Chapter 25
Paulette
Paulette slowly walked down the staircase, gritting her teeth as she gripped the handrail. It had been almost a week—five days, to be exact—since her emergency C-section, but the pain around her midsection still lingered. It was sharp one moment and then sometimes it was a dull throb, like she had done one too many sit-ups and was suffering the aftermath. She didn’t care about the pain, though. Only hell or high water would keep her from making the daily trips to the hospital to see her infant son.
She closed her eyes as she descended to the next riser, thinking back to the day she had delivered him. It had been so traumatic—the pain, the blood, and the feeling that things had spiraled so far out of control that she couldn’t tell up from down anymore.
She remembered EMS easing her from the grocery store floor onto a stretcher, asking her so many questions that she could barely answer. She also remembered how Detective Nola’s face had gone almost completely white as he watched her being carted down the produce aisle. Paulette would have been amused that she had managed to terrify a man who’d had her scared and looking over her shoulder for so many months if it hadn’t been for the fact that she had been in mind-numbing agony at the time. She was then rushed by ambulance to the local hospital. During the ride there and after she arrived, she kept whimpering, “It’s too early. It’s too early. It’s too early.”
“None of that matters now,” a nurse had whispered reassuringly to Paulette as she was wheeled into the operating room. “You’re going to have your baby today. It’s going to be okay.”
And then she felt her son being pushed and tugged out of her. After the epidural, that was all she could feel—the pressure of the doctor’s hands. And then she saw him—a mini-version of the baby she had anticipated. But instead of a fist-pumping, feet-kicking, screaming baby, his body was limp. He was quiet. There was another frantic rush as he was taken to the NICU.
Little Nathan was still there in the NICU. Her baby rested under a heat lamp to help him control his body temperature. He lay in a tight little ball—as he had when he was inside her tummy—with tubing down his throat and wires attached by clear tape all over his body. Every time she saw him her heart broke.
“I’m so sorry, Nate,” she had whispered to him the last time she had seen him, gently rubbing his wrinkled arm, listening to the beep of the monitor. “Mommy is so, so sorry she did this to you.”
She hadn’t put her baby first. She had let her fears and worries dominate her decisions, when her focus should have been on preparing for Nate, on giving him all she had to give.
“I was so stupid, honey,” she had told him.
Paulette now stepped onto the foyer floor and walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she heard Antonio ask over her shoulder.
She turned to find him walking down the staircase toward her.
They hadn’t talked—really talked—since he arrived at the hospital and walked into her recovery room. His expression had been indecipherable as he stood near her hospital bed.
“So I hear I’m a dad now,” he had said casually.
She had been unable to meet his eyes when he said that. Instead, she had stared down at her lap.
“When were you planning to tell me you were pregnant? Were you ever planning to tell me?”
She had opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. Her tongue had felt heavy, and not just because of the painkillers she had been given through her IV.
“You know, I don’t get it, Paulette. All the lies . . . the betrayal. How much do you expect me to take, huh?”
She had closed her eyes in response.
In the face of her silence, Antonio had slowly shaken his head and walked out of the hospital room, leaving her alone with her thoughts and her guilt.
He had driven her home from the hospital two days after her cesarean. He had deposited her in her bed, fluffing her pillows behind her head and setting a glass of water and the TV remote nearby.
“Tell me if you need anything,” he had murmured before shutting her door behind him.
“Are you going to see Nate?” Antonio now asked as he walked toward her across the foyer.
Paulette nodded. “I haven’t been to the hospital yet today. I try to do it before noon, but I’m moving a little slower than usual.” She gave a pained smile before reaching for her sweater on one of the coat hooks and wincing at the dull throb that erupted along her stomach.
“I can drive you,” Antonio said, stepping off the last riser.
She paused. “You . . . you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. I want to see him. I haven’t been to the hospital since he was born.”
Paulette had noticed, but she hadn’t faulted Antonio for keeping his distance from the baby. She had assumed Antonio hadn’t gone back to the NICU because he doubted whether Nathan was his son. And in truth, he was right to doubt it.
“Come on,” he said, walking across the foyer and retrieving his keys from the foyer’s oak table. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later they rode in silence in his Mercedes to Chesterton General Hospital. Paulette remembered having a similar strained car ride with Antonio only months ago when they were driving to see Terrence in the ICU. That ride had been carried out in silence, too, though the whole time she had wanted to confess her feelings to Antonio, to tell him all her secrets and regrets. But she had held back. She wasn’t going to do that again.
“I should have told you,” she now said as he drove.
His eyes darted from the windshield and he glanced at her. “Huh?”
“I should have told you about the baby,” she said in a louder voice, swallowing the lump that had lodged in her throat. “It was wrong of me to keep that secret from you . . . ridiculously wrong. But I was scared. I make the worst decisions when I’m scared. I know that now.”
“Why were you scared?” he asked, reaching over to lower the volume of the radio.
She took a deep breath. This would be the hardest part. “Because I wanted for so long for us to have a baby, Tony. I had been hoping about it, dreaming about it. And then when I finally got pregnant, I . . . I couldn’t say for sure if it was our baby.”
“Our baby?” She watched as the muscle flexed along his mahogany-hued jaw. “You mean, you think it’s his baby, then?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t say for sure. And I know how you feel about the affair . . . how you feel about . . .” She was going to say his name but thought better of it. “I know how you feel about that man and I didn’t want you to . . . I didn’t want you to take it out on me and the baby,” she whispered.
The car compartment fell silent again. Antonio’s hands visibly tensed on the wheel.
“I wish you would give me more credit, Paulette. You make me out to be some monster.”
“No, I make you out to be a normal man who’s been through a lot, whose wife has pushed him to the point that any other guy might break or go crazy. But you haven’t broken or gone crazy, Tony, and I’m in awe of you. You are a good man . . . a man who is way too good for someone like me.”
He didn’t respond. Instead he kept his eyes focused on the windshield, on the roadway in front of him.
“So if you want a divorce, I’ll give it to you. I understand.” She lowered her eyes. “I thought about it last night and I’m . . . I’m going to talk to Evan and ask him if I could stay at the mansion for a while, at least until Little Nate gets better. You can have the house all to yourself. It’ll give you some peace, finally. I’ll pack my things and—”
“No,” Antonio suddenly said.
“Huh?” she asked, raising her eyes.
“I said, no, baby. I don’t want to get a divorce. I told you I was in this for the long haul. And besides, I don’t want my son being raised apart from me. That’s not what I signed up for.”
“But . . . but you don’t know if he is—”
“He’s my son,” Antonio declared. There was so much resolution in his tone that she wouldn’t dare argue with him. “I okayed my name being added to his birth certificate, didn’t I? You don’t think I realized what I was doing? No, Nathan Williams is my son. I don’t care what any DNA test says. And my son will be raised with his father. And we will . . . we will work through this.” He drew to a stop at a stoplight and turned to gaze at her. “I want to be with you, Paulette. I want to make this work.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. After all this, he still wanted to be married to her. And he was willing to claim the baby as his own without question.
“You’re too good,” she squeaked, her throat tightening.
The light turned green and he accelerated. “I’m not perfect,” he said. “By no means, but my family is important to me. You’re important to me. I fight for what’s mine.”
They arrived at the hospital a few minutes later. In the elevator, Antonio reached out and grabbed her hand and she almost fainted from the feeling of relief and calm that washed over her. He hadn’t held her hand in almost a year. He hadn’t touched her. The feel of his warm palm against her skin was a sensation that she had sincerely missed.
They made their way down the hall of the maternity ward to the NICU. Paulette knew most of the nurses by name by now and greeted them when she entered. One blond nurse looked up at Antonio in surprise.
“Are you Little Nate’s daddy?” she asked, a smile on her pink lips.
Antonio nodded. “That’s me.”
They walked to Nathan’s incubator and Paulette watched as Antonio hesitated. “Can I touch him?” he asked the nurse. For the first time, he seemed nervous.
The nurse nodded. “Of course!”
He then leaned his hand in and caressed a finger along Nathan’s leg.
“Hey, buddy,” he whispered, grinning from ear to ear. “It’s your daddy.”