I turned and spotted Jake’s car whipping into a parking spot in front of the clinic, barely a couple of feet away from me.
I inwardly cursed, grinding my teeth before taking a deep breath and facing the inevitable confrontation with Jake.
There was going to be one because he looked like he was going to skin me alive.
I sighed.
Of course, he’d followed me. I should’ve thought of that but I was too concerned about Bessy. And now I was risking her secret, and possibly her baby.
“What the hell are you doing here, Charlotte?” he bit off, grabbing my elbow and finally glancing around. “If you needed to go to the doctor, I would’ve taken you—somewhere a little less sketchy than here, for sure.”
“This is a different kind of doctor, Jake,” I muttered as I yanked my arm free from his grip and headed for the entrance with him dogging my steps. “You shouldn’t have followed me here.”
“I had to after you turned white while you were on that call,” he said gruffly, peering at the ratty posters and notices on the wall right next to the building entrance. “Brandon’s going to kill me if something happened to you and I did nothing.”
“You can see I’m in one piece so you don’t have to worry,” I told him plaintively, trying to get past him to get through the door. “You can go, Jake.”
When he wouldn’t move, I started tapping my foot loudly and impatiently.
Bessy needed me and Jake was literally in my way. “Jake, move your ass over!”
“Wait a sec,” he said, his voice odd. He slowly turned his head to me, his green eyes accusing. “What kind of health center is this?”
Abortion services, as far as I knew, were offered in many locations in the city, mostly in women health centers and such. This place, as questionable as it looked, seemed to only cater to specific ‘planned parenthood’ options. There were little posters on the wall with tips on how to prevent pregnancy, birth control options, etc.
It made no specific mention of abortion but it displayed enough material to give anyone an idea that it specialized in family planning.
“Charlotte,” Jake started in a low voice, swallowing with difficulty that I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and down his throat. He was looking at me anxiously, a thin film of sweat shining on his forehead even in this cool day. “Why are you at this place?”
I let out a small but loud puff of breath and rolled my eyes. “I’m here for an abortion.”
His jaw dropped so fast and so hard, I could almost hear the sound of the bone popping out of place.
My words replayed in my head and I gasped out in horror when I realized just how my abrupt confession sounded.
My hand flew to my mouth for a mortified second before I grabbed Jake by the elbow, knowing that he was going to snap out of it in a moment and bring down the wrath of God upon my stupid head.
He let out a string of curses that made me shudder and nearly cross myself, his voice rising as the momentum of his outrage intensified.
“Jake! Jake!” I tugged on his shoulder, trying to shake him out of his rant but he kept going. “It’s not me! Hey, listen! Jake!”
Out of options and running out of time too, I stomped on his foot hard enough that he yelped and hopped away, scowling at me deeply.
“You can swat my hand and break my toes but there is no way I’m going to let you do what you think you’re doing, Char—”
“I said it’s not me, okay?”
I practically yelled that to his face so he didn’t miss it.
He blinked a few times and shook his head as if it would clear it.
“You’re not—so, why... Then who are you here for?” he demanded in exasperation, still very much in my way. Then his face paled, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s not Tessa, is it?” he whispered scratchily, paling even further than I could imagine.
“No, it’s not!” I replied hastily, bolting to the side and around him, grabbing for the door but he successfully kept it firmly in place with one hand pressed against it. “Jake, please! I have to stop her, okay? She doesn’t want to do it but she’s so fried in the brain right now that I worry she’s going to just let it happen.”
His jaw clenched. “Who is it, Charlotte?”
I exhaled sharply and made a decision. Bessy was going to hate me for squealing but at least she’ll have her baby. Besides, she hated me already anyway.
“It’s Bessy, okay?” I said quietly, pleading at him with my eyes. “She’s pregnant and no one knows and she’s being pressured into this. But she doesn’t want to do it so I’m here to get her out as soon as humanly possible.”
“Let’s go.” Without another second of delay, the door swung open and Jake strode in.
There wasn’t a single person in the reception area except for the person at the front desk but I figured in a place like this, there was probably a secluded waiting room.
Who wanted to sit together for a couple of hours, leafing through magazines and discussing their no-baby plans for small talk?
I didn’t want to pass judgement—it was legal, after all—but I imagined it was still an awkward topic to bring up in a conversation.
I went up to the scowling woman at the front desk and asked for Bessy but she gave me a long-winded speech about patient privacy rights and such.
In short, she wasn’t going to tell us a damn thing about Bessy, let alone allow us to see her.
I rang Bessy’s phone again but she didn’t pick up.
Come on, Bess. Answer the damned phone so we can save you.
Pacing, I tried a couple more times before she finally answered.
My heart twisted when I heard her on the other line.
She was still sobbing on the phone but she was at least rambling out where she was in the building.
“She clearly doesn’t want to do this,” I told the woman, thrusting out my phone to her so she could hear Bessy wailing on the other line. “She’s very upset.”
“I know. We’ve been trying to get her to settle down in the last half hour,” the woman answered with an exasperated roll of her eyes.
“We’d really like to see Bessy Mitchell, please,” Jake said in a stern, serious voice as he levelled the receptionist the most intimidating stare I’d ever seen from him. “We’d hate to have to file a complaint about the treatment of patients and their trusted family and friends in this facility. I do own two of the top newspapers in this city, after all.”
Jake hardly ever called attention to his wealth and influence that I often forgot he was running a very successful publishing business. While I never thought of him capable of extreme vanity when it came to his social status, it was handy to see him turn up his level of self-importance at a time like this.
“And I happen to be a co-chairperson of the state’s most important charitable society—The Lady Championettes Society. You might have heard of them,” I added, tipping my nose so high in the air, it would’ve proved hazardous to a plane flying by.
While this wasn’t my usual strategy, questionable places such as a fly-by-night abortion center like this only cared about money, dirty or not, and staying under the radar so they could continue to run their operation without sticking to the strictly implemented regulations.
The woman scowled deeper as she contemplated our threat and I dramatically glanced at my watch. “I’m a very important person, you know, and you’re wasting my time.”
“And I’m the damned queen of England,” the woman muttered bitterly before pointing at the bay of empty chairs. “You two sit and I’ll go see about getting your friend who is not, for all intents and purposes, named Bessy Mitchell.”
She kept grumbling about people who couldn’t make up their damned minds and their stuffy friends before disappearing into a hall.
Jake and I glanced at each other before letting out matching sighs of relief.
“How did this happen?” he asked as he slowly walked to a chair and sank down on it.
“No. I mean, how did you end being Bessy’s extraction team for this?” Jake interjected with thinly-veiled impatience. “The last time I saw the two of you together, you were flaying each other with insults. What kind of miracle happened?”
“Nothing short of me just being there at the right place at the right time,” I answered wearily as I plopped down next to Jake. “It’s a long story and we’ll have to wait and see if Bessy’s in the mood to tell you. The reason she’s in this mess is because she hasn’t told anyone else—well, except for the asshole who got her into this situation in the first place.”
Just then, the receptionist came back and waved us over.
“The private exit’s in the back so you’re going to have to pick her up there—and I don’t care who the hell you are, so don’t even start—but it’s the clinic policy that no one exits from the procedure through the front door so in the back you go,” the woman said sulkily.
“I’ll go get the car,” Jake said, fishing out his keys.
The woman held up a hand. “First, we’ll need to settle some paperwork because this procedure was already paid for and it wasn’t done, not because of any issues on our end. If the patient demands for a refund, we’ll need to loop in the person who’d forwarded the payment to us but if you’d just like to call it quits, we’ll need to have the release papers signed by another witness attesting that it was not our—”
“I’ll take care of it,” I interjected, nodding to Jake. “Go get Bessy and pick me up by the front door.”
The paperwork took less than ten minutes. It was just pretty much to say that the clinic had done their due diligence in ensuring that the procedure happened but that it was the patient’s decision not to go ahead. They clearly wanted to hang on to the payment and wanted some kind of proof in case Don (I had absolutely no doubt about this) came after them for a refund.
I was so glad to be out of there.
When I came out of the building, Jake was already waiting in the car with a silently crying Bessy curled up on her side in the backseat.
“Where are we going?” Jake asked as soon as we hit a main road. “Are we taking her home?”
“No, no!” Bessy cried out from the backseat. “Don will kill me as soon as he finds out I didn’t go through with it. And I c-can’t go to my parents like this...”
“Don?” Jake asked, giving me a confused sidelong glance. “Don, who?”
I glanced at Bessy who’d turned her face down on the seat, soaking the luxurious suede with her tears, and turned back to Jake with an arched brow.
“How many Dons do you know in your circle?” I asked him quietly.
He frowned, his forehead wrinkling in thought for a moment, before the truth hit him.
His eyes wide with shock, he glanced at me and soundlessly mouthed at me, “Don LeClaire?”
I shrugged and turned back to face the road. “It’s not just messy. It’s a shit show.”
Bessy had calmed down a bit in the back seat just as we approached central downtown again.
“I can bring her home, I guess, and she can stay with me for a few days while Brandon’s out of town,” I said, biting my lip as we debated the best next course of action. “But it’s my turn to host our weekly tea meeting with the Championettes tomorrow afternoon, plus I’ve promised a sleepover with the sisters on Thursday night because Brand’s out of town. Then on Friday, I have a full day of Championette meeting just outside of the city.”
“She can stay at my place,” Jake volunteered as we sat at a red light. “I’ve got no one coming over, especially now with my all-celibate lifestyle.”
“You’re hardly celibate,” I shot back at him with a teasing smile. “You’re just monogamous now.”
I gently reached out a hand between the front seats to nudge Bessy who had been drifting off in the backseat, probably from sheer exhaustion of crying in the last hour or so since she’d been in that clinic. “Bess? What do you think about staying with Jake for a few days? He’s got a free guest room and no guests coming over, except for me because I’ll come by and see you to make sure you’re doing okay.”
Bessy opened her bleary eyes and blinked in surprise. “Jake? But he’s a womanizer.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” Jake grumbled, earning a light smack in the arm from me.
“He’s been reformed for the past few weeks now,” I reassured Bessy with a smile. “Besides, no offense intended but he’s not interested in you. You could say his affections are otherwise engaged.”
Bessy narrowed her eyes at us. “You two are having an affair?”
“No!” Jake and I both said in unified horror.
“Okay, okay. You don’t have to sound so put out about it,” Bessy said, sniffling as she slowly pulled herself up to a sitting position.
She wrung her hands together, her chin trembling again with another onslaught of tears. “It’s not that impossible, you know? I, of all people... I should know h-how easy it is to fall headfirst into that h-hole.”
“Good thing I’m handy with a shovel,” I told her brightly, hoping to God that she wasn’t going to start sobbing again. When her face crumpled again, I reached out and touched her knee. “Bess, come on. It’s alright. We got you out of there. Nothing happened. You still have your baby. You can still work things out.”
Slowly, she lifted her eyes to me and this time they didn’t just show her plain misery.
She was frightened.
“You have no idea how angry Don will be,” she said through choppy breaths. “He was like possessed by the devil when he came to see me the next day, after we talked. He’d made arrangements for me to...” She stemmed her tears with a quick swallow, clutching the base of her throat with a trembling hand. “He wasn’t going to let me keep the baby, Char, no matter what. Even if I promised to never bother him about it. Or not tell a soul who the father is. He wants it g-gone...”
My hands curled into fists so tightly I felt my nails dig into the flesh of my palm.
I tasted a tang of rust in my mouth and realized that I’d bitten the inside of my bottom lip. While I’d learned to fight back throughout the years and despite my verbally creative threats, I wasn’t really particularly prone to mindless violence. I only used physical force when extremely necessary, and usually only to defend someone or myself.
Right now though, I almost felt a perverted craving to claw Don’s eyes out and rip my nails down his face.
I had no great love for Bessy but Don, in my opinion, was pond scum.
“It’s easy to be scared, Bess, especially when it’s not just you anymore,” I told her solemnly. “I can’t tell you not to be scared. I know how it’s like to be at the mercy of someone. What I can tell you is that your fear is no good when you’re dead. So fight—fight with all you’ve got.”
***
It took a couple of days before Bessy was back to even being remotely normal.
When we dropped her on a bed in one of Jake’s guest bedrooms in his condo, she pretty much dozed off, wiped out from the emotional and physical drain of her situation.
I didn’t know where she lived and I didn’t want to risk running into Don so I went out and shopped for some clothes and essentials so she could have something for a few days while she was recuperating from her ordeal.
Jake called me from his office the next day to tell me that Bessy wasn’t eating. All she’d had since I left her was some tea and a couple of crackers.
She was pregnant. She couldn’t not eat but I suspected, given her frail appearance, that Bessy hadn’t been eating much for some time now.
As soon as Jake got off the phone, I grabbed a few things from the pantry and started filling a canvas shopping bag.
I had the Championettes coming for tea (which was really just lingo for a meeting where we all got to sit together, sip from dainty little teacups and ni
bble on pretty pastries) early in the afternoon but Felicity was there already preparing everything with the small catering staff we’d hired. She gave me an incredulous look when I told her I had to go out for a couple of hours but I didn’t give her a chance to interrogate me.
I strode out of there and had Gilles drop me off at Jake’s place.
Bessy was still moping around in bed when it was practically noon, but I let her be until I finished cooking a hearty soup. I brought it to bed and stood guard to make sure she ate every last bit of it along with the crusty bread and assorted fresh fruit I heaped on a plate for her.
Thinking that I wasn’t really Bessy’s ideal company, I asked her if she wanted me to call Anna but she frantically refused, saying that she didn’t want anyone else to see her like this—especially not her friends.
Right. Because I wasn’t her friend. Not really. But it didn’t make a difference to me.
I hung out with her until Jake came home early for lunch, bringing home a giant take-out meal that he promised was going to keep them fed until the next day. He’d sheepishly admitted to us that he didn’t cook but he knew how to order out extremely well.
When Jake walked me down on my way out, I stopped him for a moment, just before we stepped out of the building, to ask how he was coping with having a house guest—a female house guest.
“It hurts that you have to ask but I’m perfectly fine with it, Char,” he told me, pressing a palm to his chest as if he was deeply wounded. “I’m not some animal who’ll hump everything female within fifty yards of me, you know? Bessy’s been knocked up by a married man who’s forcing her to have an abortion—even I know how screwed up that is. I just want to be nice to the poor girl, that’s all. And I’d rather you help her while within my supervision. God knows the trouble you’ll get into trying to do this on your own.”
I resisted blurting out to Jake just how much else I had going on that I couldn’t tell people about.
Between the Championettes’ endless fundraisers this fall, my familial obligations to help host Martin’s party and my duties as Brandon’s wife, I had a runaway wife trying to escape the clutches of her abusive husband, a boy and his uncle in hiding at my old house, and a young girl who dabbled with the same abusive husband her cousin had the misfortune of marrying and was now faced with difficult choices concerning her baby and their future.
The Mischievous Mrs. Maxfield Page 86