The next few weeks flew by. They held Paula’s memorial, which went as smoothly as Evie had expected. Paula seemed to have gotten her personality from her birth mother, tilting the scales in the Nature vs. Nurture debate firmly in Nature’s favour. While most of the contractors tried to brush it off as grief, Evie firmly believed Paula’s bio mother was batshit crazy.
The first thing Cecilia did was try to have Paula’s adoptive parents and siblings thrown out of the memorial service byscreaming that they had made her baby girl strip to get through University, which led to them firmly telling her that they had four other adopted children to raise. While they’d had a college fund for her, there wasn’t enough in it to pay for four years at Harvard, and they weren’t going to take away their other children’s funds to pay for Paula.
In the end, Tommy arranged for her adoptive family to have some time with Paula’s urn so they could pay their respects, while Evie texted Aaron for his ETA so he could give them the glass sculpture with Paula’s ashes. She managed to keep them there by bringing them into another room and explaining that Paula’s husband was on his way and had something for them. They met him in the parking lot, but when he tried to give them the glass hummingbird paperweight, they declined, saying they came to say goodbye, but Paula would not have wanted them to have any part of her. They did agree to meet him for dinner before flying back to Massachusetts, which made him happy.
Evie pulled Aaron aside before he went into the funeral home and told him what had happened when Cecilia saw Paula’s other family, and he groaned, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Of course she’s acting like a maniac,” he muttered. “Guess I need to prepare to be called a murderer, huh?”
“Yeah, probably.” Evie rubbed his arm sympathetically. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin slightly before walking inside.
Cecilia didn’t yell and scream at Aaron, though. She walked up to him and jammed her finger into his face.
“I know you killed her, you sick son of a bitch.” Her voice was a low hiss, full of venom. “You wanted to keep her barefoot and pregnant, forced her to get an abortion and go on—”
Whatever Paula had been forced to go through, they would never know, because when Aaron heard the word abortion, he grabbed Cecilia’s wrist and pushed her finger out of his face. She froze, her eyes widening in fear.
He didn’t say a word. He just shoved her hummingbird paperweight into her hand along with the pendant and walked out. Nissa appeared immediately and brought Cecilia into a side room while Evie chased after Aaron.
She got outside in time to see his car peel out of its parking space. It stopped beside the dumpster, and a second later, two of the hummingbirds flew out of the open driver’s window and landed inside the bin, followed by the dull thud of breaking glass. Then Aaron was gone with a squeal of tires.
When Evie went back inside, she told the minister to start and sat near the back with Thorn.
“Is Aaron okay?” he murmured.
Evie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
**********
A week after the disaster of a memorial service, Alex approached her with the idea of moving in together, pointing out that they had been together for almost two years. If they were living in the same apartment, he wouldn’t feel like he never got to see her, which would help reduce the number of arguments they had been having.
Evie, who had actually been considering ending the relationship altogether, decided after some thought that this would be her last effort to try to make things work. She had her new lawyers, friends from a couple of her pre-law classes in herfirst year at Columbia, draft a lease slightly skewed in her favour. Namely, if one of them ended the relationship, Evie would move out of the apartment for thirty days, and Alex had to find a new place to live and vacate the premises by the end of the thirty-day term.
Alex, insisting that moving in together would fix all their problems, happily signed the lease and moved in with Evie at the beginning of November. Evie struggled to adjust to having someone else living in her space and taking over parts of it, but eventually they found a system that worked for them and, to her surprise, their relationship improved quite a bit.
Alex hadn’t realized just how much time she spent with Tommy and Thorn and complained about them constantly dropping by with no more warning than HELIX letting her know they were on their way. She asked them to give her a heads up or to ask her to come to their apartments, because she recognized it wasn’t fair to Alex to have them dropping by randomly all the time. Still, aside from a few issues with Alex not being quite as clean as she was, they cohabitated very well.
**********
Aaron had taken to seeking her out in her office more often just to talk, and she got the impression he was very lonely since Paula had died. Not surprising, given how much Paula had isolated him from everyone else. With Beau in Iraq, Evie and Nissa became his go-to people whenever he wanted to grab a coffee, lunch or the occasional drink after work.
He was away on a particularly long assignment when Evie let Alex move in, and when he came back, they got lunch at Sherlock’s, a nearby British-style pub that Alex had introduced her to, and she told him about it, he scoffed.
"Do you seriously think that's a good idea?"
"I don't know," Evie admitted. "It's a trial thing. If we continue arguing, or if our arguments get worse, I only have to give him thirty days to move out. I still have a bedroom in Tommy’s penthouse, so it’s not a big deal."
"Evie, if you don't know, the answer should be no." Aaron rolled his eyes and shook his head as he ate his burger.
"He made a very valid argument about the amount of time we spend together and how we only start having problems when we aren't seeing each other." She shrugged, feeling a little defensive. "And it might be sunk cost fallacy, but we've put too much work into the relationship not to give it every chance we can."
"Sunk cost fallacy is exactly what it is." He waved a French fry in her face. She frowned, snatched it from him and popped it into her mouth with a smirk. He gave her a mockingly annoyed look and picked up another fry, dipping it in ketchup so she wouldn’t take it from him. "Is he still pushing boundaries?"
"Yeah." Evie's voice was quiet. It had been bad the night before. She had been playfully teasing him about something and had gone too far. He had made her bend over his knee and spanked her hard enough that it hurt to sit today. She had almost screamed her safe word at him and had squirmed off his lap, locking herself in the bathroom while he apologized and cried for losing control outside the door. "But that’s really rare now."
It was the truth; the previous night was the first time in close to a year that he’d lost control like that.
