Page 44 of Cut Off
“I have a lawyer.”
“You have a contract lawyer. You need a family lawyer. Yesterday. Today, actually. By lunchtime. The kind that eats grandmothers in pearls for breakfast.”
He almost smiles.
“I’ll call Ms. Hernandez,” he says. “She had someone for me.”
“Good.”
“Gwen’sgoing to bring up everything,” he says after a second. “All my skeletons. Not just the bar fight suspension, but all the puck bunnies. She’s going to bring it all up and dress me up as a thug and the judge is going to—”
“The judge is going to look at the kid in your house who made mac and cheese yesterday and who sleeps in a room you had decorated and is currently sitting in a Dickens public school with his old beat-up backpack because you let him keep it. And Ms. Hernandez is going to file her report. And you are going to keep doing the work. That’s it.”
He nods.
We sit in the silence for a breath, needing it. Finally, I say, “Will you tell me about her?”
“Gwen?”
“Rosie.”
His face changes. Not closes—opens. Just a little. Like a door cracking. The light coming through the windshield catches in his hair, picks out a few strands of red I hadn’t noticed before—the brown, highlighting his rich auburn hair perfectly, and I file that under the things I’m ignoring.
“Rosie was…” He sighs. “She was the smartest person in any room she walked into. And she always knew it, but she’d never say it. She’d just sort of—let everyone else figure it out around her. She was funny. She had this dry sense of humor. She’d say something completely bonkers in the middle of class and only I’d catch it, and we’d just lose it, the two of us, in the back of the lecture hall. Drove our professors nuts.”
His hands move when he talks. They didn’t before, but they’re moving now.
“It was greatuntil it wasn’t,” he says. “I keep… I keep trying to figure out the line, where it stopped being great, and I can’t find it. No exact moment where I go, oh, that’s it. It was just—gradual. Like she was getting smaller and smaller in the room, and I didn’t—I was twenty-one, Zoe, I was a kid. I didn’t see it.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I remember her saying, ‘My demons are catching up.’ I thought she meant exams. I was a bonehead. She meant her mother. She meant everything. And when I got drafted, when the Blizzards called and it all started getting big and loud and cameras appeared in our apartment hallway—she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She hated all of it. The attention, the lifestyle, the—we’d come home, and she’d just go straight to bed.”
I whisper, “She was terrified.”
“Yeah. So she just left. I came home from a road trip, and the apartment was empty. Note on the counter. ‘I can’t do this. Don’t look for me.’”
“Jesus, Jonah.”
“I called, emailed, texted her, on and off, for about six months. Then I stopped because I finally took the hint. She wanted away from me. But she also wanted to be away from her mom and away from the whole thing.” His hand opens and closes on the wheel. “And maybe that would’ve been fine, except she was pregnant. And she didn’t tell me. And that—that I can’t—”
He breaks off.
“That’s the part,” he says.
“That’s unforgivable,” I finish.
He nods. “I don’t know where to put it. The anger about that. Because she’s gone. So I can’t. I can’t yell at her. I can’t ask her why. I can’t—there’s nowhere for it to go.”
“No. There isn’t.”
He’s quiet. The heater whirs.Somewhere outside, a car door slams.
I look at him—the way the muscle in his jaw is finally not jumping for the first time since we walked out of the judge’s chambers—and I think, for a clear, terrifying second: Oh, no.
This is bad.
This is exactly the bad thing I told him would not happen, and I made him shake on it in the parking lot of Room Bloom eight days ago. This—this thing where I’m in an SUV admiring the line of a man’s profile while he tells me about the worst thing that ever happened to him—is the textbook definition of falling for somebody.
