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Me and Grace.
It was much too early to know for sure, but that morning I decided that it was a girl growing inside of me and I’d taken to naming her Grace. And ever since she came into my life, she would be the focus of every decision I was contemplating about my future.
I couldn’t stay a real estate agent, that much was obvious. The hours were too long and the pay too inconsistent. At some point, I’d have to go job hunting and would probably end up doing data entry or something dull and dependable like that. It wasn’t something I was especially excited about (it’s hard to imagine anyone who would be excited about that), but if it gave me what I needed to take care of Grace and spend as much time with her as possible, then it was good enough for me.
The sounds of the TV faded to the background as I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, trying to imagine the future I’d share with Grace. I could see myself nursing her in the hospital after her birth. Her first steps. Her first word (“Mama” of course).
Then her first day of kindergarten and maybe teaching her to ride a bike. She’d fall off and scrape her knee, but I’d bring out the hydrogen peroxide and treat her wound, putting a bandage on it. And she’d feel instantly better and hug me and tell me that she loved me.
But the fantasy ground to a halt when I imagined her — maybe at eight years old or so — asking me about her father. She’d say all the other girls at school have dads, why didn’t she?
The very question sent a jolt of anxiety through me, which was ridiculous because I had years to come up with an answer. But my body told me I had to give her a satisfying answer now. Maybe her dad was a hero, who died rescuing puppies from a fire. No, that sounded fake. And she’d want to see pictures of him, too. This was the modern era, after all. Not only would she demand pictures, but she’d want a full name, too.
I imagined her as a young teen, armed with the name of her father, tracking him down on the internet and me telling her to stop. Grounding her for using the computer in a way that she wasn’t supposed to.
And I began to cry. Because I was being a bad mother. I was grounding my daughter just for being curious about her past, like any girl would be.
No, I would have to tell her the truth if I wanted to have a good relationship with her. Even when it was hard. When she asked about her father, I would have to tell her everything. About how he was my boss and how we fell in love, but I ran away. And poor little Grace would ask why, and I’d try and explain that it was because I cared about him. And she would hate me for it because I was depriving her of a father. And I’d have to try to tell her that it was better to never have a father at all than to have one who didn’t want to be a father.
I sighed. I tried explaining it to Mila also, when I moved back in. Mila didn’t understand. In fact, she seemed utterly baffled by why I would run off when I had a man like Wesley supporting me, but she trusted me to make the right decision for me. And, I guess as a kind of support, she insisted that the right man would come along sooner or later.
What I bit my lip and didn’t tell her was that the right man already had come along. He was absolutely the right man for me, just not the right man to be the father to Grace.
As devastating as that was for me to admit to myself, there was an even scarier possibility that I kept pushing away. I was a failure at real estate — I couldn’t sell a single house in the time I worked at Dynasty — and I’d been a failure in love, ending up at my sister’s house for the second time in under a year after picking the wrong man. In other words, I was a failure as an adult and had to rely on family for support. If it hadn’t been for Mila, I don’t know where I would have been at this point.
I couldn’t even look after myself; how was I supposed to look after a baby?
I could cope with the idea that Wesley wasn’t able to be Grace’s father, but what if I wasn’t the right woman to be her mother?
CHAPTER24
***WESLEY***
The office was darker without Sloane. Not literally, of course and, in fact, the standard Los Angeles sunny weather was in full swing, sending bright natural light into our office. The windows were tinted, but one could be forgiven for not realizing it.
It was more a feeling of darkness, like something was missing. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt it. Everybody else was in lower spirits since she left. The office was in slow motion, as if the floor was covered in a two-foot layer of molasses. How did our office ever even function without Sloane in it?
Perhaps she hadn’t sold a single house in the time she had been at Dynasty, but sometimes there was more to a person than a mere number could suggest. Maybe she hadn’t yet directly brought any money into the agency, but if losing her meant having to continue on like this, then I would have happily paid her a salary just to come into the office every day and let us all bask in her energizing aura.
There was a knock on my office door and, instinctively, I looked at the clock on my desk. It was only a quarter past 11. Based on my motivation levels, I would have assumed I’d worked through lunch.
“Come in,” I said.
Courtney opened the door and came in. There was a hesitancy to her movement, and she looked tired. She made a point of closing the door behind her and then sat down.
“How can I help you, Ms. Pines?”
She spoke in barely above a whisper. “Do you know where Sloane is?”
Her quiet voice was perhaps a result of her trying to keep the sound confined to the room, though it felt as much a result of lethargy. Or maybe I was just projecting.
“I think she just wasn’t feeling well,” I told her. Everything was still up in the air. I didn’t want it to sound like she’d quit, even though she’d sent in a resignation email. “She should be back in a day or two, I imagine.”
Courtney nodded and looked down at her feet.
“There’s been a nasty flu going around,” I told her.
She nodded.
