Page 53 of Knocked Up

"Nothing happened," I said. "He's family. Sign the pucks."

I got a bag of frozen peas out of the break room freezer, because that is what was in there. I stood in the parking lot with it against my face and watched a rescue adopt out nine animals in one morning. That is more than they do in three weeks.

Auggie came out with kibble in his collar.

"You want the good news or the medical news?"

"The medical news."

"Your face is going to look incredible tomorrow. Now the good news. Everybody in there thinks you took that on purpose."

"I didn't take it on purpose. I didn't see it."

"I know," Auggie said. "That's why I said it's good news."

He stood next to me a while, chewing his thumbnail, which he did when he was deciding.

"Beckett. What was on the floor?"

"Nothing."

"Okay," he said, and did not ask again.

The clip was up by eleven. By one it had a caption that was a question. By four there were three accounts that hate this team running it with a different question. By dinner a man on a national afternoon show said the words personal situation and moved on to a hip injury in Nashville. My father's producers do that show. My father has never once in his life let a thing go by because it was mine.

I did not care about any of that. I've been trained since I was seventeen to care about exactly that. It was so far down the list I had to go looking for it.

What I cared about was that her private life hit the floor of her mother's building in front of a camera, four days after she told me. I was the one who put it there.

I did not go back in. The lobby was full of people, and the last thing that woman needed was me standing near her desk with a bleeding mouth.

I went home, did the fluids, and sat with the dog.

"He's got a good right hand," I told Bear.

Bear's tail moved twice.

"I'd have hit me too."

I turned it over the whole way home looking for the part where I was owed an apology. It is not there. He was eleven years old. He came into a kitchen and found his sister on the floor and could not get her to say why. I'm the why, and I've been the why for ten years.

At six I got the green folder out of the drawer.

I had a game Monday, a face like a bruised peach, and a folder of printouts about a blood pressure I had no business knowing anything about. There is one language I speak. I've never been able to speak any of the others.

I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal with a bag of peas on the passenger seat and a dog behind it. I parked in her lot at seven forty. The lights were on.

I did not have a sentence.

What I had was this. I had it all the way down in the part of me that does not put things into words. Whatever this turns out to be, whatever she lets it be, she is not doing it on her own, not one hour of it.

I got out of the truck.

Chapter 15: Tessa

I let him come, and the reason is not a nice one.

I let him come because saying no would have required a sentence. Every sentence I could build started with the word because. Everything after the word because was true in a way I was not prepared to say out loud.