Page 60 of After-Hours Heir

His breathing seemed to be calming down, and he was outraged because it meant that perhaps the angry nurse was correct.

He had panicked.

An overflow of an emotion he had never allowed himself to feel. He didn’t know what to make of that. He didn’t understand it.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” he said to Sylvie.

“I understand that,” she said. “Is that why… Is that why this is so…”

“Nothing is too much for me,” he said. “I have seen terrible things, Sylvie, and I have never once felt anything like that. If I die in my sleep it is on your head.”

He walked away from her, moving into the kitchen so that he could pour himself some whiskey. He knew that she couldn’t have a drink. He didn’t care.

He braced his hands on the counter and looked down. He held himself there like that, trying to find himself. His breath.

Who he was.

“Christos, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, then I can’t help you.”

“What makes you think you can help me? You weren’t there. Not for any other part of my life before this. You never have been. What makes you think that you could do something for me? We are having a son.”

“Yes. We are. Does that make you happy?”

“I don’t know how to be a father. How will I…”

And he realized exactly the abyss he was staring into. The horrible realization that the last thing he wanted was to raise a child who might turn out like him.

He was his own nightmare.

He was the monster in the shadows. Not his father. Not any of the men who had abused and mistreated him during his years as a trafficked laborer.

He had become the darkness.

And he couldn’t bear the idea of a boy modeling himself after him. Of him becoming the man that a woman like that nurse would look at with disdain.

The world could not contain more men like him. Because he was…

“I’m not a good man, Sylvie.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Would you want our child to be like me?”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then she stepped forward, put her hand on his face. “I don’t want our child to be traumatized. And I have a very strong feeling that whatever this is, whatever you are, it’s connected to something that happened to you.”

“How do I raise him? I need you,” he said. “You were right. I am the dysfunctional parent. I-I can offer him nothing but money. Nothing.”

“You can love him, Christos. I went and saw my mother. And she said that she was proud of me for getting pregnant with your baby. She thinks that I trapped you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know. But it hit me then that my mother just doesn’t understand me. She will never be proud of me. Not of who I am. Because nothing that I am means anything to her. She doesn’t care about the same things I care about. She doesn’t want the same things that I want. I’m not good enough for her because we just…we exist in two totally different spheres. And she doesn’t know how to care about someone who doesn’t reinforce her own values. If she could have just loved me, that would’ve changed a lot of things for me. I didn’t need her to be a perfect example. I just needed her to…care.”

“What if I don’t even know how to do that?”

“If you didn’t care you wouldn’t have reacted that way.”

“I still think it might’ve been a medical event.”