Page 52 of Sprog
"You fucked her."
"Yeah." I don't look away from her. "I'm not proud of it. I wasn't myself. I thought if I was with someone else it would help me get through what I'd done. It didn't. It made everything worse. And then I found out she'd sabotaged the condom and she was pregnant. Razor told her the baby would come and there'd be a paternity test. It could have been anyone’s; she was clear about that. But when EJ was born, I didn't need a test to know he was mine. I did it anyway. And when the results came back, a piece of something I thought was completely broken put itself back together."
"She doesn’t have anything to do with him." I say. "She signed over her maternal rites as soon as he was born, so he’s I just mine. The club have helped me to raise him."
Savannah is quiet.
"I’m so sorry, Sav. I'm sorrier than I know how to say. I staged that night because I loved you more than I knew what to do with. I couldn't think of any other way to make sure you went and lived your life. I thought I was protecting you." I look at my hands and then back at her. "That isn’t an excuse. I know it's not. I'm telling you the reason, not asking you to forgive the decision."
"You had no right," she says. Her voice is controlled but there's heat under it. "My dream was always to come back here and open a practice. That was always the plan. Come back to you. I wasn't leaving you, Austin. I was going to do this and come back."
The ground shifts under me slightly.
"You never said that."
She looks at me steadily. "I shouldn't have had to say it. We talked about everything. That was us. And then you made this enormous decision for both of us without a single conversation." She puts her mug down and the sound of it on the table is quiet but deliberate. "You didn't trust me to make the right choice for myself. You made it for me."
That lands.
"Yes," I say. "You're right."
"Why didn't you just talk to me about it?"
"Because I knew if I talked to you, you'd talk me out of it. You were always better at it than me. You always made more sense." I look at my hands. "And I believed I was doing the right thing. I needed to believe that. If I'd let myself question it, I'd have collapsed." I look back at her. "That's not a good reason. I know it's not. I'm just telling you what was true."
She goes quiet for a moment.
"What did you do," she says carefully. "After. That night."
I wasn't expecting that question.
"I sat in the clubhouse," I say. "Alone. Until about four in the morning. I didn't drink. I just sat there." I can see it clearly still, the way the bar looked at that hour with the lights low, and everyone gone, the sound of nothing except the road outside. "I went back to my room afterward and I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, and I told myself I'd done the right thing. And I was certain of it. Absolutely certain. And I hated myself anyway, which is a strange thing to hold at the same time."
She's very still.
"After about a week I wasn't sure anymore. After a month I thought I'd made the worst mistake of my life. I kept running it back. Should I have talked to you? Should I have tried? Would it have worked? I went around that circuit for a long time and I never came out the other side of it with the same answer twice." I look at her properly. "I still don't know if I was brave or a coward. I've spent ten years trying to work that out and I honestly don't have the answer. Some days I think I did the only thing that made sense. Some days I think I chose the easier option and dressed it up as sacrifice." I stop. "I'm not asking youto feel sorry for me. I'm just telling you the truth of what it was like, because I think you deserve that."
She's looking at me differently now. The anger is still there but there's something else with it.
"You really sat there until four in the morning."
"Yeah."
"Not drinking."
"No. I thought if I drank then I'd call you. I thought if I heard your voice I'd drive to wherever you were and take the whole thing back." I look at her. "So, I sat there and I didn't call, and I didn't drink. I kept telling myself it was for you."
The silence between us is different now. Heavier, but in a different way.
"I nearly called home," she says. Her voice has changed. Quieter. "In my second year of residency."
I wait.
"There was someone. A man I met in my program. A good man, before you say anything. Kind. Steady. He cared about me properly." She looks at her mug. "We were together for almost a year and a half. He asked me to move in with him. I was so close to saying yes. I had all the reasons to say yes. He was exactly what you'd put on a list of everything a sensible person should want."
"What happened?"
"He sat me down one night and started talking about the future. Our future. Where we'd live, when we'd start a family. Good things. Things I should have been glad to hear." She turns themug around in her hands. "And I sat there listening to him and I couldn’t make myself be present in that conversation. Because you were in my head. Not deliberately. I wasn't sitting there thinking about you on purpose, you were just there, the way you always were, background noise that never actually went quiet." She swallows. "I nearly called home after that. Not to speak to anyone in particular. Just to hear a voice from here. Maybe to say your name to someone who knew you. I got as far as picking up the phone."
