At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (35 page)

I shook my head. I couldn’t even find the words.

“I know you think I did this on purpose.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“I honestly thought this was impossible. I—I haven’t had a period in months.”

I turned around and looked at her. Okay, she was thin, but she wasn’t
that
thin. From my cursory research about severe eating disorders, I knew that women sometimes stopped having their periods, but she didn’t look like she’d lost enough weight for that to happen.

“Something is clearly wrong with you. Tell me what it is.”

She opened her mouth to answer and then shook her head, her hands shaking as she pushed her hair away from her face in nervous agitation.

“I have to go,” she said.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You’re going to walk out of here right now? You’re going to just leave it like this without telling me a goddamn thing?”

“You’re too pissed off right now. We’re at work, for God’s sake. Your secretary is right outside the door! I
can’t
talk to you here.”

“Enough with the bullshit, Emilia! I’m sick of the excuses.”

Her head came up, her eyes narrowed. “You just smashed that vase into a thousand tiny bits and you think this is a good time for us to talk? No way.”

My headache intensified to the point where it suddenly felt like there was an army inside my skull waging a war to get out. I pressed my palm to my head.

“Your head hurts?”

I shook my head, clenched my teeth. “Stop putting this off.”

“We’ll talk. Tomorrow. I’ll—I’ll come to your house.”

“If you walk out of that door now—you walk out on me again, we are
done
.
Forever
. The way it should have been when you moved out in October.”

One tear streaked across her pale cheek.

“It takes two to fuck up and if you can’t acknowledge your own failures, then you’re right—we
are
done,” she said, voice trembling.

“We were done months ago. I’ve just been the fool for holding out hope.”

She nodded, blinking, fighting furiously to contain her tears but they were escaping again. I suddenly wished I had ten more vases like the first one to smash against the wall.

“You don’t need to worry about it, then. I’ll take care of this,” she choked out. Then she turned and walked to the door. I spun, staring out into the atrium, refusing to watch her walk out of my life forever.

I shut my eyes, squeezed them tight against the pain that was intensifying like a torrent of hammers raining from the sky. Even if I wanted to run after her, I doubted I could. The door opened and clicked shut just as quickly. I pressed my forehead to the cool glass, my head bursting with pain.

Chapter Twenty

I spent half the night wondering what to do. Wishing there was someone I could talk this through with. There was no way I was going to go to Jordan. I had half a mind to call Heath, but wasn’t sure if Emilia had told him yet. I almost called my lawyer to try and figure out what my rights were.

In my anger and pain I’d effectively cut her off by telling her in all finality that we were done. Now, she no longer worked for me. She had alienated herself from her mother so it was unlikely that even the family connection would be worth anything. Ironically, I had balked at the fact that once she stopped working for me, we’d no longer have a connection in our lives.

It seemed I’d worried about
that
needlessly. Because now, we were connected forever.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take before we were composed enough to talk this through like the adults we were supposed to be. How long would it take me to calm down? Or for her to unfuck herself long enough to determine if she could even handle going through with this?

I ended up seeing her again a lot sooner than I thought I would.

At eight o’clock that next morning, Saturday, when I was still asleep, my phone buzzed on my night table. I picked it up to see a text from Heath.

Get over here NOW
.
911
.

I sat up, texted back.
What’s up?

He replied.
Need your help ASAP. She’s freaking out
.

I hesitated, actually considered telling him to call someone else. I was done with her, wasn’t I? But my gut still sank hearing that she was having a hard time. Her behavior enraged me, but I couldn’t help myself. Could I even stay away if I tried?

That month after we’d split up in St. Lucia and she moved back to her mom’s house, I’d tried to forget her. Our fling had only lasted a few short weeks. In fact, we’d only had sex a handful of times. But try as I might, I couldn’t get her out of my head.

She was indelibly imprinted on every thought, every feeling like a tattoo on my soul. The memory of her voice, her laugh, the feel of her body was permanently a part of me. I blew out a breath, running my hands through my hair. I’d struggle and I’d find the will to resist this, resist her. But…
we were like magnets
.
Tearing ourselves apart to get back to each other
.

I swallowed, my throat feeling prickly. One last burst of stubborn resistance had me setting the phone aside, resolved to forget her.

Then I called myself the dick that I was, took it back up and replied.

Be there ASAP.

I got there a little over fifteen minutes later. Heath lived up in the Orange Hills, so it was a bit of a drive from my place in Newport. I did break a few speeding laws on my way up. As luck would have it, the CHP didn’t know a thing about it.

When I knocked on the door, Heath whipped it open almost as quickly. He was still wearing his pajamas. I stared at him.

“What’s going on?”

“She’s locked in the bathroom and she’s sobbing. She won’t answer me and she keeps saying your name and ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again. We gotta get her out of there, man.”

I took a deep breath and walked in. I wasn’t sure what Heath knew or what she wanted him to know. So I walked to the bathroom without saying another word. I could hear her sniveling on the other side of the door, so I knocked.

She didn’t say anything.

“Emilia,” I called. “Open the door.”

“Adam?” she answered after a long moment.

She sounded weird, her speech slurred. I looked at Heath and asked quietly, “You have any tools? A screwdriver? I need a flashlight, too.”

Heath left to go dig through a drawer in his kitchen. I turned back to the door.

“Open the door, Emilia. We’re worried about you.”

“You’re not worried about me,” she said. “You’re pissed off at me.”

“I can be both at the same time. Open the door.”

“They keep coming out the same. Every one of them.”

Heath returned with a huge screwdriver and a flashlight. I tried to fit it inside the small hole in the doorknob. I shook my head at Heath. He left and returned with the entire drawer, having pulled it out of his cabinet. I began digging through the tools to find something that would work.

I chose a thin screwdriver and held the light up to the doorknob, sticking it into the hole. “Emilia, you need to come out. Open the door.”

“You said you didn’t want to talk about it. That you were done.”

“I’ve had some time to cool off.” Heath waved to get my attention, frowning and mouthing,
What the hell?

So that answered that. He didn’t know. Emilia was still keeping secrets. She was crying again, in a muffled way, like she was weeping into her hands or a towel. I twisted the screwdriver. I almost had it. “We can talk about this now. Let me in.”

The doorknob clicked and I quietly turned it, slowly pushing open the door. Emilia was inside the bathtub with only a bathrobe cinched around her. All across the counter, a multitude of pregnancy tests were lined up. All different brands, colors and shapes—she must have spent hundreds of dollars on them all. Every single one of them was used. They all showed the exact same result in different ways; some had pink lines, some had blue, some had a red “plus” sign and some just said the word “pregnant” on mini digital screens. Well, that answered that question. She must have been up half the night peeing on them.

And from the look of her, she hadn’t slept since the last time I’d seen her. I went to sit on the edge of the bathtub and she looked up at me with pathetic, red-rimmed eyes. “Emilia, you need to sleep.”

Heath walked in, looked at the counter and his jaw dropped. He shot a death look at Emilia. “What the fuck is this?”

Emilia didn’t move, just pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. I turned to Heath. “Hey, man, I got this. Do you mind—?”

And that’s when he grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me up and shoved me back against the wall.

“Did you do this to her?” he said, getting in my face. I pushed him off of me. Heath was a big guy and easily had twenty or more pounds on me. It wouldn’t go well for either of us in a fight and I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit now.

“Get the fuck off of me—”

“What the fuck did you do, man? Did you get her pregnant?” Heath’s face, only inches from my own, was murderous.

Emilia was now standing in the tub. She reached over and grabbed Heath’s shoulder. “Heath, get off of him!”

The next thing I felt was the sucker punch to my gut. Fire blossomed in my lower abdomen. I shoved Heath back while fighting for my next breath. He went flying backward into the sink and knocked the army of pee sticks off the counter. I backed out of the bathroom, putting my arms up.

“Calm down, Heath.”

Emilia was shouting at the same time. “Heath! I have this handled, all right? Knock it off!”

Heath pivoted from me and turned his wrath on Emilia. “You’ve got this handled? You’ve got this fucking
handled
? You have chemo next week. How the fuck do you think that’s going to happen now?”

Chemo?
That word hit me like a second punch to my gut. Emilia was saying something to Heath in a low voice, but he was red-faced and furious. He stepped back into the bathroom. “No, no. I’m not going to ‘shut the fuck up,’ all right? You should have told him weeks ago. You should have told them
all
weeks ago. Maybe then he wouldn’t have fucked you and handed you your death sentence.”

I stepped back, stunned. From my angle, I couldn’t see either of them, but I could see the counter behind the sink and now, beyond the plethora of scattered pregnancy tests, I noticed an entire lineup of prescription bottles. The realization hit me then, like a Mack truck driving straight through my chest.

Emilia had cancer.

And she was pregnant.

And she needed chemotherapy.

I turned and staggered down the hall, trying to catch my breath, running my hand through my hair. Heath came down the hall after me. I spun.

He looked exactly like he was going to take another swing at me. “You fucked it up again, man. You fucked it up good—
literally
.”

I could feel the blood draining out of my face. I almost stepped forward and purposely left myself open for another punch. It would have felt better than the utter terror coursing through my veins at this moment. I could hardly even think.

“She has stage two HER2-positive breast cancer,” he choked out, appearing as near to losing it as I felt. “It’s
extremely
dangerous—
extremely
aggressive. When she was in Maryland, she had a chunk of her breast removed and she’d been taking drugs that fucked up her hormones. She was also on painkillers for a little while—those syringes you found in her bag. She’d just finished radiation therapy before the Con. And she was supposed to start chemo next week, but they won’t do it now if she’s pregnant so fuck you very much for
that
.”

I turned away from him, put my face in my hands. I didn’t even care if he came at me. Oh, God. This got worse and worse with each minute that passed. I longed to go back to yesterday when the worst problem I thought we were facing was what we were going to do about her pregnancy. But this was making me wish the ground would open up under my feet and swallow me whole.

There was silence between us and I could tell Heath was trying to figure out what to do or say. That made two of us. I was reeling, like the room spinning around me. I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. My heart was still racing.

When Heath finally spoke, it was in a voice thick with emotion. “I fucked up, too. Because I should have told you, even if she would have disowned me. She’s shut everyone out and I’ve been the one carrying the football for this whole thing.”

I blinked, looked down, hardly trusted myself to speak, glad he couldn’t see my face. “Thanks for taking care of her. I—” My voice shook and I cut myself off, shaking my head. My throat stung and I couldn’t think.

I heard Heath come up behind me slowly. “You should talk to her, man.”

I fought for breath, and even that simple act was painful. “I have no idea what we have to say to each other.”

Heath came closer and I tensed. He hooked a hand onto my shoulder. “You need to talk to her. You know what she needs to do and she’s not going to listen to me.”

“She’s not going to listen to me either.”

“Adam,” Heath said, his voice hardening. “Man up, okay? Look past your own hurt feelings. If she doesn’t do what we both know she has to, she could die.”

I shrugged off his hand, turned from him and rubbed the morning beard on my chin, knowing he was right. I nodded.

Heath sighed heavily. “I’m gonna get dressed and get out of here for a few hours. Let you two talk.”

I nodded again, still unable to look at him or focus on anything. He turned and walked out. I sat on the couch and stared down the hall for a long time after Heath ducked his head into the guestroom where Emilia was staying and told her he was leaving her with me. I pulled out my smart phone and did a search for stage two HER2-positive breast cancer. I added pregnancy into the search. I skimmed as fast as I could to glean as much information as possible. The cold fear was fading into the background and now hard, rational problem-solving was stepping in to take its place.
This
I was comfortable with.
This
I knew…As I gathered the information I’d need, my mind was working constantly to find a way through this puzzle.