And now my baby is suffering, and I can’t stand it.
Tilly pushes at me gently to set her down, and I don’t want to let her go, but I do.
As soon as I set her down, she reaches right back up, takes my head in her hands, and runs her thumbs below my eyes.
“Ah, fuck,” I mutter. I’m supposed to be the big, strong man here, but her thumbs come away damp with tears.
“He’s going to be okay, right? This won’t kill him. He’s going to have a good, long life. My grandpa had it, and he lived to be—”
“But how is there sickle cell in your family?” I stare hard at her, and yeah, her complexion is a touch more vibrant, even darker, than when I first met her and her features have never seemed to fit her face, the pretty almond eyes and the broad, dusky lips and the delightfully heavy spray of mute freckles across her cheeks, but she’s just Tilly. She has Tilly features.
“You met my dad,” she says with an incredulous tone.
“I didn’t. I was there, but I didn’t meet him. I didn’t see him.” I wouldn’t have thought to look for him; according to Andy’s investigator, the man is living with her sister.
“Blaise, look at me. I’m—” She cuts herself off with a sigh. There’s hurt in her voice. Resignation. Like she’s finally going to admit that she did blackmail, that she took all my money and funneled it to her father, her debt, whatever else, that she spent it all just to end up broke, but at least her father will live out the rest of his days comfortably, and . . . and I don’t know how that’s going to explain how our baby ended up with this disease of all things, when it was the very last thing I thought I had to worry about, since Tilly’s his mom.
She lifts her hands up, curving her fingers around her ears to snag the ridge of her wig back behind where it’s been glued down and starts to peel it away. I’ve never seen her removeit — she’s still never let me see her head uncovered before, always hiding in the bathroom to remove whatever she’s worn that day and reemerging with a sleep bonnet — but I know the process. She should be using water or a remover to soften the glue, not just peeling it right off the skin.
“Ooh, ooh, don’t do that,” I rush out, not wanting her to hurt herself. I don’t know why this is the moment she thinks she needs to do this, but I feel an instant pang of guilt for whatever I said that made her think this was important.
“No,” she whispers, spinning away as though to warn me off. “Just let me do it this way. I need to.”
I clench my fists, unsure if I can actually hear the glue tearing at the delicate skin or if it’s my imagination, but I hate this so much. I hate that we can’t just have normal issues like our friends have.
Then again, Shaunessy and Allore both tricked their girls into getting pregnant, and apparently, Morales’s girl got kidnapped once. And Huang? Not that he’s my friend, but the shit he called his girl when their relationship got rocky? He’s lucky she didn’t castrate him.
Freak would probably like it, though.
She turns back to me once the lace has fully peeled off, leaving her forehead red and splotchy. She keeps her eyes closed, though, when she pulls the wig off her head.
The biggest surprise is that there’s hair actually covering her head. I always just assumed she was bald, and that’s why she’s so protective of her head. I know she’s been through chemo; I don’t know how long it takes for hair to grow back.
Instead, there’s a full layer of black hair making a dome on her head. It’s plastered down, which only makes sense because she didn’t take the wig off last night. Possibly not even the night before, what with Joss going into labor. Itdoesn’t look very thick, like she keeps it cut short, but that also makes sense. I’m still not sure why she felt she needed to do it.
Until she scratches it with her fingertips to fluff it up.
“Oh.”
That’s all I can say. It’s not quite the texture of my hair, which really just wants to be fluff if it’s not contained in some way, but once hers loosens from the mold it’s pressed into, I see the frenetic curls fighting to form. I recognize the zig-zags.
She finally opens her eyes with a quiet but imploring sigh.
“I think I saw your father,” I tell her, my throat going dry. It’s one thing to know her father is there; it’s another to realize he was that man who was watching TV but didn’t really look there, like he was a body that no longer had a soul within it. “I’m so sorry.”
The hurt in her eyes, it makes sense now. I’ve been a total asshole to her when she’s really just been trying to survive. I tell myself I would never blackmail someone to the degree she did me, but how would I know unless I was in her situation?
“You don’t want me anymore, do you?” she says, already looking defeated.
I shrug. There’s nothing else I can do. I can’t keep being angry with her for doing desperate things to make her father as comfortable as possible. “You did what you had to do. I get it. Just don’t do it again.”
I never cease to be thrown off by anything Tilly says or does, but I’m definitely not prepared for her to say, “It’s not like I was deliberately, uhh, tricking you into thinking I was white. I mean, I figured you knew I wasn’t. My mom’s white, my complexion is closer to hers than Dad’s, but look at me.”
I cough out a laugh, feeling stupid because yeah, a lot of her features make more sense now. I should have probablyfigured it out long ago, but it’s not like it mattered to me. I definitely should have figured it out the second the doctor told us Donovan has sickle cell, though. “Babe, why would I care about that? I’m not white either.”
“Obviously you’re not—what?” she huffs. “You just made a gigantic deal about it!”
“Because white people don’t—” I cut myself off by pulling her back in for another kiss because this is such a silly argument. As we kiss, I ruffle her hair some more. It’s cute. I like it. I bet she’d be really pretty with it just natural. She’ll probably get really nice, thick, bouncy curls when it grows a bit more.
