by Shelly Ellis
“Ev, that’s not how kids work.”
Leila sounded tired and it wasn’t just because it was three o’clock in the morning. He knew she was tired of having these arguments, and frankly, so was he. But he also knew that even though Leila loved him, she would end their engagement if Izzy gave her an ultimatum or told her she didn’t want her to get married. He had seen before how much investment Leila had in making sure that her daughter was happy. On the rankings of importance in Leila’s life, Isabel Hawkins came first. That left Evan with a lot at stake in this.
“Then how the hell do kids work, Lee, because I don’t know what else to—”
He was stopped short by the ringing of the telephone. Both Evan and Leila paused, surprised to get a phone call at this late hour. When the phone rang a second time, Evan’s stomach instinctively tightened. Whenever he received late-night calls like this, it was always because something had gone wrong. And something had gone wrong—he could sense it.
He slowly picked up the cordless phone on his night table. “Hello?” he asked with a frown.
“Hello, this is the Metropolitan D.C. Police Department,” a woman’s voice answered. “Am I speaking to Evan Murdoch?”
“Y-yes. This is he.”
“Are you the next of kin for Terrence Murdoch?”
“Yes,” Evan nearly shouted, sitting bolt upright at the mention of his brother’s name. Leila jumped at his side, startled. “I’m his brother. What’s . . . What’s wrong?”
“Sir, your brother has been in an accident.”
Chapter 3
Paulette
Paulette lowered the phone back into its cradle, her hand trembling as she did. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears as she sniffed. She quickly shoved back the duvet and sheets in her four-poster bed and rose to her feet. She walked across the bedroom floor to her bathroom, prepared to hurriedly wash her face and brush her teeth. She didn’t have time to do much more. Time was one thing Paulette could not afford to waste. Evan had said that he and Leila were on their way to D.C., to the Medstar Washington Medical Center to see their brother, Terrence. If Paulette left in the next fifteen minutes, she would arrive soon after them and they all could hold vigil in the hospital waiting room together.
Paulette flicked on the bathroom lights, blinking furiously and squinting at the sudden brightness. She turned on the water to its coldest setting in one of the double sinks, cupping her hands underneath the faucet and splashing her face over and over again.
The last Evan had heard, Terrence was in critical condition and on a respirator in the intensive care unit. As Evan had relayed the news to Paulette over the phone, he sounded dazed. When Paulette frantically started asking him to tell her more about their brother—the severity of his injuries or his chances of survival—Evan had only mumbled his replies.
“I don’t know . . . That’s all they told me . . . I wish I knew more,” he had blurted out to her steady stream of questions, frustrating her even more. Finally, Leila jumped on the phone, probably after wrenching the receiver out of Evan’s hand.
“We won’t know anything until we get there, Paulette!” Leila had barked, her tone sounding more anxious than harsh. “We’re heading out now. Just meet us there, okay?”
He’s still alive, Paulette reminded herself as she stepped out of the bathroom a few minutes later, shaking with each tentative step like she was walking on a tightrope. At least Terry is still alive.
And if his last hour was drawing near, she would see her brother for the last time if it killed her.
Paulette walked toward her armoire to quickly grab some clothes to dress and head to the hospital. She tugged her cotton nightgown over her head and glanced at her reflection in the gilded-edged, free-standing mirror near her walk-in closet. She stopped in her tracks and stared, stunned as she gazed at herself.
Her body seemed to have changed overnight. Her breasts now spilled over the tops of her balconette bra and the straps cut into her shoulders from holding the burden of the additional weight. Her waist had grown by several inches. Even when she sucked up all the air in her lungs to make her stomach flat, she still had a slight potbelly—like she had had one too many burritos and was bloated with gas. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but even her hips and thighs were starting to look a little wider. She was almost three and a half months’ pregnant, and yet her body was already showing all the telltale signs of the impending baby.
Now frantic for quite a different reason, Paulette rushed the remaining distance across her bedroom and yanked open one of her armoire drawers. She searched for one of the many fashionable billowing, long wool sweaters she often wore nowadays. Paired with a set of leggings, it cloaked her changing body perfectly. But she wouldn’t be able to hide the pregnancy much longer—not at this rate. Either her body would betray her and reveal her secret, or the changing weather would. It would be April in only a couple of months. The weather in Northern Virginia would get warmer soon. Wool sweaters and thick leggings would start to look strange if she continued to wear them.
You didn’t really think you could keep up this charade forever, did you? a little voice in her head mocked as she threw one of the sweaters over her head and shoved her arms through the sleeves. Come on, Paulette. You’re not sixteen anymore. No one’s that naïve!
No, she wasn’t sixteen anymore. When she was sixteen and pregnant, she had had an abortion. The guilt over that was the reason she had chosen not to have one this time around, even though she wasn’t sure whether the father of her baby was her husband, Antonio, or her ex-boyfriend, Marques, who had blackmailed her into giving him thousands of dollars and having an affair with him. She had decided to risk the damage this baby could have on her marriage because she couldn’t talk herself into walking into that women’s clinic and putting her feet in those stirrups again.
But the risks were great. When Paulette finally had to reveal to Antonio her pregnancy, she was terrified at what the aftermath would be. Would he divorce her? Would he kick her out of the house? Would he kill her?
Her hands stilled after she tugged on her leggings and she reached for one of the brown leather riding boots at the foot of her bed.
Will he kill me?
Marques’s murder was still unsolved. There were no eyewitnesses and Marques’s seedy drug ties had left police detectives with a long list of possible suspects. But Paulette had her own suspicions, though she hadn’t shared them with the boys in blue.
Marques had been killed in his apartment in the wee hours of the morning and according to neighbors, there had been loud voices before sounds of a struggle. Marques was found beaten and strangled by police soon after.
Antonio had stormed out of their house the night before the murder after Paulette, crippled by guilt, had finally told him about her affair. Her husband hadn’t been reachable for hours and hadn’t returned home until the next morning. He also had never told Paulette where he had been all that time while her calls to his cell went to voice mail and her texts went unanswered.
She didn’t want to believe Antonio was capable of such a horrendous act. Before the rancor that had entered their marriage, her husband had been a funny and loving gentleman. No matter how furious he had been at her, he wasn’t capable of cold-blooded murder. He wasn’t capable of beating a man to death and strangling him with his bare hands, was he?
Paulette took a deep breath, sat on the edge of her bed, and tugged on her boots. Though questions about her husband still clouded her thoughts, she momentarily pushed them aside to finish dressing.
I can only deal with one crisis at a time, she told herself.
Minutes later, Paulette stepped out of her bedroom and walked down the hall to the stairs with keys in hand and her purse thrown over her shoulder. As she passed the guest room, the door creaked open. Antonio stood in the doorway in striped pajama bottoms, catching her by surprise.
“Oh, Tony, you scared me!” she exclaimed, throwing her hand over her chest, feeling her
pulse quicken beneath her palm. She stared at her husband, who practically loomed over her in the shadow of the doorway. “I-I didn’t know you were . . . were awake.”
Since she had told him about the affair several months ago, he had moved his things and now permanently slept in the guest room. Because of his busy work schedule, sometimes they could go days without seeing each other. Paulette suspected that not seeing her occasionally suited Antonio just fine, which broke her heart. The man whom she loved no longer wanted to be around her.
“Where are you going?” he asked, narrowing his eyes with suspicion and pushing his door open wider. He glanced over his shoulder at the alarm clock across the room on his night table, then turned back and glared at her. “Where the hell are you heading out to at three a.m.?”
I’m not cheating on you, Tony, she wanted to tell him, but instead she cleared her throat and said, “Evan called. Terry’s in the ICU at Medstar. I’m heading into D.C. to see him. We all are.”
Antonio’s face suddenly changed. He abruptly shifted from anger and mistrust to unmasked concern. “What’s wrong with Terry? What happened?”
“He had a car accident,” she whispered, lowering her eyes. “It’s bad . . . really bad. Evan said he doesn’t know if . . .” Her voice choked a little. She cleared her throat again. “Look, I have to go. I told them I would—”
“I’ll go with you,” he said suddenly, turning around and yanking down his pajama pants. She watched in shock as he walked naked across the guest room and turned on the overhead light. He began to open drawers, pulling out underwear, a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt.
“Tony, you don’t . . . you don’t have to come with me. I can—”
“No matter what’s going on between us, Paulette, Terry is still my brother-in-law,” he said loudly and firmly. “I think of him like a brother. I want to know what’s going on with him, too. I’m going.”
At that, she fell quiet.
They pulled out of the garage in Antonio’s Mercedes soon after. As Antonio made the forty-five-minute drive into the city, the couple sat in such a strained, uncomfortable silence it made Paulette fidget in the passenger seat. Unable to take the silence any longer, Paulette reached forward and pressed a button on the dashboard to turn on the satellite radio. She slumped back into the seat and listened to the drone of sports radio banter.
So many questions for Antonio filtered through her mind that she wanted to ask.
Do you still love me?
Why do you stay?
Will we ever be able to go back to the way things were?
Do you hate me for bringing that man into our lives?
What will you do when I tell you I’m having a baby?
What will you do if I tell you I don’t know whether the baby is yours?
But all her questions went unanswered. She stayed silent and her husband continued to diligently stare out the windshield, acting as if she wasn’t there.
When Antonio pulled into a spot in the multi-story parking garage, Paulette almost leaped out of the car. She couldn’t get out of that stifled compartment fast enough.
“Do you know where we need to go?” Antonio asked as he shut the driver’s side door and walked around the car toward her.
She quickly nodded. “Ev said he was on the sixth floor.”
She turned away and marched across the garage to the stairwell, not looking back to see whether Antonio followed her. When she and Antonio stepped out of the steel-walled hospital elevator ten minutes later, they were greeted by the sight of the ICU waiting room. Several leather brown chairs were lined along the walls and in the center of the room in an L shape. A flat-screen television sat on the far wall facing the elevator and a CNN anchor sat behind a glass desk on the screen. A half-stocked vending machine sat along the adjacent wall.
Paulette quickly spotted Evan and Leila. Save for an elderly woman who looked like she was nodding off in her chair, Evan and his fiancée were the only other people in the quiet waiting room. Evan was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed as he stared bleakly at the linoleum tile beneath his feet. Leila sat at his side, her face grim and her eyes red and glistening with tears. She was rubbing Evan’s back and whispering something to him.
Seeing them both like this, Paulette’s mind instantly leapt to the worst-case scenario.
Oh God, she thought, starting to tremble all over again. Terry’s dead! He’s dead, isn’t he?
“Ev?” she called out weakly.
At the sound of her voice, Evan immediately raised his head. He staggered to his feet and slowly walked toward her with his arms outstretched. He looked absolutely decimated.
Paulette raced across the room, closing the distance between them. She leapt into her brother’s embrace. She didn’t care whether he felt her hard, round stomach. She just wanted her brother to hold her.
“I’m too late, Ev!” she sobbed into her brother’s ear, tightening her arms around him. She clung to him like he was a life preserver in a vast ocean. “I’m too late, aren’t I? Terry’s dead! Oh my God! Oh my God! Terry’s—”
“Calm down, Sweet Pea,” Evan whispered, patting her gently on the back and using her childhood nickname. “Terry’s still alive. The doctor said he’s stable.”
At those words, she sobbed even harder—this time with relief.
Maybe it was the hormones from the pregnancy or the constant stress she had been under because of the affair, her broken marriage, and keeping her pregnancy a secret, but Paulette sobbed and sobbed and Evan let her do it. He let her cry on his shoulder as long as she wanted. Meanwhile, Leila and Antonio stood mutely to the side, allowing the siblings to have their moment.
When Paulette’s sobs finally tapered off, her brother slowly pulled away and gazed down at her. “Do you want to see him?” he asked.
“Of course.” She sniffed, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater. “Take me to him.”
Evan reached down and took Paulette’s hand. They both walked to the waiting room’s entrance. When they reached the doorway, Evan paused and turned to look back at Leila.
“Go ahead,” Leila said, answering his silent question. She dabbed at her watery eyes with Kleenex. “We’ll wait for you guys here.” She smiled up at Antonio before falling back into one of the chairs along the wall. She patted the seat of the chair beside her. “Park it here, big guy. Keep me company.”
Antonio gave her a half smile before dropping into the seat.
As Paulette walked out of the waiting room, she heard Leila say, “Tell me what you’ve been up to, Tony. I haven’t seen you in a while.”
Antonio then began to speak. His voice was calm and without the spite that Paulette often detected nowadays whenever he spoke to her.
Paulette was grateful to her future sister-in-law for offering a distraction and keeping Antonio preoccupied. She liked Leila. In the twenty-plus years Paulette had known her, they had only argued once and that was due to deceit and machinations on her brother Dante’s part. He had lied and insinuated that Leila had divulged secrets about Paulette that Leila had promised to keep forever. But now the two women were friends again. They met regularly for lunch. They laughed and gossiped together over the phone, but Paulette still hadn’t told Leila her current secret—that she was pregnant. Paulette was hesitant to trust anyone besides her obstetrician with a secret this big again.
Evan’s hold around Paulette’s hand tightened as they walked past the nurses’ station and down the quiet corridor to Terry’s hospital room. They passed several glass-enclosed rooms with patients of all ages, many hooked up to a myriad of IVs, respirators, and so much tubing that they looked like extras in science-fiction movies. Several nurses in blue scrubs shuffled in and out of the rooms.
“I’m gonna warn you that he’s in bad shape,” Evan said softly, glancing down at her. “It was a very serious accident, Sweet Pea.”
Usually she hated it when her brothers used the nickname that their mother had bestowed upo
n her when she was one year old. But today she found it comforting.
“I know,” she whispered as they walked.
“The doc said they’re going to transfer him out of ICU soon because he’s doing better, but Terry still doesn’t look good. There are bruises and . . . and swelling. He has some broken bones.”
Evan was trying to prepare her for something awful. She could sense it. But nothing was more awful than her brother dying.
“As long as he’s alive, Ev, I don’t care,” she said as Evan drew to a stop at one of the doors.
He nodded, let go of her hand, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she took a timid step into the room. The curtain around the hospital bed was partially drawn, so the only thing she could see was a lump at the end of the bed. Probably Terry’s feet.
When they stepped around the curtain, she breathed in audibly. She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from shouting out. Evan’s grip around her shoulders tightened as she started to weep again.
Terrence Murdoch, former model and unrepentant playboy, lay at a slight angle in the hospital bed, propped up by several pillows. His face was covered with a mix of purple and red bruises and so much swelling that Paulette could barely recognize him. His head was now so lumpy and misshapen that he looked less like someone who had once graced Italian and Parisian runways, and more like the Elephant Man. Bandages were wrapped around his head and a large white patch surrounded by cotton covered his left eye. Plastic tubing was in his mouth. His bloated lips hung slack, like he had fallen asleep while watching television or sitting on his living room couch. A cast was around his left arm. The other arm sat lifeless at his side.
Paulette slowly shook her head as she cried.
What had happened to her brother, and would he ever be whole again?
Chapter 4
C. J.
C. J. furiously flipped through her reporter’s notebook in search of a blank page before resting it on the steering wheel of her Honda Civic. She ripped off the lid to her ballpoint pen with her teeth and held her cell phone in the crook of her shoulder.