It was nearing ten in the evening by the time I’d managed to get everyone home and squared away and could get out the door.
Olivia stayed behind with a sniffly, half-asleep Noah, his heart still broken from having to cut our day at Disney short. I felt fucking horrible about taking him from it early, but I needed to sort this out as quickly as I could, needed to figure out how the fuck I was going to fight this and what I needed to do. If keeping him meant upsetting him this one time, I would sacrifice a good memory for a million more.
With my house completely off limits for this conversation and Ethan’s house filled with his roommate’s friends, we had two options — a private bar where I could book us a room, or the office downtown where anyone working late could find us.
I chose the former.
“You can’t just throw money at this and hope it works,” Ethan snapped, downing the last bit of his first glass of whiskey and setting it down on the table in frustration. He seemed just as stumped as I was, just as angry as I was — or maybe he was just as overworked as I was. “I’m sorry but that’s not how this works. You’re going against a fucking pediatric nurse who has known him his entire life.”
“But he’s my son!”
Ethan reared back at the outburst. In fairness, I’d put way too much emotion into that, but I’d barely been given a moment to process any of this outside those thirty seconds that I’d had with Olivia in the gift shop. I’d hoped Noah would nap on the flight home, but he was too hyped up on a sugar rush from too many churros, and so I’d been left on the verge of breaking for hours.
I leaned onto the pool table, two glasses deep and my mind a fucking wreck, and put buried my face in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m not doing well.”
“I can see that.”
“There has to be something we can do,” I said. “There has to be. I know you said I can’t throw money at this, but there must be someone I can pay off, the judge, her lawyer, someone.”
“That’s bribery, Damien, and it’s illegal.”
“I fucking know!” I spat. “Help me. Please. What can I do?”
His gaze hung on me as he poured himself another glass from the bottle. He slid off the stool and poured another two fingers worth into my abandoned glass. “You won’t like my idea.”
“I will like any fucking idea that guarantees me custody of my son.”
His tongue slid across his bottom teeth as he pushed his glasses up his nose, taking instead to leaning against the private, empty bar instead of sitting at it. “Fuck the annulment. Stay married, for now. I’ve filed the papers but it’s not too late to cancel. It will strengthen your case. She’s not married, she lives alone, so it would be a single-parent household. Two-parent households are preferred, from what I can tell, but again, I don’t know nearly as much about family law as I do business—”
“I can’t do that,” I breathed. I’d given endless hours of thought to it after I’d sent him that text asking him to pause the annulment — Olivia would fucking kill me if I did that. And he’d already sent them at that point, anyway, so I’d given the green light to carry on. But knowing damn well that it would help now, in this situation and not the one I thought I was dealing with, tempted me far too much. “It’s not just me I need to worry about. It’s Olivia, as well.”
“I understand. But you wanted my suggestion,” he said, the words feeling far too cold. I reached for my glass, downing it, pouring another, and taking a gulp. “Marissa left you. The court will of course take into consideration her infidelity, but in their eyes, she left a relationship when she found out she was pregnant and left him to you in a state of what Grace is claiming was medical incompetence at the end of her life. You have to understand how they will see this and the best ways you can combat it, and your best bet is to show that you have a loving, stable home with two parents.”
I shook my head, struggling to fully process his words. All I could think about was her, her reaction to this, how she’d fucking hate me for it. She wanted the annulment, desperately. And I wanted to give her that.
I wanted to give her far more than that.
“I don’t want to ruin this,” I breathed.
Ethan looked at me, his jaw ticking. “When you say this—”
“All of it. Noah. Olivia. The whole thing. I’m being tugged in two different directions.”
“Why does she factor into this? She’s just a girl that works for you, Damien. How is that on the same level?”
“It’s not,” I insisted. “But she’s drastically taking over parts of myself that I didn’t fucking realize I still had. Do you understand that? Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
He downed the rest of his drink in silence, closing the binder laid out on the table. “You can’t be seriously telling me that you love her after, what, three weeks? Four weeks?”
The words hit me like a brick, winding me, sobering me just slightly. Of course I wasn’t saying that. That would be insane. And I wasn’t someone who jumped into things like that so easily and so quickly, especially not now, not with Noah in the equation. Liar. “I’m not saying that I do, but I’m saying that I think I could. And I haven’t opened up like that in almost six fucking years.”
“And salvaging that is worth more to you than your son?”
No. It wasn’t. But it was still a fucking factor.
He was right, though. I was putting a maybe on a pedestal that although didn’t come close to the one I’d raised for Noah, was still high enough to be a problem when all of this was on the line. I’d crossed lines I’d set for myself, backed down from what I’d said to her on the phone that night. I’d developed feelings when I knew I was mostly incapable of commitment again, and fucked myself over in the process.
I didn’t know what to fucking do, but more than that, I didn’t care that I would go home smelling of booze. I poured myself another glass.
