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“Would you like a drink?” he asks when we make it into the living room. He turns to face me and runs his hands soothingly down my arms.
His touch heats me from the inside out, causing me to shiver. Thank you very much, hormones.
“Water, please,” I whisper.
He stares hard at me, his eyes slowly making their way down my face. His gaze is filled with so much longing that it feels like a caress, trailing a blaze of heat across my skin. It lands on my lips before he finally takes a long, unsteady breath.
I can’t ignore the thick hunger that clings to the air around us, but giving in to these feelings is the last thing we should be focused on right now.
I shake my head, trying to clear my mind and tell him to move at the same time.
When he turns to leave the room, I sigh, letting some of the tension in my shoulders free.
For the first time, I allow myself to realize how beautiful their home is—anything to distract me. The living room is large and open, with tall glass windows covering an entire wall. A big brown couch sits against one side of the room, and a beautiful stone fireplace adorns another. The last part of the room opens up to the hallway and kitchen.
I walk over to it, looking closely at a group of pictures arranged in a collage on the wall. They’re mostly of Willow, some alone and some with Chase or Emily. There’s a picture of the child with an older couple. The woman is beautiful, with chestnut-colored hair and a sweet smile. I can’t decide if the man looks more like Chase or more like Drake, so I’m unsure who they are to Willow.
Finally, I come across a photo of three kids, maybe just a little younger than Willow is now. I’m hit again with how much Willow looks like her mother, as the girl in the photo has to be a young Emily. Which means the two boys must be Drake and Chase—Drake with a large welcoming smile, Chase with a serious scowl. I can’t help but grin at how perfectly adorable the group is.
“That was the first summer Drake and I met Emily,” Chase says, walking back into the room with a glass of water in each hand.
I grab mine with a “Thank you” and take a few long drinks.
He heads over to the couch, and I follow before sinking in on the other side of it. “Emily and her mom moved to town after her parents divorced. Her mother worked a lot, so after a few months, we all spent more time together than apart. When my father bought the cabins, we would all go up there on weekends and explore together.”
“Your parents never worried about any funny business?” I ask, taking this opportunity to see if he gives me the same story as Emily about their relationship being platonic from the start.
“We came from different parents and households, but we were pretty much raised as siblings. Around puberty, I think, our sleepovers went from us all together in our sleeping bags to having to sleep in different bedrooms. Emily was given the upstairs loft of the cabin, which ticked Drake off because he didn’t think it was fair that she got her own bathroom.” He laughs softly and looks down. “I don’t know. We were good kids. I guess they trusted us when we said we weren’t interested in each other like that.”
“How did they react when you two got married?”
“My parents were always accepting of our situation. The whole town has been, honestly. There were rumors in the beginning, and questions. But we just ignored them and moved on, and eventually, they got bored and moved on too. I’m not sure how many people know or understand our dynamic one hundred percent, but what they do know is that everything we do is for Willow. Everyone in town loved Emily’s mother, then Emily, and now Willow. They’re all so much like one another. Loving, giving, selfless. Emily has such a good heart, and with all she’s been through, I’m sure no one ever wanted to make things harder for her.”
“Is that why you did it, then? You married her to make things easier on her?”
“Emily was completely on her own when Willow was born. Her colic was so bad that Emily was barely sleeping. She just became a shell of a person. Drake and I, our friends, my parents—we were all so worried about her, and we tried to help as much as we could, but Emily is so fucking stubborn. You can’t make her do shit. In a way, I felt responsible for the situation.”
He scrunches up his face and reaches up to run a hand through his hair. “Obviously, Willow isn’t biologically mine, but when Emily was pregnant, talking through what to do, I was the one giving her all the reasons why she’d make a great mother. There were times I was probably too pushy, to be honest. Too invested. But I knew Emily would never forgive herself for any choice other than raising Willow. And then, when Willow was about four months old, I came up with this hair-brained idea on how I could help Emily. I bought this house, and maybe a week or so later, Drake and I took a day off work and we moved in all of Willow’s and Emily’s things, and that was that.”
“That was that,” I say quietly. He makes it sound so simple, as if there were no options other than buying a house and moving in with the two of them. But it still feels a little crazy to me.
“She fought me on it at first,” he continues, “but I think it was more her personal battle with pride than anything else. She knew it was the best thing she could do for Willow, and I don’t know, we just never looked back. They became such a normal part of my routine that even when the colic got better and Willow was sleeping through the night, I wasn’t ready to let them go, and Emily wasn’t ready to leave.”
“But you’re not in love with her?”
“No, Addi.” His words are soft and gentle. “We don’t share a bed—we’ve never so much as kissed. She even kept her maiden name. But as unorthodox as we might be, we’re a family.” He stops talking for a moment, looking out over the room as he takes a deep breath. “Before we knew it, five years had passed, and Emily started to get sick.”
“Which is when you got married.”
He nods, reaching for my glass of water and setting it beside his empty one on the side table. He leans his elbows on his knees, gripping his hands together. “The lymphoma came out of left field. One day she was fine, and the next, she was exhausted. She was tired all the time and losing weight rapidly, but we never expected to hear the word cancer. It shook us both. She didn’t have insurance through her waitressing job, didn’t qualify for Medicaid, and the cost of chemotherapy is astronomical. There was no way we could afford it, but she needed it.”
He looks over at me with a sad smile. “She handled everything like a champ the first few days, like it hadn’t quite sunk in. Then one night, after putting Willow to bed, it hit her. She cried for hours, worrying about what would happen to Willow if she didn’t get better. She was terrified Willow would be ripped out of the only home she had ever known because I had no legal right to keep her. I held her while she cried, and when she was finally asleep, I drove over to my parents’ house and woke up my dad in the middle of the night to tell him I was going to marry her. I knew the company could provide her insurance to help with the cost of treatments. I could adopt Willow so if the worst were to come, she could stay with me. I thought Emily would put up a fight at the idea, but she agreed right away, and we were married within a few days. My dad hired a private investigator and after a few months, we found Willow’s father. He gladly signed over his rights to me, but it took another six months until the adoption was complete.”
His face hangs in a frown, his worried eyes drilling into me.“I’m sorry I’ve dumped so much on you. I know it’s insane, and we probably could have figured things out differently, but emotions were high and we reacted quickly and with Willow’s best interests in mind. I don’t really expect you to understand why I did it or forgive me for it. Even if my and Emily’s marriage isn’t real in the traditional sense, I did commit myself to our family, and I had no right to pursue anything with you knowing it could never develop into anything.”
His apology hurts more than it probably should. I’m not an asshole. I understand his motives and I could never fault him for them, but his words still sting. I don’t expect him to leave his sick wife for me. I don’t want to tear apart his family. At the same time, I want my child to have a father. And the selfish woman in me wishes Chase and I could give our relationship a chance. But the thought of stealing another woman’s husband, no matter the situation, just makes me feel slimy.
With a deep sigh, I meet his gaze and finally ask the question I’ve been wondering all day. “How sick is she?”
