“I’m sorry,” he said, when he finally finished. “I know that doesn’t fix anything. I know I don’t have any right to call you with this. I just didn’t know who else would understand exactly how stupid I feel right now.”
“Marcus,” I said, watching Elijah tumble happily into the grass, Maya’s laughter carrying across the garden in a way it hadn’t carried freely in months before we left Harrow Point. “I understand you’re hurting. I even understand, in some small way, that you probably feel humiliated in front of your whole family. But I need you to hear me clearly, one time, and then I think we’re done talking about this.”
“Okay,” he said quietly.
“You didn’t lose a wife and an heir on the same day,” I said. “You lost a wife and two children you told to ‘take them if I wanted’ because it would make your new life easier. Whitney’s baby isn’t the tragedy here, Marcus. You deciding, out loud, in front of a lawyer, that Maya and Elijah were inconvenient furniture you were willing to let go of — that’s the actual tragedy. Everything else is just consequences catching up to that decision.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I know you’re right.”
“Take care of yourself, Marcus,” I said, and meant it as sincerely as I could manage. “I hope you figure out, eventually, what actually matters. I just can’t be the one who waits around while you do.”
I hung up before he could say anything else, and set the phone face down on the wicker table.
Yvette called me a week after that, an apology that surprised me more than Marcus’s had — Yvette, who’d stood in that lawyer’s office smirking about family needing a “real heir,” now sounding smaller and more careful than I’d ever heard her.
“I said some things I shouldn’t have said,” she told me. “About you. About the kids. I was so caught up in wanting Marcus to have a son that I didn’t think about what it meant, the things I was saying, standing right there while you signed those papers.”
