Thief

“Because it’s better for everyone if we’re not together.”

I can’t keep the sneer off of my face. “Better for whom?”

Olivia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Estella,” she says.

It feels like someone has reached a hand into my belly and grabbed hold of my organs.

Olivia is chugging her water, her free hand limp in her lap.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I haven’t heard her name in a long time. I’ve thought it plenty, but Olivia’s voice wrapping around the syllables is jarring.

Her nostrils are flaring as she breathes. She still won’t look at me.

“Olivia…”

“Estella is yours.” It’s a blurt. I blink at her, not sure where that came from, or why she’s saying it.

Being told I had twenty-four hours to live would have been less painful than that statement. I don’t say anything. I stare at her nostrils, which are working like fish gills.

She spins in her chair until her knees bump into mine, and she’s looking me straight in the face.

“Caleb.” Her voice is gentle, yet it makes me flinch. “Leah came to see me. She told me she’s yours. She’ll take the paternity test to prove it. But, only if we’re not together.”

My head and my heart are in a battle for who can host the most pain. I shake my head. Leah? Was here?

“She’s lying.”

Olivia shakes her head. “She’s not. And you can get a court-issued paternity test. She can’t keep Estella from you if you are her father. But Caleb, think about it. She’ll use her to hurt you. Forever. It’ll affect your little girl, and I know what it feels like to be a parent’s weapon.”

I stand up. Walk to the window. I’m not thinking about how Leah could use Estella to hurt me. I’m thinking about Estella being mine. How could something like this be true and I not know it?

“She was pregnant before Estella. We were separated, but we had sex once during that time. Anyway, she lost the baby after she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and had to have her stomach pumped. That’s why we went to Rome. She said that she wanted to reconcile, and I felt so guilty about her sister and the miscarriage.”

I look at Olivia when I say that. Her lips turn white as she presses them together.

“Caleb, she wasn’t pregnant in the hospital. She lied to you. She told me that too.”

I always wondered what Olivia felt when I told her I faked my amnesia. Painful truth is ineffable. It swings you around a couple times until you’re dizzy, and then punches you hard in the stomach. You don’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t hurt so badly if on some level you didn’t know it was true. I run with denial for a few more minutes.

“She bled. I saw her bleed.” Denial is such a friendly companion. It’s normally Olivia’s best friend. Suddenly, I want in on the party.

Olivia looks so distraught.

“Oh, Caleb. It wasn’t from a miscarriage. She probably just got her period and passed it off as that.”

Damn it. Fuck. Olivia is looking at me like the naive, gullible fool I am.

I remember how Leah chased me out of the room before I could speak to the doctor. How I stood in the doorway and told her I’d stay just so she’d keep my baby. She was clearly trying to get me out of there before the doctor revealed the truth.

I don’t need to say anything to Olivia. She can see I’m getting it.

I’m feeling smaller and smaller. During my back and forth time with Leah, Olivia was falling in love with someone else. I could have just walked away with Olivia in Rome and spared us years of this tangled, twisted mess.

“How did Estella come to be?”

“After Rome we made it another month. She was angry with me. She accused me of not being present, and she was right. So I moved out again.

I was at a conference in Denver and she was on a trip with her friends. We ran into each other at a restaurant. I was friendly, but kind of kept my distance. She showed up at my hotel that night. I was pretty drunk and landed up sleeping with her. A few weeks later she called and told me she was pregnant. I never even questioned it. I just went back to her. I wanted a baby. I was lonely. I was stupid.”

I don’t tell Olivia that I found out she was seeing someone during that time. That when Leah came to me, I fell into her because I was trying to fill that Olivia hole in my chest again.

“So, she told you Estella wasn’t yours? That night you told her you wanted a divorce?”

“Yes. She said she’d slept with someone else before the ski trip. She also told me she only went because she knew I’d be there and she wanted to make me think she got pregnant that night.”

“It was all a lie,” Olivia says. “Estella is yours.”

I see the tear in the corner of her eye. She doesn’t swipe it away and it rains down her face.

”She’s going to keep hurting you and Estella as long as I’m in your life. I have a husband,” she says softly. “I should work things out with him. We’ve been playing house, Caleb. But, this isn’t real. You have a responsibility to your daughter…”

All of it — Olivia, Leah, Estella — ignites a fury in me. I spin and walk to her chair, leaning down and placing both hands on her armrests and get right in her face. All I want to do is go find my daughter, but first things first. I’ll deal with them one at a time. We are breathing each other’s air when I speak.

“This is the last time I’m going to say this, so listen carefully.” I can smell her skin. “You and I are happening. No one is keeping us apart again. Not Noah or Cammie, and least of all, f**king Leah. You are mine. Do you understand me?”

She nods.

I kiss her. Deep. Then I walk out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“What’s the matter with you?”

She rubbed her hand down my chest. I caught it before it reached the top of my pants.

“Jet lag,” I said, standing up.

Olivia.

She puckered her mouth sympathetically.

I’d been lying on the hotel bed for about ten minutes while Leah spoke to her mother on the phone. Now that her phone call was over, she was making her intentions known. I wandered over to the window so I could be out of her reach.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” I said. Before she could ask if I wanted company, I closed the bathroom door and locked it behind me. I needed to run to clear my head, but how could I explain a midnight run in a foreign country to my suicidal, overly emotional wife? God, if I started running, I might never come back. I stepped into the shower and stood under the scalding hot water, letting it fill my nose and my eyes and my mouth. I wanted to let it drown me. How was I supposed to do life after what just happened? Leah knocked on the door. I heard her say something, but her voice was muffled. I couldn’t look at her right now. I couldn’t look at myself. How did I just do that? Walked away from the only thing that made sense. I almost had her and I just gave up. I used ‘had her’ loosely, because you can never really have Olivia. She floated around like a vapor, causing friction and then running away. But, I’d always wanted to play the game. I wanted the friction.