Chapter Forty-Four

 

Ezra

 

 

“That was her on the phone, wasn’t it?”

Aiko stands at the door to the guest bedroom where I’ve been sleeping. I sit on the edge of the bed, phone still in my hand. Kimba hung up long ago, but I still hear her voice, the resignation in it. If this is my baby, I’m going to lose her, and it’s like a shoal of piranha trapped in my belly, a feeding frenzy of anxiety and dread.

I don’t answer Aiko’s question, but stand and cross the room to leave. She doesn’t move, but blocks my exit, a tiny wall keeping me inside.

“Ko,” I say, hearing the impatience in my own voice. “I need to get by.”

“Ezra.” She runs her hands up my chest.

I slip past her, striding out into the hall and heading down the stairs. I settle in at my desk, open my laptop and try to distract myself with all the other things that require my attention. There’s an email to re-schedule the publisher’s meeting I missed because of Aiko’s bombshell announcement. I need to finish this book. Another email from the YLA finance director regarding next year’s budget and a grant we’re applying for. I need to look at her projections.

I need to settle the issue of this pregnancy.

I need Kimba.

My head drops into my hands. It’s futile trying to concentrate when my future hangs in the balance. I give up, let myself feel the weight of possibly losing her…again. Not as a boy who had no idea what a magnificent woman she would become, what we could be together, but as a man who’s known her body and glimpsed her soul, been consumed by the fire that burns inside.

You set me on fire inside, Ezra Stern.

“We need to talk,” Aiko says from the door.

“Talk to Chaz.” I lift my head, refocus my attention on the laptop and try again.

“Chaz is not the father of this baby.”

I do look at her then. “Oh, so you didn’t fuck him the last three weeks? Was I mistaken about that?”

Color floods her pale cheeks and she drops her gaze to the floor. “Are you going to condemn me for something we agreed on?”

“Absolutely not.” I shut my laptop and give her a level look. “But you can’t condemn me either. You want to have your cake and eat it, too.”

“I want you, Ezra,” she says, swallowing hard. “I didn’t want to end our relationship. I wanted an open one.”

“Again, cake. You know me, Ko. What would ever make you think I’d want that? I don’t care that you slept with Chaz.”

“Maybe that’s what hurts most because it’s killing me that you slept with Kimba as soon as my back was turned.”

“Your back wasn’t turned. You left,” I say, slicing a hand through the air. “With him. We broke up and agreed to tell Noah when you returned. Don’t try to re-write history because the truth is suddenly not as convenient.”

“History is re-writing itself, Ezra.” She walks deeper into the office, one hand on her stomach. “And there’s nothing convenient about an unplanned pregnancy at nearly forty on the cusp of the biggest opportunity of my career. I didn’t ask for this either. You were there that night. I didn’t fuck myself.”

“I know that.” I expel as much of the frustration as I can on a long breath. “If this is my baby, you know I’ll support you, but we won’t be together.” I look at her directly so she can see the finality on my face. “Not again. And not just because of Kimba. I hadn’t even seen Kimba when we broke up. You and I ending things was the right thing to do, for all of us. It still is.”

“But it hasn’t happened.” She crosses the room, presses her palms to the desk and leans forward. “It hasn’t happened because Noah doesn’t know. Our families, our friends don’t know. When Noah comes home, we tell him he’s going to have a little brother or sister and he’ll be ecstatic. Things go back to normal.”

“I don’t want normal. I want Kimba.”

Hurt shows in her sharply drawn breath, in the tears that fill her eyes right away. 

“Ko,” I say, deliberately gentling my tone. “I told you before you left that I wanted one person I could love for the rest of my life. That person is Kimba, and I know it seems soon to you, but I’ve known her since we were babies. Even when we were separated, I never stopped knowing her.”

“If I ask you a question, will you answer honestly?”

“Always.”

 “Did I ever even really have a chance?”

I give the question the consideration it deserves and force myself to be honest with her while still being as kind as I can. “Probably the best chance anyone has ever had. If you’d said yes when I asked to marry you, I would have found a way to keep my distance from Kimba when our paths crossed again.”

“You couldn’t have just been friends?”

I glance past her toward the kitchen, the mudroom, and flash back to that night when Kimba and I first made love. The wild sounds we made. The desperate craving that hung in the air. That absolute long-sought rightness of being inside her for the first time.

“No, I don’t think I could have been just her friend, even though I fooled myself that I could have.”

“When did you fall in love with her?”

I feel the cold metal around my finger again. Smell the freshly cut grass in my back yard. Hear the glass breaking on the rocks.

“I was six years old.” I chuckle humorlessly and touch my empty ring finger. “And again when I was seven. Eight. Nine and ten. I think I fell in love with her every day for the first thirteen years of my life, and as soon as I saw her again, my heart just remembered.”

She watches me, her face pinched, but some semblance of acceptance finally entering her eyes. My cell phone buzzes on the desk, breaking the poignant, painful mood.

“My appointment is tomorrow,” Aiko says, turning to leave. “First thing.”

I check the screen and answer right away. “Mom, hey.”

“Hey! You said you needed to speak with me urgently. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, it’s quite urgent. If you ever checked your messages, you’d know when your son needs you. Noah told you to call?”

“When would I have talked to Noah?” she hedges.

“Okay. Never mind. I’ll deal with that later. I have a question for you.”

“All right.” Even though she says it, I hear the caution in her voice.

“Did you ever visit the Allens’ lake house?”

The question drops into a pool of silence so deep I almost lose track of it.

“Mom? Did you hear—”

“I heard you. I…why would you ask me that?” Caution becomes evasion.

“I don’t remember us ever going with them up there. Kimba’s grandfather bought it not too long before we left.”

“Yes, so why would you—”

“Your charm was there, Mom,” I cut in before she can find a way to lie to me without telling me anything at all. “The star of David you lost that summer? Kimba and I went to the lake house and she found it in the laundry room.”

“What laundry room?” she asks and then gasps.

“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “They just completed renovations that knocked out some walls and shuffled some things. The laundry room wouldn’t have been there…when you were.”

She releases a long, tired sigh on the other end of the line.

“Nothing’s ever as it seems, Ezra,” she says, her words weary and cryptic.

“I’m not interested in how things seem. I’m interested in how they were. How they are.”

“Your father and I were having problems,” she says, her voice shrinking. “I wanted to leave Atlanta—needed my family around me.”

“I remember.”

“And you know how badly I wanted to get you out of the South. Your father and I both wanted to expose you to broader experiences. Even I didn’t dream of going overseas, but it turned out to be good for you, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it was great for me, besides the fact that it meant I lost Kimba.”

“Yes, I’m sorry for that now. At the time, it seemed like the best thing to do.”

“What was the best thing to do? Move? Why? What happened?” I pause and then ask the question again, the one she denied before. “Were you unfaithful to Dad?”

I can practically hear her courage gathering and taking shape before she says the word.

“Yes.”

I nod and expel a sigh. Finally, the truth. “I don’t condemn you, Mom.”

“Good. Because you have no right to,” she says, defiance coming across clearly.

“Of course not. I just meant I would never judge. Can you tell me what happened?”

“We swore, the four of us, that we would never tell. We went our separate ways, and agreed we’d take it to the grave.”

“Well, two of you are already in the grave, and the truth is coming out if Kimba can’t stop this book from being published.”

“No, honey. It’s like I said before. Nothing’s as it seems. That’s not the truth.”

I frown, resting my elbows on the desk and touching my head, trying to piece her words into something that makes sense. “I don’t understand. Start from the beginning.”

“It began, like most affairs do, with loneliness. I was so lonely.” A breath catches in her throat. “We both were.”