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Getting up, he walked into the outer office to find out what she was taking. It didn’t matter; Lucy had very little in way of personal stuff on her desk.
He leaned against the doorjamb. “How is she?”
“If you cared, you would call her.” Sera slammed the drawer shut on the desk, then opened it again and grabbed a small plastic case of something and swore under her breath.
Though he understood the anger, he didn’t see it coming from this woman. This woman let nothing faze her, from a sudden engagement to a daughter halfway done with a pregnancy, to her own kid in the hospital and her not knowing what was going on. But now her anger was palpable.
“She left, Sera. I would have talked to her when I got back, but she was gone.” Even he knew he didn’t think they would have talked then either.
“You accused her of trying to kill your child. Lucy! Lucy, who couldn’t hurt a fly,” Sera hissed.
“You weren’t there, Sera. I told her about the allergy.”
“Did you tell her how to treat it? Did you ever sit her down and say, ‘when this happens, you need to do this, or that this will happen’? She has never encountered that before, and it scared her to death.”
He looked away. “No, I didn’t. I guess I should have.”
“Yes, you should have.” She turned back to the desk and grabbed a second plastic tube and put it in her suit jacket.
“If she really is quitting, tell her I will give her a good reference.” Leo watched as Sera looked at the desk.
“I will never get her into another office again, Leo. Any confidence she has gained over the last six months is gone. I spent sixteen years trying to find Lucy and I had, I finally had. But now she’s gone again.” Sera looked at the ceiling.
“Tell her she was good, that she would excel anywhere.” Leo wanted to hug the woman. She so needed a hug.
“Not anymore,” was all she said. “That’s all she wanted, her headphones.”
Watching Sera head for the door, he asked, “Would it be possible to let me know when the babies are born? I would like to know.”
Sera stopped and turned on him. “No, Leo, I will not. If you want to know, you had better talk to their mother. Or are you concerned she’ll rope you into being a father to them? Because I can tell you right now, she won’t. In fact, right now … right now she’s planning on giving my grandkids away to fucking strangers, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Her anger was all-consuming. “She had never thought about giving them up. She was willing to marry me to keep them.”
He instantly regretted telling Lucy’s mother that they were marrying for something other than love. All Lucy had wanted was for her family to think they were getting married for love, and now he had said that wasn’t the case.
But Sera didn’t seem to notice as she tried to rein in her anger, anger he could tell she wasn’t used to expressing.
“That, Leo, was the Lucy that thought that she could do anything. That was the Lucy who never let anything or anyone get her down. This Lucy thinks she will kill them, and nothing we tell her has changed that.” She turned and walked away from him, carrying what little Lucy had left in the office and his life away with her.
Her words cut him as deep as he was sure his words had cut Lucy. But she had brought the carton of almond milk into the house, and she remembered everything.
Sera had been right; he hadn’t told her anything about what happened when Amelia had a reaction, or how to treat it. That had been on him. Maybe if he had made a point of doing that, she wouldn’t have used the almond milk. Maybe he was also to blame.
