Watching Noah be so absolutely excited to run into his new school and make new friends after what had happened last week was enough to crack my fucking chest.
He didn’t even seem phased by the seizure. He was back to himself the next morning, and when I’d nervously brought up the topic of him starting at the private school I’d shelled thousands out for, he surprisingly seemed more than keen.
I’d spent hours in meetings with his teacher, the principal, and the school nurse — I wasn’t about to let anything go unchecked or a single set of eyes to be off of him. Not after the seizure. If something happened, I needed to know that people would be on hand immediately.
It only helped a little bit that the school was directly next to a hospital.
“Remind me of the rules,” I said, pop-quizzing him as I white-knuckled the steering wheel. My Audi, the one I barely ever drove, idled beneath us.
“Dad, I know them,” Noah groaned, his head flopping back dramatically into his carseat.
I stared him down in the rearview mirror. “Then remind me.”
“Call you or Olivia if I need a thing,” he started, his pointer fingers coming together as he started to count them off. “Don’t be… what was the word?”
“Blasé.”
“Don’t be blasé when I say that Mom is dead. No fighting. No back-talking Mrs. Thatch. Ask for the nurse if I feel bad and tell them to call you.”
“And the sixth one?” I grinned, turning to look over my shoulder instead. He beamed back at me.
“Oh yeah! Have fun.”
————
Liv’s message lit up my phone in the middle of the meeting. For a split second, my heart skipped a beat at the first words: need to talk to you ASAP. Thank God she’d followed it with a heads up that it wasn’t about Noah, because I was two seconds from leaping out of my chair and ignoring the lashing I was getting from the shareholders.
I replied to her the moment we finished up and let her know that I was heading back to my office. I’d barely made it before her — I had about enough time to sit down in my chair and open my laptop before the door clicked open and her panicked form rushed through.
“Fix this,” she said, her phone in hand as she crossed the expanse of the open layout. Her wavy brown hair looked a little unkempt at the roots as if she’d been pulling at it, her eyes just a little too wide, a little too stressed. She wore one of my favorite outfit combinations of hers — a loose, flowing white button-up tucked into a pair of wide leg black slacks, cinching her in at the waist.
“Fix what?” I asked. “No hi, how was dropping off Noah this morning?”
She glared at me as she held her phone out. The screen was filled with a photograph, and the moment I took it from her, I realized exactly what photo that was. I could remember the flash of light as we left, could remember kissing her temple like that, drunkenly assuming it was a chapel photographer and not some random passerby. Shit. “Hi,” she deadpanned, the sarcasm dripping from her tongue. “How was dropping off Noah this morning?”
“Shit. Where did you find this?” I asked, zooming in on the only evidence of what we’d done. Although it made me worried for her, I couldn’t deny that it was nice to have one concrete piece of evidence that I’d liked her from the start and hadn’t just wanted to fuck anything that moved. It was the only thing we had that wasn’t a faded, drunken memory.
“My brother sent it to me,” she swallowed, her voice faltering just a tad. “It was in some cheap tabloid.”
“Which one?” I asked. I tried to exit the photo in the hopes that it would take me back to the website it was published on, but it just sent me back to her photo gallery, sitting there amongst the myriad of pictures of Noah eating ice cream and a handful from our trip up north. She saved it.
“Wealthy Watch,” she scoffed. “It’s some weird, off brand tabloid that apparently focuses on people like you. But you’re missing the point.”
“I’m not, Liv, I’m just trying to figure out—”
“My brother sent it to me. You know what my parents are like. You know what I’m—what I’m supposed to be like.” She collapsed into one of the wingback chairs opposite my desk, burying her face in her hands as her elbows rested on her knees. “Fix it. Please, before I have to do more damage control or come up with better lies. Scrub it and push Ethan on the annulment.”
I swallowed. “He’s submitted the paperwork. We’re just waiting for it to clear.”
“Thank fuck,” she breathed. “How long does that take?”
“I’ll ask him,” I offered, scrolling up through her images out of sheer curiosity and the need for a distraction. One of them, just there at the top of the screen, was the same one that existed on my phone, the same one she’d sent me two days ago while I was here and she was with Noah at the beach. He was sitting in her lap and clutching a sandwich in his hand, and she was kissing him on the side of the head just like I was with her in the photo she’d come in to show me.
I didn’t want to lose this.
“I’ll call him the moment he’s done at the courthouse,” I added. “He should be leaving soon.”
Her lips pursed as she lifted her head from her hands. “Okay,” she nodded, taking her phone back from me as I slid it across my desk. “Please let me know.”
————
“What do you mean she’s strengthened the fucking case?” I gripped the underside of my desk so hard I could feel my nails chipping as I pulled myself back to my computer.
“She found a photo.” My heart sank as Ethan’s hurried breaths filled the dead space of the call. From what I could tell, he was rushing back to his car after having just left the courthouse to drop off some of the forms for the custody trial. “I didn’t see it, but I believe it’s of you and Olivia leaving the chapel—”
“I know the photo,” I ground out through my teeth. And to think this day had started on a high. “How is that related to this?”
“She’s spinning by saying it shows that you’re unruly, unpredictable, and a liability. She managed to get some statements from people who saw you that night and is able to reliably say that you drunkenly married a much younger woman in Las Vegas under dubious circumstances. She’s driving home the narrative that you’re unfit to be a parent,” Ethan said, his car door slamming through the phone. “You’re fucking lucky that the women who work at the courthouse aren’t very tight-lipped. Apparently Grace and her lawyer were telling them all about it.”
Shit. I was screwed. I was absolutely, positively fucked by this. My heart hammered in my chest, my mind going blank and filling with flashing images of Noah from the morning, Noah in the hospital, Noah calling me dad for the first time.
“As far as I know, they’re still unaware of Noah ending up in the hospital, and we’ll keep it that way. She has no right to his medical documents. But you need to be aware that there is a possibility of that coming into play, as well,” Ethan continued, but I was hardly paying attention.
“What do we do?” I asked, cutting right to the meat of it.
“I’ve already told you what you should do.”
“Would that even help still?” The anger in my voice was rising. I couldn’t hold it back, couldn’t keep myself from letting it flow in the one private space I had right now. “If they’re questioning the legitimacy of my marriage, would staying together do anything?”
“Absolutely it would,” Ethan shot back. He seemed just as irritated as I was — and I hoped it was as clear to him as it was to me that neither of us were angry at the other. “They’re saying that you’re unpredictable. Prove them wrong. Stay married. They think it was dubious circumstances, so show them that you’re in love. An annulment will only solidify the narrative they’re running with. It’ll show that you made a poor decision and cannot be counted on.”
“Fuck,” I snapped. “Fuck.”
“You wouldn’t even have to fake anything if your feelings are anything to go on,” he added.
“Can you please not?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m almost as angry as you about this whole thing. They’re fighting dirty and this isn’t my area of expertise,” he explained, and I wanted to believe him, truly. But there was no way on earth he was anywhere close to my level of anger, not when it wasn’t his child on the line. “Look, Damien, I’ve spoken to a few other lawyers that specialize in family law, and every single one agreed with what I’ve suggested. And I imagine they’d double down on that now.”
The idea of doing that, of going against my word when Liv had come in here not thirty minutes ago begging me to dissolve our marriage, plagued me far less than I thought it would in that moment.
I couldn’t think with my heart on this. I had to think with my head, had to think of Noah, had to be okay with it. I cared for her, and I cared far too much, far more than I thought I was capable of — but Noah had to come first. Noah would always have to come first.
“You want me to give you the green light to cancel the annulment.”
“I do,” he sighed. In the background, his engine whirred to life. “We can put it back through when everything is said and done. But we can still cancel it.”
We can put it back through when everything is said and done.
That, that right there, was my saving grace. A month and a half extra was sellable. I could tell her it was a backlog of paperwork, a flaw in the system, anything. We could put it back through and she’d have no idea.
“Do it,” I said, hating myself just a little bit more as the words slipped out. “Cancel the annulment.”
