He rubbed a hand across his jaw and nodded slowly.
“To be clear, you’re mad that your sister didn’t tell you something that has nothing to do with you.”
“For a week,” I added, though we’d already been through this. The only sounds in the space were my teeth brushing and Junior crunching on his food from the kitchen. I didn’t know what Barry was getting at, but he was so still and watching me intently, like every word out of my mouth had double the meaning. It made me squirm, but I brushed my teeth better than I had in weeks, thirty seconds on each quadrant and behind the bottom teeth. At this rate, I’d even floss.
“You see how this sounds coming from you,” Barry said, not a question.
My face betrayed my hurt and confusion in the mirror, but I busied myself with rinsing the foam from my mouth and making sure the porcelain was clear of splatters. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Barry, but not this. Even if I did sound ridiculous, I thought he might at least give me a moment of sympathy, of “your feelings are valid” before the cold hard truths.
“How does it look? Like I’m a caring sister?”
“You don’t like when you’re left out of the loop,” he said. “It feels like shit, right?”
It dawned on me all at once that Barry was not the person I should be talking about keeping secrets with.
“Oh.”
Barry repeated the noise and nodded at me finally getting it.
I thought about sliding past him, pushing him so that I might be out of the bathroom and have a modicum of space away from his interrogating and indignant eyes. He moved before I could, pushing off the door frame and stalking across the living room. His back was to me, his shoulders tensed when I followed.
“Wait,” I started, but I had no idea how I’d continue.
“Hannah—” Barry cut himself off and took a breath. “Would you ever have told me?”
I took a halting breath and then released it. I couldn’t say yes, but I wanted to. I wanted to lie, say that I had been about to tell him, that I’d been gathering the courage to call him that very week when he found me asleep at the practice facility. He wanted me to say that, I could tell. He wanted to know that he was someone I would have told, and I was someone that would tell.
Maybe if I lied, he’d stop looking at me like I was a sad thing he didn’t know how to trust, like I was just as selfish as he’d guessed.
“No really, how old would she have been when I found out? When she graduated preschool? College?” His voice was thin, not yelling, but worse: exasperated. He sounded tired and sad, and it might have been easier if he was just angry. “In thirty years, would I get one of those DNA kits and find out that my daughter had been living forty minutes away with two kids of her own?”
I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look at him either. I couldn’t.
“I wasn’t going to come in so early that day,” Barry said. “When I ran into you, I didn’t need to be there. I thought about stopping for breakfast first or sleeping in another hour. It fucking?—”
Barry broke off. The couch groaned as he sat down on it, then the floor when he stood back up. The heater clicked on, sounding through the vents as dusty warm air started blowing from the grate in the living room.
“Your family is so good, Hannah. They’re welcoming and they’re so thrilled about this baby, it’s impossible not to feel excited around them.” I peeked up at his face and forced myself not to look away. “It haunts me that if I’d slept in that morning, I still wouldn’t know. Because I wouldn’t, would I?”
After a few moments of sustained, painful eye contact, I shook my head. Junior brushed against my ankles, then sauntered across the room to do the same to Barry.
“Right,” Barry said.
He picked up his shirt and walked right past me to the basement door, closing it behind him. Junior’s meow pulled me from staring at it. I could only curse and retreat to my room, crawling beneath the comforter and tossing from one side to the other trying to get comfortable. I listened for his creaking steps through the house, but Barry didn’t come back upstairs before I fell asleep, hating myself more than I had in some time.
CHAPTER 13
DON’T YOU WANT ME?
When I woke up just after eight on Saturday, Barry was gone, probably to the gym, and this was a relief. Things were overall icy yesterday; I’d apologized and he said “all good,” but I suspected we were in fact not yetall good.
I scrawled a note onto my Post-it pad with a kitten border in case he came back while I was still out, but nothing felt right. I wroteThanks for the smoothie, but then crumpled the note and went withI’m the worst. Then I triedHave a nice day, and then the same note but with an exclamation point. I peeled that one off too and wrote it back out without the exclamation point but ended up crumpling that one as well. I settled onOut with Kate. See you laterand slipped out of the house, leaving a pile of pale blue Post-its in the garbage beneath my yogurt cup.
He’d been spot-on in his guess that I wouldn’t have told him—I wouldn’t have. I’d convinced myself that I’d been protecting myself, protecting the baby even, by not telling him, but I could see how learning this would be hurtful. Of course he was hurt.
I took the bus to the diner because I hadn’t seen Josie in a few days, and it wasn’t busy so she interrogated me while I ate. I sat at the counter and she and Marcus peppered me with questions about Barry, what he was like, if they could go to a game with me, what was he doing staying in my house, were we sleeping in the same bed, would we start dating, and also did he like his burger?
“I am begging you to bring him to karaoke,” Josie said. Iwatched as she poured salt into the glass shakers from each table.
