Having Jay's Baby (Having His Baby #2) (20 page)

He exhaled. “I think I aged twenty years last night.”

I padded back to the bed and got in. I buried my face in his chest.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked. “Still drowsy?”

“A bit,” I said, testing my equilibrium with a gentle head-rocking movement.

He breathed amusement against my hair. “You look a lot better,” he said.

My gaze flickered up to his face. I let my head fall back into the crook of his arm as I watched him. There was so much I wanted to say. My heart was full of love, and terror. I was afraid to open it in case both came out. My eyes lingered on the firm lips, now pressed tightly together.

“I want to know,” I said, “what happened.”

A shadow passed over his features. In his eyes, I had the strangest sensation of watching something longed for slip from my grasp, like a precious object tumbling down into cold, dark water.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I gathered strength and nodded.

“Elizabeth took her,” he said.

The earth seemed to spin on its axis. Dizzy, I jerked my head up out of his hold.

He inhaled, adjusted his position to accommodate me, the movement hesitant. “It was my first thought, last night. I guess I just didn’t want to believe it-”

“Why?” I asked, my head awash with disbelief. “How?”

“She still has a set of keys to the apartment,” he said.

The silence pressed between us, dense. I waited for him to elaborate, but the why seemed harder for him to address. I pulled my body up to sit next to him, holding the sheet to my chest.

His eyes followed me. He considered my features for a moment before going on. “She’s been under a lot of stress,” he said.

Anger sliced through me. “Did they arrest her?”

He nodded. I could see pain glint behind his eyes. “They’re going to keep her in for evaluation. Apparently she’s—in a very agitated state.”

I looked away. I stared at the blank walls blindly for a moment, trying to analyse how I felt about that. The terror from last night had turned into a flood of gratitude this morning once I’d seen that Nina was unhurt—gratitude wide and overwhelming and so much more powerful than any fear I’d ever known. It had washed me clean. Now the emotions were back, attempting to fill the space. Confusion mingled in with anger. There was, however, not a lot of room for sympathy.

I turned back to Jay. The hesitation on his normally confident expression was so acute that I recoiled mentally. To my amazement as much as his, I recoiled physically, too. I slid out of the bed, taking the sheet with me.

“Where are you going?” he asked in surprise.

I didn’t know. Anger tightened in my throat. I sat for a long time just trying to assimilate the waves of emotion coursing through me. I’d never been the type to throw things—I’d seen enough scenes like that between my parents to last a lifetime—but I could easily have trashed the room right at that second, so violent was the rage building in me.

“Stella,” he said finally. “I had no idea Elizabeth was capable of something like this. There’s no way I’d have suggested keeping Nina in this apartment if I’d thought there was any risk.”

I turned. “This isn’t your fault,” I said, a tremor of suppressed emotion threading through my voice.

“Everything’s a mess,” he said. He rubbed his face with his hands again, raking them through his hair. His features settled into blank dismay as he considered the view. “A fucking mess. I don’t know how it could have gotten this bad.”

I watched him for a moment, feeling useless. “I don’t think we should stay in this apartment,” I said eventually. “Maybe we should go to D.C. for a while. I have a follow-up piece to do on the Internet bill.”

“I can’t leave the state.”

“Why?” I sat motionless as he carefully explained the complicated situation with his father, and the questioning yesterday by the FBI. “God, I’m so sorry,” I said once he’s finished. “I had no idea.”

He sighed. “To be honest, last night kind of put things into perspective.”

I stared at the carpet for a moment, out of ideas. “Do you have to go to the office today?”

“They suspended me,” he said, his tone flat. He shot me a smile. “I told you things were a mess.”

I grimaced.

“I was planning on leaving, anyway,” he said. He touched my shoulder, running a finger down my back and leaving a shiver in its wake. There was a spark of something irrepressible in his dark gaze. “They just beat me to it.”

His humour was contagious. “Oh, yeah?”

“I’ve been working on a new business on the side, with a few of my contacts in Washington. More focused on bills that actually mean something to me.”

He shrugged then, the blank look returning. The light in his eyes extinguished. “What is it?” I prompted.

“If I get arrested for fraudulent trading, they can ban me from being a director for a while—a long while.”

I paused. “Did you know what your father was doing with those shares?”

“Not really.”

Not exactly a stark denial ... I frowned at him. “Have you got a lawyer?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. He yanked the covers back and sat at the other side of the bed, facing away from me. “I have to speak to my father before I do anything else. I need to get down to the hospital.”

I stared at the impassive width of his back. Crawling on to the bed, I knelt behind him. It was my turn to elicit a shiver by tracing a hand down his spine. I didn’t want him to leave—not yet. He was right; everything was a mess. I had an overwhelming urge to keep the three of us in this room for as long as humanly possible in case we got any more embroiled in it.

“Can I do anything to help?” I asked instead.

He turned so that I saw his profile. “Just pack,” he said. “I’ll see about renting somewhere else today.”

“I’ll find somewhere,” I said. “Let me do it.”

His upper body vibrated with a short burst of humour. “Okay. But no dives in Harlem. Let’s aim for something a little further south.”

I slid my arms around his waist and laid my head on his warm shoulder. At first he didn’t move, but then his hands slid around mine. We sat for a while in the early morning silence, the calm in the eye of the storm, Nina’s laboured breathing like a heartbeat in the background.

#

Nina woke some time later and effortlessly brightened the mood. She seemed unaffected by the previous night’s events. We had breakfast in the kitchen—the family scene as surreal for me as I think it was for Jay. The last time we’d been in this kitchen we’d been yelling at each other ... what a difference a couple of days could make.

As soon as he left for the hospital, my new number programmed on to his phone, I called the office and took care of some urgent tasks. Then I dressed Nina and sat on the sofa for a little while, thinking.

#

The brownstone on West 45
th
Street was eerily unchanged. The realtor showed me through each of the rooms, pointing out spacious closets where my clothes had once hung. “This room is perfect for a nursery,” she said, opening the door on to the room where I’d lain Nina when we’d first arrived back from the hospital. She marvelled over the fitted kitchen. “Those tiles are from the original build back in the late eighteen-hundreds,” she said, and I smiled, recalling the day Monica and I had stripped off the decrepit cladding and found them. We’d jumped around like a couple of gleeful school kids, dust all over us, while my weeks-old baby girl was slumbering in her car seat in the next room. “The last owner did a wonderful job at restoring it. There’s love in every detail.”

“There sure is,” I said.

“I should tell you that we got a very generous offer yesterday,” she told me.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Of course, she had. It had been on the market for months now with no takers. How, I couldn’t fathom.

“It’s above the listing price,” she added. “If you want it, you’ll have to act fast.”

I wanted it, all right. Not just the house; I wanted my life back. The question was: would Jay help me, for Nina’s sake, to get back to this life I’d spent so long trying to build up? Could I ask him? He’d told me to swallow my pride. He’d insisted I accept his support.

The real question was: was it just support, or would he want to share it with us one day?

“What number would let us close the deal today?” I asked the realtor, pulling my phone from my bag.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jay

I only noticed I was wearing odd socks after I’d been let into the large office in the hospital. They stared back up at me with gleeful rebellion from inside the assured sheen of my Italian leather shoes. The realisation alerted me to the fact that I barely even remembered getting ready this morning. Everything seemed very slow and simplified where babies were concerned, but it was deceiving. I was starting to realise that it was impossible to get anything else done when they were around.

“Lost something?”

Fueller’s jovial tone snapped me out of my reverie. I rummaged up a smile. “Just my mind,” I said. “Nothing serious.”

“It’s a full house today,” he said.

Shaking his hand, I was momentarily buoyed by the sight of my friend’s rumpled appearance. Here was a man with a full, meaningful life. Work that mattered; a wife he adored and three kids with good values. Wearing matching socks seemed like a futile accomplishment in the wake of such success.

“You okay?” Fueller asked, laughing. “You look kinda dazed. Was it a rough morning?”

“You have no idea.” I frowned. I couldn’t quite process the last forty-eight hours yet, certainly not enough to vocalise it, and so despite Fueller’s concerned frown I asked, “Is my lawyer here yet?”

“Outside. She’s laying into the FBI already, threatening to call the whole thing off if they don’t get rid of the recording devices.”

The bleak walls were adorned with anatomical diagrams. Metal furniture was slumped up against one wall. I could smell disinfectant and something stale. I shifted in the tiny plastic seat. “Can they do this?” I asked Fueller. “Without any notice?” He shrugged but I continued to stare at him, hoping—hoping for what? That someone would barge in an put a stop to this farce? Annex me from this family for good?

Bull scraped his chair across the concrete floor and surveyed the grey mist outside, the only view evident from so high up. “They don’t want you. Not really. They’re after your old man.”

I exhaled to ease some tension. It didn’t work

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Bull went on. “This is a good thing. They get everyone in a room together, and the truth comes out. Good for you,” he added, “but maybe not for your old man.”

“He just had a heart attack. There’s no way he’s up to this.”

The door opened. My stomach clenched at the sight of my father, sitting up in the bed. Two attendants wheeled him into the room. Despite the shabby surroundings, he managed to look like an aristocrat in a litter, his gaze on me as fierce as it had ever been. Fierce and sharp, because he lost interest before I could even throw together a reaction. In his wake two men arrived, their suits as rumpled as Fueller’s, followed sharply by a woman who looked to be in her early sixties, and a man in a white coat who I presumed was a doctor.

“Try not to agitate him,” the doctor’s was saying in a low tone. “We’ll be keeping an eye on the heart monitor, and I’m telling you—if we don’t like what we see, we’re taking him back to his room.”

“We can’t have anyone outside the investigation in the room, doc,” one of the rumpled men said. “We’ll keep it slow and easy, I promise.”

The details were agreed. My father ignored me for the best part. I couldn’t look at him, either. My chest was aching as though it had been split. The old bastard was really going to put us through this ... if he had another heart attack—

The fissure in my chest seemed to fill with tar. He only had himself to blame. I just had to get through this. There was nothing I could do for him. Nina needed me now, and she needed me a free man without a black mark against his name, someone who could provide for her. She needed me there. As did Stella, I hoped, and not just for Nina’s sake.

Stella. Just thinking of her caused a shaft of searing light to cut across the doom. Did she need me? I realised with a rush of something akin to panic that I needed her. God, I needed her. Right now, I felt that cautious, even expression watching over me in this dank room. That slight citrus scent that always permeated the air around her head; when I rested my face there and closed my eyes, I could block out the rest of the world. Only me, and her.

“Shut the door behind you, would you, doc?”

The door had to be banged shut in the ill-fitting frame. Sitting up, I gritted my teeth, aware of my father’s sharp eyes on me. “How long is this going to take?” I asked the eldest of the investigators.

He seemed unimpressed by my, admittedly, supercilious tone. “As long as it takes, Mr. Fitzsimmons,” he said with a thick New York accent. “Unless you got something to tell us that’ll speed things along?”

“My client has nothing to say to you,” my new lawyer said in a gravelly voice. “He’s here as a gesture of goodwill to assist with the investigation into his father’s business, but we’ll answer the indictment charges in court in front of a judge. Until then, anything you have to say, you can say to me.”

The investigator seemed to be barely listening. Instead, he was regarding me with open curiosity. “Must be a hell of a thing to see your father all laid up in bed like that,” he said. He scratched his chin. “Cuts a man up inside.”

Abel sighed loudly. When I looked over he was smiling—not at me, but at the investigator. They could have been old friends riling each other for all the generosity in his expression. “Cut the crap, Mancini,” he muttered. “Leave the heart strings out of this and just get on with it.” He gestured towards the wires on his chest. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I haven’t got all the time in the world.”

“Do you know each other?” I asked, the words coming unstuck from my throat.

Abel looked away, disinterested. “Sure,” Mancini said with a grin. “Your pop’s been a regular fixture down at the precinct these last few months.” He turned. “Ain’t that right, Abel? We’ve got a special chair for you down in interview room four.”

The door handle rattled, as did the disquiet in my chest as I processed this new information. Abel had been visiting a police precinct? My eyes flickered to the door as it jerked open. Visiting? Clearly Mancini was implying that there had been no obligation involved, so why had my father been spending time with the very people he’d been under investigation with? More importantly, why hadn’t he mentioned this before?

There was no time to contemplate the unnerving reasons for this as my gaze settled on the newcomer behind the door. I was on my feet in seconds. “What the fuck is she doing here?”

“Whoa, slow down!” Mancini said, lifting his hands in surrender.

Elizabeth stared at me with shocked, if dull, recognition. In fact, everything about her was dull. It was as if someone had turned down the colour on an old television set; her eyes were small and strained to focus, the long hair rendered wispy from neglect.

“What,” I said, barley able to formulate the words through a clenched jaw, “is she doing here?”

“She’s here to corroborate your evidence,” Mancini said with an obvious air.

My jaw slackened. “She’s under arrest for the kidnapping of my daughter!” I kicked the plastic chair in frustration, afraid of what I might do to her. My hands itched to get at her slender throat. “Are you fucking kidding me? Last night, she took my daughter from our house! Why is she even allowed to be walking around?”

“She’s still in custody, Mr Fitzsimmons,” Mancini said. “She’s not going anywhere, I promise you.”

Bull’s imploring hand was on my sleeve but I remained standing. I stared at her. Her face seemed to have literally fallen a few inches. Everything about her was weighted—loaded. “She’s sedated,” I insisted. “Look at her.”

“Just sit down, Mr Fitzsimmons.”

“Yes, please, don’t get up, darling,” Elizabeth slurred, “not on my account. Is my mother here already?” She noticed my father in the bed. “Oh, Abel. How are you feeling?” Her voice increased noticeably in volume. “Is the food any better? I had a word with Cook.”

“Come on, guys,” Fueller said to the investigators. When I looked down at him, he seemed as shocked as I felt. “She couldn’t corroborate her own name,” he said. “What is she doing here?”

“Just sit down,” Mancini said. “Everybody just sit down and shut up, for Pete’s sake.”

We did. Elizabeth was shown to a seat next to me. She touched my arm; God help me but I couldn’t stop myself shrugging it off. Disdain wavered around the peripheries of her expression. “Have you been drinking?” she asked me.

“A dog and pony show,” a low voice said. I looked towards the bed. My father shook his head at me.

“A touching family reunion,” the younger investigator said. “Doesn’t matter what given us—you’re still in a lot of trouble, Abel. You know that, right?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” Abel threw back. “I had a heart attack. I’m not senile.”

“Not yet, old man. Health care down at Ellis Island isn’t quite up to these standards, though. No private rooms, if you get my meaning.”

“Can we just get on with this?” I asked. Desperate to get out of the room, I shifted in my seat again. “What do you want?”

The questions started shortly afterwards. They were all leading towards the same conclusion—if I could offer up someone else, I’d save myself. My head was thick was suspicion and through the fog I wondered how many people Abel had already thrown under the bus. Was I one of them?

I agreed, after a small conference with my new lawyer, to disclose my side of the story. It was the truth, so I didn’t have to worry about tripping up in a story. Abel actually laughed through some of it, as if amused by his own antics. Elizabeth kept trying to leave in search of coffee and was threatened with physical restraint.

“So, you deny all knowledge of your father’s attempts at stripping assets from your firm?”

I nodded.

Finally Mancini turned his wary eye off me. He turned it on Elizabeth. “What about you, Mrs. Fitzsimmons? You said in a previous statement—part of your divorce petition—that your husband was well aware of your father’s pyramid scheme. You went as far as to say he was part of it.”

There was a pause. “What scheme?” she asked. She was looking at her finger nails with faint horror. “I’ve just had these done. Those bodyguards are very heavy handed.” Her accusing tone centred on me. “This treatment ... it’s unconscionable.” She mangled the last word and started to cry, before stopping furiously. “Your handling of the entire situation leaves a lot to be desired, and I don’t mind telling you that that’s an understatement. Abel, tell him. That woman in my house…”

Chest tight with rage, I stared out at the grey mist.

“Can I speak now?” Abel said in a bored tone.

The younger investigator shook his head, in dismay rather than disagreement. “Sure,” he breathed. “Why not?”

“I haven’t finished!” Elizabeth cried.

“I thought she was sedated,” Abel said.

“Who are you?” she asked the investigator. Her tone suggested that she didn’t particularly care. She turned back to me. “I want a divorce,” she announced.

A burst of astonished laughter escaped me.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me, Jay Fitzsimmons,” she said. “In case you hadn’t noticed we are not divorced, despite all of your flimsy efforts.”

“I noticed, Elizabeth, trust me.”

“Well, now I’m telling you that I want a divorce. I plan to get it done, too,” she said, “the way I get everything done around here.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Abel said again. “Could somebody please get her to be quiet? If this is supposed to get me to talk, it’s working.” He glared at the investigators. “What do you want? I’ve already given you Benson. As convenient as it would be, I can’t see my son topping your wanted list, so what’s this little show in aid of?”

“We want everyone,” the investigator said. “At the moment, you’d better hope you talk before any other of your buddies opens their mouths. Because trust me, they’re all getting real nervous lately, what with all the surveillance-”

“I get it,” Abel said.

“I don’t think you do, Mr. Fitzsimmons. You and your kid here are starting to look like a good catch. We’ll get the others eventually with or without your help.”

“You might,” he agreed. “You might not.” His weathered face hardened for a moment. He glanced at me; tiredness seemed to grip him and he suddenly looked every day of his sixty-six years. “Get them out of here,” he said, laying his head back on the pillows.

Frozen, only my heart seemed to be functioning. It beat, slow and determined, as though encased in ice. The true horror of what I was slithering through my consciousness. Abel and Harry had been friends since boarding school. Good friends. Best friends.

Fueller touched my arm. “Let’s go, kid,” he said quietly.

Confused, I glanced around to see my lawyer getting up. An orderly had come in and was helping Elizabeth to her feet.

“Wait a minute.” I got up and turned to the Abel. There was so much I wanted to say to him—so much anger and resentment, and yet underlying this, a aching wound that wouldn’t heal. There was nothing in his expression except impatience as he watched me.

He sighed. “Just get out, Jay.”