She’s shaking her head, “No. I—I insisted on him doing a DNA test. Just to make sure. He did. Gus doesn’t belong to him. That’s how I knew it was—” she cuts off for a moment, her already pink face flushing further, and I realize why.
If what she’s saying is true, that means it washerthat day at the masquerade ball. The woman I’ve thought of nearly every day since. Who I’ve been chasing through dark hair and curves that couldn’t quite keep up in other women.
And if that was her, that means she and I have a shared memory of that balcony.
Her head tipped back against the wall. That ruby mask, the dress bunched up around her waist and the brick wall behind her back. One of my hands splayed astride her head, the other hooked around her leg, holding her where I wanted her.
My fingers in the meat of her thigh, her purrs at being told what to do, the whimper sliding out of her at the climax of her orgasm.
“It’syou,” Jules says, holding my gaze with her own. “There’s no other option, Russell.”
“It’s impossible, Itoldyou.” I’m trying to stay calm, but her insistence is making me feel a kernel of hope, and I know that’s not a good idea. “It might have been me on that balcony with you, but that doesn’t mean I’m Gus’s father.”
I know what it’s like to let yourself dream of something. For years, I dreamed about having kids with Margot. We’d live in New York City and raise our kids far from the Burch dynasty. I’d let Calvin have it, the whole heavy mantle of medicine, let him raise his kids the way I grew up. With the expectations and weight of the family name.
Margot and I would pay too much for a brownstone and too much for our kids’ tuition and eventually, I might even become chief of medicine at a hospital in NYC. I’d come up with new treatments for kids with heart conditions, we’d rise in our careers, and even with the stress of the city, we’d say it was worth it.
But none of that happened. Instead, I learned that I could never have biological children. After she left, I realized it wasnever really that much about Margot—which was, maybe, part of the problem. Without the promise of kids in our future, we realized we didn’t really have that much in common.
So, I lost that future, my fiancée, and found out my father would be dying of cancer, all in the same decade. And now I’m back in Chicago, once again facing a choice: allow myself to hope, to wish for the chance that I might get something I want.
Gus. A son. A family, right here for the taking. A miracle.
Or, I could make the logical choice. I could take my lessons from the past and move forward sensibly.
In my apartment this morning, when Jules asked me what this was, I found myself leaning toward hope. Toward thinking I could have her and Gus, despite the fact that this started as a fake thing. Despite the fact that she’s so much younger than me, seeming to be in a completely different part of her life altogether.
But hope has only ever resulted in pain.
“It’s not possible,” I say again, more to convince myself than to convince her.
“Fine,” she says, looking off to the side for a moment before returning her gaze to mine. “Then take a DNA test.”
“I told you?—”
“Just—” she cuts me off, shaking her head. “Humor me, okay? Do it for me.”
But I can’t do the DNA test and just humor her. It would be humoring me, too. And when I think of the pain of a negative test, of getting the answer I know has to be true, to hold that evidence in my hands—it’s too much.
“There’s no point.”
“So, you won’t do it.” Jules bites the words off like they’re poisonous.
“I don’t think there’s a point,” I argue, but her face is already closing off, and she’s taking a step back from me, shakingher head, more mascara-tinged tears running down her face. “Jules?—”
“Don’t,” she whispers, the word coming out in a plume of hot breath in the increasingly frigid air. The sun is completely set now, the park coming to life with the massive displays by the ice rink and the lights from nearby buildings and streetlamps. “Don’t, Russell.”
With that, she turns to walk away.
This time, I’m not going to let her. Not when she’s upset. Not when she’s obviously gone through something else today. I take a step forward, determined to follow her, to at least call her a car and make sure she gets home okay, but then I turn to the side and see the last person I would have expected—or wanted—to see, standing just behind the hot chocolate stand.
She’s tall and thin and wearing a shining white coat that’s bedazzled up the sides, her long skinny fingers clutching a pink phone with charms hanging from the top.
“Russell,” Evony says, tilting her head at me and giving me a sly look. Before I can even think of something to say, she’s turned on her heel and started in the other direction, furiously texting.
After a second of standing there like an idiot in the cold, I say the only thing that comes to mind.
“Fuck.”
