by Kaylee, Katy
When it was two in the morning, I grabbed my bags and snuck out of the house. I didn’t have much money, but it was all tucked inside a small bag inside my purse, and I knew exactly what I was going to use it for.
To start my life over, again.
All alone.
At least, until the baby came.
23
Harrison – Monday
On the third day after Paris had left without word or explanation, I was so impotent with rage that I could hardly breathe. I’d called out of work – something that I hadn’t done in years – and sat in the living room, staring at the TV with a stony expression on my face.
“Dad? Are you in here?”
Turning, I saw Hollie standing in the doorway. She frowned as she walked close and sat next to me on the couch.
“Are you okay?” Hollie asked. She reached out and put the back of her hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel too warm,” she said.
“My daughter, the doctor,” I replied.
Hollie pressed her lips together. “I haven’t seen you like this, like ever,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
How could I tell her? How could I even begin to explain how angry and betrayed I felt, that her best friend had up and left me?
I thought things had been going so well between us, too. We’d been having fun and sharing each other and growing steadily more intimate. I was falling in love with Paris, but I hadn’t realized just how deeply until she’d chosen to leave without a word to me.
Now, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever see her again. I had no idea where she’d gone, or why. She’d snuck out in the middle of the night with all of her things like a criminal. The bed had been stripped, the sheets neatly dumped on the floor. She’d even taken the pillowcases off and folded them on top of the dirty sheets. Her toiletries had vanished from the bathroom, and she’d wiped out the tub as if we’d never shared a deliciously erotic bath together.
I was so fucking confused and angry that I felt like punching something.
Why would she go? How could she go?
How could she do that to me, as if she meant nothing to me?
“I’m fine,” I lied. “How are you? That’s the important question.”
Hollie leaned against the back of the couch and shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “I mean, I’m kind of pissed, to be honest.”
“Your mom and Mitchell?”
Hollie shook her head. “I know that I should be,” she said. “But ... it’s really hard to think about that right now. I don’t know why Paris left. I feel guilty, like I’m responsible, or something.”
I stared at her. “Why would you be responsible?” For a moment, I felt a cold trickle of dread at the back of my neck. What if Paris had told Hollie the truth about everything that had transpired between us?
“Because I dated around this summer and didn’t spend much time at home,” Hollie said. “I don’t feel like I was a very good friend. And ... Paris is like, really pretty, right? But she’s really shy around guys, and maybe I should have tried to set her up with someone. I feel like I left her behind while I was going out all the time.”
“I don’t think that had anything to do with it,” I said.
Hollie frowned. “Why?” She asked. “I mean, no offense, Dad. I know you like Paris and everything, but you don’t know her the same way that I do.”
No, I thought. I certainly don’t ... but you don’t know her the same way that I do, either.
“Anyway, maybe I should just try to reach out and apologize,” Hollie said. She pulled out her phone and stared down at the screen. “That’s weird,” she added. “Paris just texted me. Her ears must have been burning.”
My heart jerked to the side and I clenched my jaw. “What did she say?” I asked.
Hollie gave me a weird look. “It’s kind of cryptic,” she said. “I’ll reach out and make sure that she’s okay.” Hollie got up from the couch and slipped her phone into her pocket. I was dying to know the exact words that Paris had said – what had made her leave without saying shit to me? But it wasn’t like I could chase Hollie down and force her to tell me, either.
Not without hinting at the secret I’d tried hard to conceal from my daughter.
“I should go into work,” I muttered, hoping that throwing myself into the case would enough to distract me. “I have a lot of shit to do.”
“Okay,” Hollie said. “See you,” she added in a distracted tone. She was looking down at her phone and I tried to peek over her shoulder as I left the room. Some kind of a game was pulled up on her screen, not a text exchange, and my heart sank.
At the precinct, I buried myself in paperwork. There was no one else in the office, and I sat alone in a dimly lit room, staring down at the details of the case. We had almost everything wrapped up, and under any other circumstance I would have been happy.
My anger kept bleeding through, though, no matter how I tried to distract myself. Every other word on the page was Paris’s name, and I saw her face each time I closed my eyes to take a deep breath. Why had she done this? She loved me, I knew that much. She’d practically told me that night we’d talked after sex.
Or maybe she didn’t love me. Maybe she’d come to her senses and realized the truth: that I was an old man, and that I wouldn’t be able to give her what she wanted. She’d decided that she’d wanted someone younger, and had been too cowardly to talk to me about it.
I didn’t blame her. How could I? She deserved someone her own age, someone who until recently hadn’t been anything but a total workaholic.
Fuck, I thought. I should have been relieved – I should have realized that this was all for the best, but I couldn’t. I was too angry. If she felt that way, why the hell hadn’t she just been able to tell me? Why had she been too cowardly to tell me that she didn’t want me, that she couldn’t be with me?
“Fuck,” I muttered, punching down on the stapler with my fist. Pain shot through my arm, but strangely I found myself liking it. I banged down again, punching the desk again and again until my knuckles were bloodied and raw.
“What the fuck, man?”
I turned around and saw Steve standing there, holding a cup of takeout coffee in one hand and a greasy paper bag in the other.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I work here, remember?” Steve said. He came closer. “Thought that you might be burning the midnight oil, and I got some coffee. Thought you might want some company.” He looked down at my hand, bruised and bloody, and raised an eyebrow. “But now I’m thinking I should’ve picked up a bottle of whiskey instead.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t know how to reply to that – I didn’t want to reply to that. Steve and I had so rarely talked about personal matters that doing so now would have been awkward.
“Lemme guess,” Steve said. He leaned his hip against my desk and looked down at me. “You’re all broken up over ending things with that stripper. What was her name, Maxine?”
I knew he was trying to get me to laugh, but wasn’t going to work. I clenched my jaw, feeling tension and pain in the back of my neck.
“Your daughter told you that she’s abandoning the idea of med school and going off to join the circus?”
I glared at him. “You’re not funny, asshole.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Look,” he said. “Come with me. Forget this for the night,” he added, gesturing to the paperwork before me. “You’re obviously not getting shit done, not while you’re in that kind of a mood.”
I sighed. “I should just go home,” I said, even though I had no intention of doing so. No, it would be a better night to just drive around in aimless darkness, alone with my thoughts and my anger and my confusion. A woman had never done this to me before – I hadn’t even been this broken up when Krista announced that not only had she been cheating for the better part of a year, she was leaving me for an old man and his piles of Scrooge McDuck money.
It was a line that we’d used on more than one suspect, but the joke didn’t make me chuckle. I got to my feet, figuring that it would be easier to just have one drink and then beg exhaustion. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll just suck down a beer and then say I have to get home to my daughter, I thought as I followed Steve out of the precinct and down the street to a dive bar favored by firefighters and cops. It was dim and the bar top was sticky with spilled beer. The smell, a mixture of pungent urine, disinfectant, and whiskey, hung in the air. Steve lead me not to the bar itself but a small table in the back.
“You need a drink,” Steve said, leaning against the dark wooden booth. “Your head is in a pretty fucked up place, Hendricks.”
I glared at him.
“Come on. Out with it,” Steve said. “I’ve never seen you like this, man,” he added. “I’m your partner. I know you didn’t choose me, but you’re stuck with me, and if you want to get shit done you’d better come out with it already.”
“It’s none of your fucking business,” I finally snapped. “It’s personal.”
“Oh, well, that’s something,” Steve replied sarcastically. “Because I was starting to think it was just a teenage tantrum.”
God, I’d never wanted to punch Steve before, but right now I would have killed to land a solid hook on his jaw. I could tell that he saw it from the look in my eyes, too, because he held up his hands in mock surrender and shook his head.
“Or, you know, fine. You don’t have to tell me shit,” Steve said. “But seriously, you look like you could use a friend ... and you don’t have a surplus of those.”
I sighed.
“And being a dick to me isn’t going to help you much,” Steve said. “You know that. You’re letting whatever’s going on in your damned head get in the way of work. We can’t have that, Hendricks. You want me to request a reassignment?”
“No,” I said.
“Then fucking tell me, dude. Don’t make me force it out of you,” Steve said.
“It’s ...” I began, then trailed off. “Look, I’m dealing with a breakup right now. I guess you could call it that, anyway.”
“Oh yeah?” Steve raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me it’s that stripper, Maxine.”
“It was Madison,” I said. “And no. Fucking of course not. She was an obnoxious slut, and you know it.”
“Who, then?”
I sighed. “No one.”
“Don’t make me do this, Hendricks,” Steve snapped.
I didn’t want to tell him. There was nothing in me that felt like confessing, but right there, with a fingerprint-smudged glass of whiskey in my hand, I suddenly knew that I didn’t have a choice. In a weird way, Steve was my closest confidante. Most of that had been circumstantial, but that didn’t make it any less true.
I took a deep breath. “I ever tell you about this case I worked ten years ago, when I was still a cop?”
Steve looked confused, but he gave a brief shake of his head.
I downed my whiskey in one gulp and held my hand up for another.
“This drug bust,” I began. “Meth and crack, but the guy also had a ton of pills. My partner and I had been watching him for weeks. We broke into his house when we had the warrant, and there was a little girl hidden in the closet.”
Steve’s confusion grew by the second.
“She wasn’t his,” I said. “She was ... well, he bought her off some junkie who owed him,” I continued, feeling a wave of sick nostalgia wash over me. I closed my eyes and saw young, ten-year-old Paris, dirty and clad in rags, with her nose running and tears streaming down her face.
“Fuck,” Steve said. “God, this job makes me fucking hate people sometimes.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, I took her home with me, to let her stay with me until I could get her placed in the system,” I said. “She and Hollie really hit it off – they were like sisters, almost instantly. I wanted to adopt her, but Krista wouldn’t have it. I think she was just worried that another mouth to feed would mean that she’d have to cut into her allowance.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, your ex is a real piece of work,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed shortly. “Anyway, this kid, Paris, and Hollie stayed close. She’s twenty now. She stayed at my house over the summer, Hollie said she needed a place to crash and I wasn’t having it at first but apparently she had some kind of a job here and her foster family moved out of state.”
Steve’s eyes widened slightly and I felt a rush of guilt.
“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “You can see where this is going.”
“You fucked her?”
I sighed. “Not exactly. She ... well, that job of hers turned out to be stripping at the Pink Diamond, and I saw her one night while I was working. Turns out, she saw me, too.”
“Fuck, dude,” Steve said. “You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. “I kept trying to get her to quit, I was worried about Angel. She was that girl I took home after we busted the party at the hotel.”
“And then you fucked her?”
I looked down into my second drink. “We’d been sleeping together since the first night I saw her at the club. I took her fucking virginity. I let things get completely out of hand, but it’s over now, and I don’t want it to be. I still want her.”
Steve stared at me for a long moment before shaking his head. “Jesus,” he said. “You should be relieved it ended before Hollie found out. It would have ruined everything with her, and between her and that girl.”
I frowned. I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. Steve had always been wise, especially for a man from such a blue-collar background, but I found myself wishing that the wisdom in his words wasn’t true. I wanted her back. I wanted her to tell me what was wrong, why she felt that she had to leave the way that she had.
“Maybe I should have told her how I really felt,” I said slowly.
Steve shook his head. “Don’t,” he warned me. “Just trust me on this. It sucks, but you’ll get over it, and you’ll be better off in the long run.”
I knew he was right.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t wish things were different. If I had told Paris that I loved her, maybe she wouldn’t have left.
And now, I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance.
24
Paris – Wednesday
One Month Later
A month had passed since I’d left Chicago.
Since I’d left Hollie and Harrison and everything I knew and loved and cared about.
I tried to tell myself that I was doing the right thing, that this was what was best for me and my baby.
But I was miserable all the time. Milwaukee wasn’t far from Chicago, only a couple of hours, but I may as well have been in a different world. I didn’t know anyone, and to be honest, I didn’t really care to. I’d pooled what had been left of my savings and moved into a small studio apartment. It was cheap and shabby, with peeling paint and water stains on the ceiling, but it was mine.
Not that I was proud of it, or anything like that. The entire apartment was smaller than one of Harrison’s rooms, and I had no idea how I was going to get everything that I needed for the baby. As I was already learning, baby stuff was expensive. At first, I’d been too proud of the idea of going to Goodwill until I’d gone to Target and seen the prices on things like bassinets and strollers. Even Wal-Mart had been too expensive for me. The stuff at Goodwill wasn’t fancy or classy, and some of it looked like it had already seen several infants through to adulthood, but it was what I could afford.
Finding a job with only three years of college had been difficult, and I was working as a temp, doing data entry for a pet insurance company during the day. When I wasn’t working with that, I drove for Lyft, a ride-sharing service, and Instacart, a grocery-delivery service. Every penny I made went i
nto savings.
I was living on tips, eating as cheaply as I could while still hoping to nourish my baby. Back at MontClaire, Hollie and I had often joked about surviving college on Snickers bars and ramen. I looked back at those days with envy, the days where if we didn’t feel like eating the carb-heavy foods at the dining hall, we could just pool our cash and order a pizza. Those days seemed so far away now, like they had been a dream.
With every week, my belly seemed bigger. I was only a little over three months, but the panic had been settling in and growing more intense since I’d made the decision to leave. After I had the baby, I wouldn’t be able to work for at least a few weeks ... and even then, childcare was so expensive that I had no idea what I’d do. The temp job was slated to end in a month, and although the people at the staffing agency had been kind on the surface, I doubted they would put in a ton of effort trying to find a job for pregnant woman with no man.
Not to mention, I dreamt of Harrison nightly. Every time I closed my eyes, he was there, even when I was awake. I’d never be able to forget his handsome face, those stunning blue eyes. The traces of grey at his temples that I’d loved to run my fingers through after making love with him.
If it weren’t for the growing baby in my belly, I would have thought that I’d dreamt the whole thing. It was impossible, a man like him wanting a woman like me. But he’d made it clear that he hadn’t wanted me after all.
He’d just wanted my body.
And well, he’d gotten it.
In retrospect, I felt like a true idiot for not even thinking about condoms. In one of my biology classes, the professor had talked about how difficult it was to actually get – and stay – pregnant. Being a virgin with a regular period and no boyfriend in sight, it hadn’t ever made sense for me to get on birth control. But at the very least, I could have made sure that Harrison had worn a rubber.