Page 28 of Family Like This

Verydifferent. This is our third apartment today. The first was the former apartment of Rae’s cousin, Mark’s fiancée. Mark bought the building and renovated the top two floors into a home for them. The other apartment is below theirs and only two bedrooms, but it also had an office that would work as a nursery, and it was more spacious than Amelia’s current apartment. It’s a decent option. It was middle of the road as far as price, though Mark probably would’ve knocked a bit off since he knows me. The second place—theLord of the Fliesapartment—was the cheapest of the three, but I was trying to consider a variety of options. It was one side of a duplex. Craplex is more like it.

Where we are now is the most expensive option, but still in our budget.Mybudget. I factored everything by what my salary could handle alone so Amelia can take as much time off as she needs to after the baby. Though our workplace offers a couple of months of paid maternity and paternity leave, knowing she wants to be a lawyer, I want to make sure she has the option to not work and focus on school.

What I wasn’t sure was if this would be her style. It’s an upscale apartment building. It comes with two parking spaces in the parking garage beneath it. The building is monitored by cameras and the parking spaces and the outside of each apartment have a camera for added safety. There’s a small playground out back in the fenced-in recreation area, which also includes picnic tables and grills. It’s like a mini park. For me, it’s perfect, but I want her to love it, too. This is also the only building with an elevator, which is important to me with a baby involved. I don’t want Amelia walking up and down tons of flights of stairs while pregnant—another reason I hated that last house. And it’ll make getting a stroller up and down easier, too.

One of the building managers greets me, and I introduce him to Amelia. He takes us up to the fourth floor—the top floor—and leads us to the apartment. 404. There are four apartments on this floor.

When he swings the door open, allowing us to walk inside, I’m hit with a surprising sensation.I feel like I’m home.

There’s a small area to take off shoes and coats, but it all opens into the kitchen and living area. The kitchen is in front of us to the left. An island with six stools runs the length of the L-shaped kitchen. The counter top is a cream and gray marbled granite and the cabinets are a dark cherry.

“Oh, wow,” Amelia breathes, but her eyes aren’t on the kitchen. To the right is the large living area, which features a wall of windows looking out over the edge of downtown.

I walk over and wrap an arm around Amelia as we look out the windows. This is more than I thought my first apartment would ever be, but when I think about a place to raise a family, I see a Christmas tree in the corner by the windows. I see a dining room table along the wall near the door where we can eat. I see big, plush couches and a round coffee table. A cozy rug for our baby to crawl around on. I see a future here.

The manager tells us to take our time looking through the apartment and hands me an information sheet.

As soon as he’s gone, Amelia spins to face me, grabbing the information sheet out of my hand. It has the floor plan on it, the square footage, safety details, and the price of the rent.

She reads it over, then hands it back to me, looking pissed. “Are you kidding me?”

Breathe,I remind myself. Her emotional swings have been big, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions about the reason for this one.

“About what?” I ask calmly.

“Why would you ever show me this place when we can’t afford it?”

“We can afford it.”

“Youcan afford it. I could never afford this alone.”

My brow furrows, and I step closer. “You’ll never need to afford this alone.”

“It’s easy for you to say that now. What happens when life gets hard? What happens if you leave? I won’t have you or my home anymore.” The words come out with vitriol, but her eyes are filled with hurt.

It did not, not for one single second, cross my mind that she might think that.

Wrapping my hand around her arm, I look into her eyes. “Who hurt you? I’m going to need a name and address so I can go kick their ass for making you think that anyone who cares for you is eventually going to abandon you.”

She inhales and exhales heavily a few times as she stares at me. Then she rips her arm from my grasp. “You mean besides my parents? They didn’t abandon me, but they’re gone now. One way or another.”

“Maybe so, but I know that’s not where this is coming from.” I step forward again, looking down at her, the guarded look on her face. “So, I’m going to ask you again. Who hurt you, and what did they do?”

She stares up at me for a moment longer, still breathing heavily, then she turns and walks over to the couch set up in the apartment for staging. She sits down, her head dropping into her hands.

Cautiously, I walk over and sit down next to her. This woman could rip my balls off and feed them to me on a good day. I don’t want to push the wrong buttons right now, but I need to know where the fear and uncertainty are coming from.

“My high school boyfriend,” she finally says, her words muffled by her hands. A second later, her head shoots up, and she looks at me. “We started dating when I was fifteen. Freshman year. We were friends first, and he was my rock. My dad battled cancer on and off throughout my life. I was seven the first time, but they were able to remove the mass in his colon. He did some chemo that wasn’t too rough on him, and he got better. It came back again when I was eleven. They caught it early and did the same treatment plan. He was good for another few years, then it came back again when I was sixteen. They caught it in his lungs first, but that’s just where it had spread to. He did harsh chemo and fought for as long as he could—you know the rest. My boyfriend was there for me for all of it. He was supportive. He listened to me vent. Held me while I cried. He wasn’t scared by my dad’s cancer and maintained a friendly relationship with him throughout it. I truly thought he was my person. We’d get through anything together because we were already handling this hard thing in stride, but it was all a lie.”

“How so?” I ask, moving closer.

“I was at our house after the funeral—hosting everyone in town, it seemed like—with my mother. He’d been at the funeral with his parents and was supposed to be coming over separately. Instead, he called me and told me he wasn’t coming because he was breaking up with me.” My eyes go wide in horror. What an absolute fuckhead. “He said he’d fallen out of love with me a couple of months prior, but he still cared about me, so he stuck it out to support me, but he couldn’t keep up the act because he’d been talking to another girl, who he wanted to make things official with. The day I said goodbye to my father, I lost the person I thought I could count on for anything.”

I rise from the couch and start pacing, filled with a murderous rage.

Rae likes to say that when Aaron gets pissed, he starts acting like the Beast fromBeauty and the Beast.I never fully understood it until right this second.

I want to tear this guy’s head off for being such an utter asshole and hurting Amelia so deeply. I don’t give a fuck that he was seventeen. There’s such a thing as common decency. Jesus fucking Christ, who does something like that?

---