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“Does my father know about you being gay?”
Joshua nods. “He’s the one who suggested the arrangement, after he found out about Patrick.”
I calculate in my mind how long ago that would have been. Not for my marriage arrangement. For my sister’s. How many years ago did my parents sit Adeline down and tell her she’d be marrying a strange man, a decade her senior?
“When?”
“When did he suggest it?” Joshua looks up to the ceiling. “A long time ago. It would have to be at least fifteen years ago.”
I nod slowly. “Fifteen years? That’s how long you’ve been with Patrick?”
Joshua smiles sadly, and I can’t help but empathize. I know what it’s like to love somebody you can never have. I’ve done it twice now. “Longer,” Joshua replies. “We met in college, freshman year. We were roommates. I’ll spare you the details.”
Nobody speaks for several moments. I’m well aware that the minutes are ticking by and soon, I’ll be asked to leave this man, this room, this jail. I might not get another chance to speak with Joshua on my own, so I need to make sure I get every shred of knowledge I can before the guard comes back to collect him and return him to his cell.
Tears sting my eyes when I think of my sister. I’ve never been able to get the image of Adeline’s death out of my head, the way she floated so peacefully in the water she’d drowned herself the night before she was to be married to Joshua.
“Adeline didn’t know any of this,” I say flatly.
Guilt creeps across Joshua’s features. “No.”
“You know, if you’d told her the truth, she probably would have happily married you. Probably would have thought it was the deal of the century, getting our family off her back. She was in love with somebody she wasn’t supposed to be with, too. She was willing to die, so she didn’t have to be without him. And you’re telling me she could have had everything she wanted.”
“I wanted to tell her,” Joshua mutters, pressing his fingers against his closed eyes. “I knew she was struggling. I would have done anything to make her realize marrying me wasn’t the death sentence she thought it was. That it would have freed her, in some strange way. But the baby. It complicated things.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face as his words sink in. The baby. It complicated things. I swallow back a scream.
“What baby?” I whisper.
Joshua’s hands drop from his eyes, and his gray stare meets mine. His sorrow is so palpable, it’s as if I can reach out and touch it.
“What baby?” I repeat, a little louder this time.
“Your sister was pregnant when she died,” Joshua says, looking up at the ceiling. “You didn’t know. I thought you knew.”
My grief hits me like a tidal wave from calm seas, the shock striking me out of nowhere. I look at Joshua, at the table, at the scratched windows that look out onto an empty exercise yard. Shock. I’m in shock.
“It wasn’t yours,” I concede.
Joshua shakes his head, his facade breaking as he witnesses my reaction to his revelation. “I’d never been in a room alone with the girl, much less touched her. If it was mine, it wouldn’t have been a problem for your family. The wedding date was set. But they knew I’d never been alone with her. They knew there was no way it was mine.”
My hands are balled into fists, and I’m squeezing so hard I can feel my nails breaking the skin of my palms. I’ve become a master of compartmentalizing over the years. It’s been a long time since I’ve cried about my sister’s death. But this is new knowledge. And it feels like it might destroy what fragile composure I’ve managed to scrape together since waking up in the hospital two weeks ago. I feel like a live wire, an exposed nerve, being tugged at by villainous fingers.
“Whose was it?” I ask hoarsely, even though I already have my suspicions.
Joshua shrugs. “She didn’t tell a soul. At least, not a soul who decided to share that information. She was seeing more than one guy before she died, I know that much. I just don’t know who. I swear, I would tell you if I knew anything.”
I’m hot. This room is stifling. I need to get out before I start trying to claw my way out of my own skin. But before I can do that, there’s one more thing I need to know.
“The embryos.” The next sentences stick in my throat like poison. “Mine. And yours. Our embryos.”
Joshua looks visibly relieved at the new subject, but he shouldn’t be. Is it really better talking about stealing a teenage girl’s eggs and creating embryos with them than it is discussing a pregnant teenage girl who committed suicide to escape an arranged marriage? “That was fucked up. Your family’s lawyers told me they needed a sperm sample to test. They never told me what for until much, much later. Years later. By then, I’d stopped being surprised by your family and their ideas of forward planning.” He sags in his chair. “I think that was the worst thing they ever told me, though. I felt like some piece of me had been stolen. I can only imagine you felt the same.”
What a strange sensation, to empathize with the man I dreaded marrying for so many long, bleak years. Now he’s in prison overalls, and I’m the one calling the shots, drawing a confession out of him that, it seems, has been years in the making.
It hardly feels like that, though. Everything he’s told me is swirling around in my head, each piece of new information screaming over the rest. I can barely separate them into coherent thoughts.Adeline was pregnant. Joshua is gay. The embryos weren’t his idea. My family is crazier than I thought possible.
I wonder how much my father knew about all of this. He needs to hurry the fuck up and get out of his coma, so I can interrogate him.
