CHAPTER 12
THIS MAN CUT HIS WORK HOURS
IN HALF AND THE RESULTS
ARE STAGGERING!
ADRIAN
Becky and I sat in the conference room working. It was noon on Friday and we were waist deep in backlogged paperwork. The Bueller trial was amping up, and I wasn’t prepared.
I hadn’t looked at the bodycam footage or the toxicology report yet, and Marcus had been giving me side-eye because I missed a filing deadline last week after leaving early to take Grace to the pediatrician with Vanessa.
I hadn’t planned on going to the doctor with her. Vanessa didn’t even invite me. But I’d mentioned the baby’s appointment to Lenny and he said that his kids cried so hard when they got their shots they were inconsolable.
Then he said Vanessa should have given Grace Tylenol before she got there, which I wasn’t sure she had. I’d texted her but she didn’t reply.
I’d sat there in a conference call, bouncing my foot and checking my phone, until finally I’d said fuck it and walked out and driven to the doctor’s office.
Vanessa couldn’t bring Grace back from that kind of upset like I could.
Vanessa was right when she said Grace was calmer with me. She liked it when I held her when she was fussy—she actually preferred me over Vanessa when she was really worked up. It would be better if I held her while she got her shots—and anyway, I wanted to meet this doctor. Run a background check for malpractice and at the very least check his ratings on WebMD.
The nurses kept calling me “dad.” Vanessa giggled every time they did it.
I was gone only an hour, but the disruption had messed up my whole day. I’d spaced on the filing and was ten minutes late to a consultation.
Lenny had taken notes for me for the rest of the conference call, but I’d missed my opportunity to ask questions while everyone was on the phone so I’d had to send emails to get up to speed.
In addition to this midday walkout, I hadn’t pulled more than an eight- hour shift in almost two weeks. The time I usually gave to my cases, I was
now giving to Vanessa.
I’d started delegating.
I never handed off work. Ever. I always did everything myself. There were fewer mistakes that way. But I’d given Lenny the Garcia case because I knew if I didn’t, I’d either have to sacrifice the quality of my representation or I’d have to sacrifice Vanessa. And for the first time in my life, work wasn’t my priority. These days when 5:00 hit, I left. I didn’t like losing any time with her. It had gotten to the point where I even hated the end of the night because I knew she’d go home and take Grace with her and leave my apartment hollow and lifeless again.
I was behind on everything. Everything. I was trying to get caught up, so I was working through lunch. I had to, because today was a short day for everyone. We all were leaving early for the annual Children’s Hospital gala.
I wasn’t looking forward to it.
I liked the gala. The food and the entertainment were always good, and it was nice to spend time with the rest of the team outside of work. But I’d only bought one seat because Rachel hadn’t been planning on coming out this weekend. I tried to get another ticket for Vanessa last minute, but the
event was sold-out.
She wouldn’t be there.
Suddenly an evening of eating steak and lobster and listening to a live
band sounded like the last thing I wanted to do with my night.
I’d been hanging out with Vanessa every day for two weeks straight. We had dinner every night. Spent last weekend snowed in, wandering the first floor, googling names we found scrawled on the walls, watching The Office, and going back and forth between each other’s apartments.
Our lives had fused together without seams. I found baby socks in my sofa cushions, and there was a bottle warmer on the bar next to my decanter of Basil Hayden’s bourbon. I’d bought my own playpen and swing so we didn’t have to keep lugging them back and forth.
Vanessa gave me a spare key, and I didn’t even lock my door anymore when I was home. She came and went as she felt like it. Didn’t even knock.
Came right in talking like we were always in some ongoing conversation, did laundry, used my espresso maker, took Harry Puppins home with her when I was at work and left Grace with me while she took showers or ran errands. Yesterday she sat on my weight bench in her pajamas, talking to me and eating a frittata I made her while I ran six miles on my treadmill.
They were always there. She was always there. I liked it. I liked her.
A lot.
I was having a hard time knowing how that made me feel because there wasn’t much I could do about it.
A core part of our relationship was us not hitting on each other. She flirted with me, yes. But that was just who she was. There’d been times she’d told me how hot I was and reiterated that she didn’t date in the same sentence. It didn’t mean anything. She had been very clear that she was uninterested in dating. That’s probably why she felt so comfortable spending so much time with me—because I wasn’t trying to sleep with her.
I was painfully aware that if I brought it up, tried to talk to her about the way I was feeling, I’d run the risk of losing the friendship. Even the conversation about crossing the line was crossing a line. Afterward there would always be the knowledge that I wanted more, even if we never acted on it. It would change things—and I was terrified of changing things. I couldn’t lose this.
Becky moved her stack of papers into a neat pile and leaned forward on her elbows. “So what’s it like hanging out with Vanessa?” She grinned. “Do you guys get VIP treatment? Is it the coolest thing ever? Does she get mobbed when you go places and you have to be her bodyguard and peel
strange men off her?”
I shook my head. “She signs autographs now and then. I don’t really see that side of her. We do normal things. She’s just like everyone else,” I said, slipping a paper clip over my stack of corrections.
Becky gawked at me from across the table. “Okay, but she’s totally not.
People love her. They pay money at cons just to be able to take, like, one picture with her, and you just get to hang out with her all willy-nilly and you’re not even freaking out about it?!”
“I very much appreciate that I get to hang out with her. Willy-nilly.” I
circled a typo.
She gave me crazy eyes.
I loved messing with Becky.
She blinked at me. “You don’t get this, do you? Your neighbor is America’s sweetheart and I feel like you’re not fully appreciating this. She was a judge on a panel with Tom Hanks once and they called her ‘the nice one.’ She had a cameo on that one Gordon Ramsay cooking show and he refused to yell at her—Post Malone has her name tattooed on the inside of his lip!”
I looked up at her. “She’s met Tom Hanks?”
She stared back at me, horrified. “Why don’t you know any of the things?!”
I stifled a grin. I didn’t know about Tom Hanks—or the Gordon Ramsay show, come to think of it. And I didn’t know what the hell a Post Malone was either.
I was fully aware that Vanessa was a celebrity. But to me she was just… Vanessa. She was grounded and normal. Most of the time I forgot what she did for a living entirely—something I think she preferred. She didn’t like to talk about her channel.
Admittedly, there were times when we were out that I noticed she was being recognized. Even if people didn’t approach her, I could tell they knew who she was.
I could never be on camera like that, my life so exposed, no anonymity. I don’t think she particularly enjoyed that aspect of it, but for her, raising money for ALS trumped privacy. I guess if you found something important to you like that, it would be worth it.
“I don’t need you to tell me how lucky I am or how incredible Vanessa
is,” I said. “I am well aware.”
Becky was shaking her head at me, rendered mute by how totally uncool and uninformed I was. She let out a disappointed sigh at my unwillingness to gossip about this and went back to her subpoenas.
The occasional celebrity surprises aside, it occurred to me that I officially knew more about Vanessa and her family in two short weeks than I had known about Rachel and hers after eight months.
I’d had a lot of time to think about that relationship since it ended, and I was coming to conclusions that I wasn’t thrilled about.
Part of me knew that Rachel had probably been purposely cagey about her real life, and that’s why I didn’t know her better or catch on to what she was doing. But the other part of me was starting to wonder how much of a role I had played in that. Because the reality was I didn’t care enough to dig.
I made no effort to meet her friends and family or to visit her in Seattle.
If she didn’t text me for a few days or answer my calls, I barely noticed because I didn’t have time to talk to her anyway.
I wasn’t blaming myself for what Rachel did. But Vanessa was right about what she said all those weeks ago. I didn’t have balance. My life only allowed for a once-a-month girlfriend who was a stranger to me after almost a year of dating because that’s all I’d made room for. And that I did have to take ownership over.
And there was something else. A small but niggling voice that told me that maybe I liked it this way. That maybe Rachel was another manifestation of the control I seemed to need, a symptom of a bigger problem. That making work my number one focus was a way to protect myself from getting too close to someone who might end up hurting me.
Leaving me, like Dad had. And the funny thing was Rachel did end up leaving me. But the more I really thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t care.
I was indignant and angry about it, but on principle, not because I’d been in love with her, or even close to it. Did I choose her by design? Because I knew somewhere buried in my subconscious that she couldn’t get near enough to my heart to damage it?
I couldn’t shake the thought. I didn’t like this. At all.
Vanessa said that childhood trauma always messes with your
relationships. And I was starting to think she was right.
She was right about a lot of things.
Vanessa made me different. Better. She made me see the world through a new lens—or a lens that I’d forgotten existed.
It was like I was a kid again. We played like children. Had squirt gun fights in her living room, played the floor is lava. When it was negative five outside, we boiled water and threw it off the balcony to make fog. We blew bubbles to watch them freeze, made snow angels on the roof, had snowball fights that made me want to fall into a snow drift in our coats and kiss her.
I laughed until my stomach hurt, noticed the beauty around me, and marveled at the fact that I’d stopped seeing it in the first place. I felt like I’d been half-dead and I didn’t even know it, walking through my life in a sleepy fog until she’d woken me up.
Vanessa had said once that money can’t make you happy unless you know what you want. And it was becoming clearer and clearer to me by the moment what that was. With every day that I spent with Vanessa and Grace, I became more sure of it. But the thing that I wanted couldn’t be bought. I
had to earn it.
I just didn’t know if I could.
I was still in the conference room scanning the Bueller police report when Becky made a shrieking noise from across the table. Becky being dramatic wasn’t usually cause for me to look up from what I was doing, so I didn’t see Vanessa come in with Grace in her stroller until she cleared her throat in the doorway.
“You must be Becky?” she said, smiling at my hypnotized paralegal over my shoulder.
My heart skipped at the unexpected sight of her.
She was beautiful. She was always beautiful, but I hadn’t been braced to see her.
She had on a purple sweater I’d never seen her wear before, and her hair was down and curled. It gave me a twinge of pride that this woman had just walked through my office to see me.
I got up, grinning. “Hey, I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Since I’m not hanging out with you tonight, I thought I’d come down to surprise you and bring you lunch.” She held up a paper bag.
I stood there, just smiling at her like an idiot until Becky made a
whimpering noise from behind me. “I’m gonna go have lunch at my desk,” she squeaked.
She clutched a jumbled pile of paperwork to her chest and grinned at Vanessa like a lunatic as she edged past her and closed the door.
Vanessa beamed at me. “You know, you’re even hotter in your office.”
I laughed.
Grace smiled at me from her stroller. She’d been doing that now for the last few days. Every time she had her pacifier in and I made her smile, it popped out and she’d beam up at me, all gums and twinkling eyes. And if I tickled her, she giggled. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved playing with her.
I reached down to scoop her into my arms and nuzzled her with my nose.
She had on a tiny blue fleece onesie with snowflakes on it and she smelled
like baby powder and Vanessa’s perfume.
She smelled like home.
She put a fat little hand up, and I bit her fingers with my lips and she made happy giggling noises. I couldn’t stop smiling.
I suddenly understood what it felt like to have family come see you at work, like a wife and kids. I’d never had that jolt of happiness at seeing someone I cared about when I wasn’t expecting it. I wanted to hold Grace while I walked Vanessa around to show her my desk. Introduce her to Marcus. Revive Becky and formally introduce her too.
“What are we eating?” I asked, looking up at Vanessa.
She was watching me holding Grace. I couldn’t make out her expression, but there was something distant about it.
I nodded over to the table. “Come sit with me.” I moved some files with my free hand and cleared a spot for her.
“I got us Thai food,” she said, setting down the bag she’d brought. “Oh, and before I forget to tell you, I can’t hang out on Monday. I just found out.” She looked at me and put her bottom lip into a pout.
I felt my face fall. “Why not?”
“A work thing came up,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out to-go containers.
I had to force down my disappointment. That was two nights that I wasn’t seeing her.
“Do you want me to watch Grace?” I asked, hoping she couldn’t hear the
letdown in my tone.
She opened a container of fried rice and scooped it onto a plate. “You don’t have to. I was going to ask Yoga Lady.”
“I can do it,” I said, putting Grace down in her stroller and taking the chair next to Vanessa’s.
She shrugged. “All right. If you want to. I didn’t want to assume.” She finished serving my food and slid it over to me.
I looked at her while she was making her own plate. She wasn’t paying attention.
She’d dyed the ends of her hair last week for a video. They were blue and purple to match her sweater. It looked exotic. She had a little dimple on her cheek that came out when she smiled. Soft freckles along the bridge of
her nose, long lashes.
Beautiful.
I felt that thing happening, that urge to keep looking at her for longer than was appropriate. It was something that I’d been dealing with almost constantly for the last week or so.
I felt like a teenage boy panting over some girl in my gym class. I wanted to touch her. All the time. When she sat next to me on the couch, I wanted to put an arm around her. I wanted to hold her hand at the grocery store, pull her onto my lap when she’d come see what I was working on at my desk at home. It was ridiculous how strong the impulse was.
I knew I was probably just projecting my own shit onto this situation, but the space between us always felt unnatural. Like we were both pretending that we wanted it there and it was an effort for both of us to maintain it.
Vanessa made videos about me. I didn’t watch them—I didn’t have time to. And Becky regaled me with the dramatic recap every time one posted anyway. Mostly Vanessa talking about what we did that day and gushing about how attractive I was—not that any of this mattered. Besides being flattering, it didn’t change anything. We were still just friends and that’s how it was going to stay for the foreseeable future.
I forced my eyes away from her and back to my food.
“So what am I supposed to wear on Sunday?” she asked, picking up her soda.
I was taking her out for her birthday. I had something pretty big planned.
She bit the end of her straw while she waited for my reply.
“Just wear something nice. Maybe the gray sweater dress,” I suggested, taking a bite of my noodles. I liked that dress on her.
I liked everything on her.
“Thanks for taking me out. I’d probably just be sitting at home if you didn’t.”
I found that very hard to believe. “What about your other friends?
There’s nobody else who would have done anything?”
She shrugged. “Nobody local. I’ve got plenty of friends. It’s only exes I’m short on. I’m so single I don’t even have someone to drunk text,” she
mumbled.
I smiled. “You can drunk text me.”
She snorted. “Good. It’s only a matter of time. Nice to have permission. I
hope you like typos and crying emojis.”
I laughed.
“You know, you could have a boyfriend if you wanted one,” I said. “I still don’t understand why you don’t date.”
She scoffed. “Nobody wants to get involved with my kind of baggage.
Trust me.”
“Your baggage is not as bad as you think it is,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “Any man would be lucky to have you.”
I’d have you… She pointed her fork at me. “See, that’s exactly the kind of stuff people say to make you feel good, but isn’t it funny how the people who insist you’re a catch are never the ones who actually want to date you?”
There was something clipped about her tone.
She looked away from me and brushed her hair off her forehead in that way she did when she was frustrated.
I stared at the side of her face. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She wouldn’t look at me.
I studied her. Her chin did the slightest quiver. I swiveled my chair until our knees touched, and I put a hand on her arm. “Hey, look at me.”
The second her eyes met mine, she burst into tears.
I leaned forward and pulled her into a hug. “What happened?” I smoothed her hair down. “Hey, shhhhhhh. Tell me.”
She just cried. Vanessa never cried—even in situations when she should.
A helplessness tore through me, an instant impulse to fix whatever was
wrong.
“Vanessa, what is it?”
Tell me so I can make it better.
She shook her head. “Sometimes I feel like I’m spinning. Like I’m in a tornado and I can’t ever stop moving and the only time I feel still is when I’m with you.”
The comment took me so by surprise I didn’t know what to say.
She let me hold her for another moment. Then she pulled away, sniffed, and brushed at the tears on her cheeks. “Hey, let’s read our fortune cookies.
If you say, ‘while in bed’ and then read it, it’s always funny.” She forced a smile at me.
Like a projector changing reels, one scene to the next in a split second.
I shook my head. “Don’t do that.”
Her forced grin got bigger, and she smiled at me with tears still in her eyes. “Do what?”
“That. That thing you do where you pretend to be happy. You change the subject and go do something distracting. It’s okay to be upset sometimes.
You don’t have to fake it with me.”
She looked at me and she was suddenly so sad again I almost hated that I called her out on it.
“Adrian, if I don’t laugh, I’ll spend the rest of my life crying,” she whispered.
My eyes moved back and forth between hers. I reached out and gathered up her hands. Our knees were still touching. I could feel energy transferring between us like I was absorbing her sadness, making her calm down. I wanted to absorb it. I’d take all of it if it meant taking it from her. “What’s wrong?”
She looked at me for a long moment like she was debating whether to continue. “Adrian, I’m worried my hand isn’t just carpal tunnel.”
I drew my brows down. “What do you think it is?”
She pulled her face back and looked at me, tears in her eyes. “What do you think I think it is?”
I shook my head at her. “Listen to me, you are not dying. Okay? And it’s normal for you to be afraid of that. Especially after losing Melanie. But that’s not what that is.”
Her eyes searched mine. “And what if it is?”
I gazed back at her steadily. “It’s not. And if you’re that worried, let’s go
have it looked at—”
She shook her head quickly.
I could see the fear in her eyes.
I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to watch her sister die the way she did. Having something random like that happen to someone you love must make it difficult to ever feel safe again. And her birthday was Sunday. Her sister and her mom hadn’t made it to thirty. Vanessa was turning twenty-nine. That had to be frightening.
I squeezed her hands tighter. “You’ll just have to take my word for it, then. You’re a beautiful, healthy young woman and you’re going to live for a very long time, Vanessa.” I put a hand on her cheek. “Everything is going to be okay,” I said gently.
Her sad eyes canvassed my face, almost as if they were searching me for the truth. She turned her cheek a little into my palm, like she was chasing the warmth from it, and her lips accidentally grazed my skin.
I wanted to kiss her.
The urge was so intense I had to physically restrain myself from leaning in.
What would it be like? To lean down and kiss away whatever was going on in that beautiful, brilliant head?
But she didn’t want me kissing her. She didn’t want anyone kissing her.
At least there was that.
She reached for her napkin and pressed it under her eyes, and I let my hand fall away from her face, disappointed that the excuse to touch her was over.
“I’m sorry to dump all this on you at work.” She sniffed. “You don’t like me like this. You like me when I’m fun.”
“I like it when you’re happy,” I said honestly. “Fun is just the lucky by- product.”
She changed the subject. “Are you ready for my dad’s tomorrow?” She wiped under her eyes. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“Of course I’m going.”
“Are you sure? I know the house really grossed you out.”
I wasn’t particularly excited to spend more time at Vanessa’s dad’s house —or with Vanessa’s dad. The apple had fallen in a completely different
orchard with that one. But I wanted to check in and make sure Sonja was
doing her job.
And the other thing.
I wouldn’t give up a night with Vanessa. Not for anything.
She was a light that I saw behind my eyelids now, long after I’d stopped looking at it—and I wanted to keep looking at it. All the time. And if that meant I had to have dinner in a hoarded house tomorrow night, then that’s what I was doing.
Vanessa peered at me from where she sat. She was calmer now.
I realized that she’d come here today because showing up to have lunch with me was one of her distractions. One of the things she did to keep her mind off whatever was bothering her.
I wondered how often she did this. How many times she showed up to hang out with me as her way of cheering herself up instead of succumbing to whatever sadness she was battling. She came here because I made her feel better or because she wanted to talk to me about it.
Because she was spinning in a tornado and the only time she feels still is
when she’s with me.
And then it occurred to me.
I was her person. Me.
I couldn’t adequately put into words the way this made me feel.
It wasn’t in her DNA to let someone else take care of her. I knew because it wasn’t in mine either. We were the rocks in our family, always putting the needs of everyone else before our own, so I knew what it meant that she let me be there for her.
It was a privilege I didn’t take lightly. An honor to be the one she ran to when she needed someone to catch her. By some random stroke of luck, some geographical coincidence, I got to know her and be something to her.
And I’d be lying if I said being something to her wasn’t suddenly all I felt like doing.