“On the next page”—I flipped it over to a new sheet of paper—“I left you space to fill things in. I got most of this information from the questionnaire you filled out back in the beginning, but I don’t have specifics on any of it.”
She nodded with her bottom lip tucked between her teeth. I was too busy picking apart her expression that I almost missed all the writing she added to the blanks I’d left for her. When I turned my attention to her neat handwriting, I couldn’t do anything other than blink, completely baffled by her answers.
“Um, Jade. You had said your price point for rent was between two and four hundred dollars. I left it blank here because that’s a rather large gap, so I thought it made more sense for you to give me a more definitive answer.”
“Yeah, and I did,” she responded without looking up.
“You wrote zero.”
“That’s all I can afford.”
This had to be a joke. But she wasn’t laughing. I wanted to laugh, but I needed her to start so I could join in. And she didn’t do anything but sit there and watch me.
“Care to explain?”
Suddenly, the stare I had assumed was meant to mock me transformed into something so tragic. She hadn’t been sitting there watching me, fucking with me. No. She was about to break, like a porcelain cup on the edge of a table.
“In the questionnaire…I selected the rent to be more than I can afford.”
“But surely you can afford more than nothing, right?”
She dropped her focus to the paper. “I don’t have a job.”
Something wasn’t right. But in order to figure it out, I needed to see her face. I reached across the table to hook my finger beneath her chin and lifted it so I could see her eyes. The blue shone even brighter than before, and it only took me a second to realize why—they were glazed with a sheen of tears.
“What’s going on, Jade?” I couldn’t keep the concern from reaching my words. We were just laughing and fucking with each other, having a good time like we always did when we talked. So I was lost how we managed to end up here.
“I don’t have a job.” The lie I thought I’d catch in her facial movement never appeared. Her eyes remained on mine, not even an exaggerated blink. No twitch in her lip, no excessive pronunciation. Nothing. This girl was telling the truth.
“But I don’t understand…I thought you had a job lined up on Geneva Key. What happened to the little girl you were going to watch?”
“I’ll still have to watch her. But it doesn’t pay anything. I get no money for it.”
What she said didn’t make sense—no one would expect her to care for their child for free. It had to have been deception, but nothing about her expression, her reaction, her demeanor, or her tone told me that was the case. Either her presence had completely thrown me off my game, or there was more to this than she’d given.
“Then can’t you find another family who is willing to pay for your services?”
That’s when her face crumpled, and as if my finger hadn’t been tucked beneath her chin, she dropped her head, her shoulders jumping with each soft, almost silent sob. The pain she shed was real, as real as the air I breathed.
I grabbed her hand, squeezing it like she was about to float away and I needed to hold her here. “Jade…what’s going on? Talk to me.”
Using the napkin she’d decimated, she wiped away the evidence of her breakdown, though she never met my stare. Instead, she focused on the white paper between her fingers and explained. “On that questionnaire, you asked about pets. I told you I have a small breed, two years old.”
I waited her out, blindsided by something I never should’ve been caught off guard with in the first place. I was trained to predict things before they happened, yet I’d found my wife fucking another man, and not once had I anticipated anything was wrong. And now, I sat in front of someone who had clearly kept something from me, and from what she was saying, it was all in the form I’d sent her weeks ago.
She took a deep breath and gave me her sad, broken attention. “You didn’t have a question on there about kids. So I thought I’d put it there and explain later…if we made it that far. I didn’t know anything about you, and I was scared to include my daughter. I couldn’t risk anything happening to her.”
The floor opened up and swallowed me whole, spitting me out in some alternate universe. I knew she’d kept something from me, but not once had I imagined it was a child. Maybe I thought that with her age, it wasn’t a possibility, but now that I sat here, I realized it had been a foolish assumption.
“You have a kid?”
5
Jade
I wanted to flee, slide out of the booth and run as fast as my short legs would carry me. The stunned look on his face said it all. His wide, onyx eyes, his full lips parted in surprise. He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, and in fact, I hadn’t planned on telling him at all—I figured we’d get to the end of lunch and one of us would say it wouldn’t work out. Call me delusional, but for some reason, I found myself believing it could.
“You have a kid?” he asked, the shock from his rigid posture mirrored in his question.
“Yes, Aria. She’s two.”
“So you’re not a nanny?”
I looked away from him, contemplating the version of truth I would offer. “Not really, no. I joke with my best friend how I’m a nanny who doesn’t get paid, so when I had to write in my job, that made the most sense.”
He didn’t say anything else, just stared unblinkingly at me.
“Listen, I’m sorry about misleading you. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into at first, and then I somehow started looking forward to your calls. You allowed me to be someone other than who I am. Stevie now sees me as the houseguest who won’t leave, her boyfriend considers me and my daughter a live-in cockblock, and Aria just sees me as her bitch.”
Out of nowhere, completely unexpected, a rush of humor tore through Cash. Almost every ounce of shock vanished before my eyes. “I have never heard you cuss. You go out of your way to say heck instead of hell, and you just said your daughter thinks of you as her bitch.”
I laughed, although I didn’t see the humor the way he had.
“What about child support?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
I let my hand fall flat on the table and tilted my head, teetering on the verge of defeat. “Well, what else should I say, Cash?”
“How about the truth? I’ll find out about it anyway.”
I shook my head. “No, you won’t.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.”
“No one knows who her father is, so good luck finding information that doesn’t exist.”
He jerked back, probably surprised by hearing me finally take a stand. But I couldn’t hold it in. I’d answer any question he had—except that. I’d talk about anyone other than him. “Birth certificate?”
“No father listed.”
“Do you not know who he is?” This wasn’t a question I had never heard before, but it stung just the same.
“Yes, I know who it is. But I don’t want him having anything to do with Aria, so I’ve kept him out of everything. I’d rather struggle alone than take anything from him.”