirt around the obvious truth.Just like Graham did, I think, and then I’m sad all over again.

“I’m thirty-six weeks pregnant. I’m supposed to look like shit.”

“Tammy says—” he begins and I tune out the rest. Mark has found himself a lady friend who is slightly less homeless than him. She lives in one of the tents over on Venice Beach and was, once upon a time, a dispatcher until her child overdosed and her husband left and she found herself in bad shape financially. A series of hard blows at the wrong time…I can see now how that would make you just walk away.

“You know…Graham really cared about you,” he says. “I mean, the guy was head over heels.”

“He had a contract written up,” I reply, assuming he’s forgotten. “He was going to try tobuymy baby.”

Mark shakes his head. “Nah. He’d come down here, ostensibly to talk about the markets but really because he wanted to talk about you. You were his favorite topic and the one thing that made him smile. A guy doing that isn’t trying to buy your baby.”

I feel my temper ratcheting higher. “Mark, I saw it with my own eyes.”

“I don’t care what you saw. That guy was never, ever going to do anything to hurt you, and I think somewhere inside, you know that.”

I brace myself to stand—it’s nearly impossible at this point. “I need to get going.”

“Keeley, you know what people see when they look at me now? They see a guy they assume is on drugs, or crazy, or just lazy as shit. And maybe all that is true, but you knew I could be homeless, and might also have gone through some stuff, so you listened.Yougot so drunk that you married a stranger in Vegas, but you’d gone through some stuff too. My point is that everyone has a story. And if you ever cared about Graham…you at least ought to ask. Because maybe he has a story too.”

I want to believe that. I can feel the way hope is already blooming in my chest, and I squash it flat immediately. If anything Mark’s saying was true, Graham would have tried to explain, or defend himself.

He didn’t care enough to do either.

“I’d better get going.”

“Did you sell the stuff from the storage unit?” he asks.

Last week, at his suggestion, I pulled some of the unworn or barely worn designer things from the storage unit and put them up for sale—three pairs of Louboutins that hurt too much, the Tom Ford dress I never wore once, a few Hermes bags, including the Birkin. I need a safety net for the not unlikely possibility that Fox fires me. I’m not asking Graham for shit.

“The Birkin already sold. I sent it out yesterday.”

“That had to hurt a little.”

I shake my head. “It wasn’t bad.”

All that matters going forward is this baby, and nothing else.

Unless Graham finally comes to his senses and tells me why he fucking did it.And then maybe I’ll allow him to matter too.

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