He shoots me another look. “You’re renovating her home after one date with her. And that was a date to a funeral no less.”
“Fair. So you think she doesn’t love him, she’s just stuck, unable to move on?”
“She’s not stuck. She’s moved. Just not on. More like sideways.” Another bite. “Why? You’re that interested?”
“I’m renovating her house, Hawk. That’s all you need to know.”
“That doesn’t tell me much.”
“Exactly.”
“You called me at six a.m. on a Wednesday to help you renovate a woman’s house. A woman you are asking about with the specific intensity of a man who is definitely not just renovating her house.” He looks at me flatly. “I’ve seen that look before. In my mirror. About eight months ago, when I was telling myself the exact same lie about Sora.”
I let that sit for an entire mile of silence.
“Celeste’s nervous about the whole thing,” I say, shifting the subject slightly. “The baby. Being a mother. She told me she doesn’t know what maternal even looks like because her parents were kind of absent.”
Forrest nods slowly. “Hannah and I weren’t exactly planning on parenthood either. You know that. I was twenty-two and terrified and had no idea what I was doing.”
“What made you ready?”
“Nothing. You’re never ready. That’s the whole trick. Everyone’s out here waiting to feel qualified and the feeling never comes. You just start doing it and figure out the rest while you’re knee-deep in diapers and existential dread.” He smiles—not the easy one, the deeper one. The one that shows up when he talks about Koda. “But the thing is, the fact that it scares you? That’s the qualification. If it didn’t scare you, you’d be a sociopath. Celeste being terrified of motherhood is the most maternal thing about her.”
“That’s basically what I told her.”
“Great minds.” He tips the jerky stick at me like he’s toasting. “Seriously though—Celeste is going to be a good mom. She’sintense and she’s a perfectionist and she’ll probably have this baby dressed for the red carpet by the time it can crawl. But she loves hard. You can tell. Anyone who’s spent ten minutes with her can tell.”
Hawk is right. I can most definitely tell.
The highway thins to two lanes. We’re deep in Westchester now, past the strip malls and the commuter stations, into the part where the trees outnumber the people and every driveway is longer than my block.
“How’s your mom doing?” Forrest asks, like he can sense I’ve been circling something.
“Same. Good days and bad days. Callie’s leaving next week—moving to Kansas. So I’m sorting out a replacement for the meds and therapy work.” I watch the trees blur past. “But there’s something else. I emailed this surgeon, Dr. Yassa. He’s Mount Sinai’s new neurosurgeon who specializes in repair and rehabilitation. He’s doing these experimental laser treatments. Like nerve regeneration.”
“Uh-oh, Saylor. I’m sorry man, but this story sounds scary familiar.”
Forrest is right. He knows my backstory, why Mum and I are stuck in America while we call Australia home. About four years ago a different surgeon sold us a similar story. A life-changing experimental procedure that could give my mum her life back. We sold everything. Our house, the farm, my truck. We bet everything on this one lottery ticket…and we lost. Not because the procedure didn’t work. But because it never existed. Gullible and stupid, I got scammed, and we were stranded in New York City with nothing and no home to return to. It was the second time I ruined Mum’s life, because apparently once wasn’t enough.
“That’s why I got Rina involved this time. She can smell blood in the water a whole ocean away. She vetted it. It’s legit. There’s only one problem…well two.”
“Being?”
“They’ve done about sixty successful procedures with mind-blowing results. Patients who were stuck in wheelchairs were taking their first steps in decades.”
“That’s amazing, man. Like a miracle.”
“Aye, but there were two cases—one full paralysis. One death.”
“That’s above a ninety-six-percent success rate,” Forrest says without thought, using mental math to inadvertently remind me how smart he is. Sometimes I forget he graduated top of his class at Columbia Law.
“Right but neither death or full paralysis is a risk I can take. On the other hand…the treatment is showing real promise. The laser therapy—whatever they’re doing with the nerve pathways—even the early results are strong. Really strong. I keep picturing how happy Mum looked when she was training. Imagine if she could run again, y’know?”
Forrest is quiet for a moment. He knows what running means to my mum. I’ve told him about Red, about the mornings in Wollongong, about the woman who ran five miles every day before she started her farm work. Mum really lived…until she couldn’t.
“Are you asking for my advice, Say? Because I can’t make this decision?—”
“It’s not that, mate. I’m thinking out loud. Even if all the stars aligned and we were accepted as patients, the risks were next to nothing, it’s also one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Minimum. Out of pocket because it’s experimental, so insurance won’t touch it.”
