“You’re right,” I tell him, my voice tight. “I don’t want the test. I don’t want to know.”
“Will that make it better?” He barks a laugh. “You know what? Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t attend any more of these appointments. I’ll leave it to the experts. You have everything figured out.”
“Finn.” I reach for his hand, and he pulls himself out of reach.
“No, Eva. I’m not going to ruin this for you. You should have exactly the pregnancy you want. The happy little doctor appointments and the happy little ultrasounds.”
A fake pregnancy. That’s what he means. The baby is real, but the fantasy pregnancy where there’s no future illness looming over us? That doesn’t exist for Finn.
I’m covered by a sheet, but I’m not going to shrink from this. “I want you here, Finn. As the father of this child. As the man I love. But I don’t want you here like this.”
“Like what?”
“Angry.”
“That’s who I am underneath all the bullshit. That’s who I am when I’m not wearing a tux and drinking champagne at a society event. Angry. I’m sorry if you didn’t know that before I fucked you.”
The doctor turns to me, her expression gentle. “Do you want me to ask him to leave? Because I can.”
Tears sting my eyes. “No, please. I’m so sorry. He’s just upset. Please give us a moment.”
She gives him a severe look. “I’m going to be right outside. Holler if you need me.”
Then she’s gone, leaving a vacuum where the only calm in the room had been. Finn’s gone off the deep end, and me? My heart is breaking. I take a deep breath.
Finn’s caught in the endless loop of his fears, and I’m not sure I can show him the way out.
I’m not entirely sure there is a way out.
His hopelessness is seeping into me, moment by moment.
But—no. I refuse to feel hopeless about my child. About our child. I refuse.
A man broke me years ago. I won’t let it happen again.
He’s the one who speaks first. “You’re getting a raw deal with me, Eva. I know it. You know it. Now the doctor knows it, too. I don’t have a defense, but I did warn you.”
That’s who I am underneath all the bullshit. That’s who I am when I’m not wearing a tux and drinking champagne at a society event. Angry. I’m sorry if you didn’t know that before I fucked you.
I think I did know. Not at the beginning, when he took me out to save me from my mother’s machinations. Not then. But later, I started to see the real Finn underneath. I saw him, and it made me want him even more. I don’t want the uncomplicated, shallow playboy. I want the grieving man inside, but I don’t know how to reach him. The Hughes curse stands between us.
“Do you want an abortion?” I ask, my voice hoarse. I don’t know if I can give it to him. I don’t think I can, but I have to know if it’s what he wants. Even if it feels like being flayed open with knives.
He curses and paces away from me—once, twice. That’s as far as he can go in the small examination room.
“No.” Finn doesn’t look at me. He’s facing the door, but I can hear him loud and clear. “If I believed it was better to pull the plug, if that’s what my beliefs and my values really were, I would have killed myself a long time ago. If I thought it was better to avoid it, I’d already be gone.”
My throat is too tight to speak. This means he’s thought about it.
It means he considered it, with that casual Finn recklessness. Is that what the underground gambling and fights are really about? About risking a life he doesn’t value?
About ending his life before he gets to the curse?
I can’t imagine him gone. It hurts that he even once thought about ending his life. That he felt that kind of pain. I want to comfort him, even though he decided to stay.
Now I understand better how much this is costing him.
He decided to live, but only under those narrow parameters. Only as the playboy.
“I’ll tell the doctor to come back in,” he says, and walks out of the room.
14
FINN
My office at Hughes Industries is the set for the greatest performance of a lifetime.
A custom Eames executive chair cushions my ass while I swivel between hard copy paperwork and my keyboard, pretending that my mind is completely absorbed in my work.
In other words, pretending to be normal.
This is my whole life. The expensive chair. A brand-new, top-of-the-line computer. Emails landing in my inbox every second. Contracts and mergers and personnel.
Really, it’s marking days on the calendar and pretending.
It’s been this way for years. When my dad started to decline, I increased my time in the office. I tried to keep it gradual so that people wouldn’t ask too many questions. I kept his visits more regular. Then, as the years went by, I spaced them out. Pushed the boundary by a week here. Two weeks there.
I’ll have to tell Hemingway how to do this. How to make it seem like I didn’t just disappear.
I even start to type it out in an email, then delete it.
I’m not sending my brother a fucking memo on how to orchestrate my slow fade from the company. I’ll talk to him about it in person. Later.
For now, it’s another day on the job. A normal one. It’s never been very normal, though. Most of the C-Suite executives are older guys. I’m the odd one out. I’m too young, not even thirty. I don’t fit the profile of a CEO of a conglomerate this large.
And yet I am the boss, in all but the official title.
I’m a good boss, too. Hughes Industries regularly evaluates the company culture and employee satisfaction. The people who work for me describe me as kind, fair, and professional.
I’m none of those things today. I feel like a racehorse who’s finally snapped and run away from his trainer. From his life.
I feel like screaming.
That would be a performance. Stalking through the office. Ripping up papers. Taking people by the shirt and demanding to know how they live with the future hanging over them like a bolder.
I didn’t sleep well enough to sustain it. I’m not that person, anyway. I don’t have a legendary temper. If I did, I’d keep it buried down deep. Hughes men can’t afford to call attention to their personalities like that. It would only make it more noticeable when I started to change.
Instead, I type out email responses and send them. I review reports. I sign company documents.
All of this is shit I could do in my sleep. Things I have done while I’m half-awake from being up with my dad or being out all night.
The pretending is harder today. Eva’s appointment is like a rock in my chest. I feel hobbled by the memory.
I lost it in there.
It was supposed to be a happy moment, and I couldn’t stand it. Nobody is better at pretending than I am, but with Eva gazing at the little bean on the monitor and everyone cooing over a doomed child, I couldn’t.
And she didn’t understand. Eva Morelli is a fighter to the core. She’s not going to give up just because the facts are against her.
It’s not a kind thought to have. I wouldn’t have it except my head is throbbing and Eva is pregnant and I am a disaster.