“I took a test on the day I missed my period, and he asked me through the door if I was sure it was his.”
I don’t move.
“The test was negative. I broke up with him that day. I was a week late on my period, so I was never pregnant. It was just late.” I pause. “He didn’t text me once that week. He never asked if I was okay. He never said sorry. He didn’t even confirm that I wasn’t –– you know. He just went on to play in the NHL. Like none of it had happened.”
I breathe out.
“So when he turned up Saturday and talked to me like nothing had happened between us, like we were just old friends, Ipanicked. Seeing you felt like a saving grace. I’ve known you forever, and it felt believable, so that’s why I did what I did.”
I’m still staring at the ceiling. I don’t have the courage to look at him. I can feel the temperature of the room change. I can feel Stanley Ermington going perfectly, completely still against my vanity.
I’ve never told anyone that story, never admitted it aloud.
I close my eyes and wait for him to say something.
Chapter 21
Stanley
She closes her eyes, and the whole room’s gone quiet. I stay where I am against the vanity and look at her, flat on her back on her childhood bed with her hands folded on her stomach like she’s bracing for impact, eyes shut. And I don’t say anything, because there is nothing I could put into the first ten seconds of this that wouldn’t somehow curve around and end up being about me, and she did not just hand me that so I could make it mine.
So I give her the ten seconds. Then I give her thirty.
Then I push off the vanity, cross the room, and sit down on the end of the bed, by her feet, far enough that I’m not one more thing happening to her.
“You shouldn’t have spent that week on your own,” I say.
She doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t answer, either, and that’s all right, because it didn’t need an answer — it needed to be said out loud by somebody who wasn’t her, and now it’s been said. I let it lie there in the room where she can finally look at it from the outside instead of the inside.
“That’s a genuinely shit thing to have to carry by yourself,” I say. “Nobody checking on you.”
Her throat moves. She doesn’t cry. I thought she was going to, but it doesn’t come, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d come apart — she just lies there and takes it in.
I look up at the ceiling she’s been talking to this whole time. It’s a regular ceiling.
“Listen,” I say. “Wanting your dad to be proud of you — that’s a good thing to want, Linwood. I’m not going to sit here in the man’s own shirt and tell you it isn’t, because my entire life is one long campaign to get one specific guy to look at me a certain way, so believe me, I get it down to the bone.” I let that sit for a second, because it came out truer than I’d planned. “But that’s his, Linwood. That was always going to be his. Somewhere in here you’ve got to figure out what makes you happy — you, the actual person, not the daughter, not the analyst — and then go and do that and let him keep up or don’t.”
She turns her head on the pillow and looks at me.
And because that is roughly the maximum amount of sincerity I can hold at one time before I drop it on my foot, I keep going.
“And look. If it’d help.” I spread my hands, generous, a man offering a gift. “I am fully prepared to let you slap me clean across the face in front of every single person downstairs. Dessert table. Peak visibility. Really sell it. Throw your father’s good wine in my face, dump me on the spot, take the pumpkin pie and plant it in my face if you’d like — I’ll go down like a gentleman, won’t even flinch. Your dad spends the rest of his natural life convinced I’m a villain, you walk away the rebellious daughter, and you will have finally done one genuinely reckless thing in your whole life that wasn’t grabbing me at a party.”
It works.
She laughs — a real one.
That’s the whole thing I was after. That’s the only thing I was after.
“I’m not going to do that,” she says.
I look at her.
“I’m going to milk this for everything it’s worth.”
“So you’re keeping me?”
“I’m sorry you got stuck in it with me.” The laugh has gone back out of her voice. “I know what they’re all saying. That you’re getting every bit of this — my dad, the summer skate, the whole thing — off the back of me. I see it. I know that’s what they’re all thinking, Stanley.”
