Love Me With Lies 03 Thief (21 page)

There was no time like the present. If Turner got in the way, I’d just toss him off the balcony. I was soaked in sweat and determined when I turned on the ignition.

I was one mile from Olivia’s condo when I got the call.

It was a number I didn’t recognize. I hit
talk
.

“Caleb Drake?”

“Yes?” My words were clipped. I made a left onto Ocean and pressed down on the gas.

“There’s been an … incident with your wife.”

“My wife?”
God, what has she done now?
I thought about the feud she was currently having with the neighbors about their dog and wondered if she’d done something stupid.

“My name is Doctor Letche, I’m calling from West Boca Medical Center. Mr. Drake, your wife was admitted here a few hours ago.”

I hit the brake, swung the wheel around until my tires made a screeching sound, and gunned the car in the opposite direction. An SUV swerved around me and laid on the horn.

“Is she all right?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “She swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Your housekeeper found her and dialed 911. She’s stable right now, but we’d like for you to come in.”

I stopped at a light and ran my hand through my hair. This was my fault. I knew she took the separation hard, but suicide … it didn’t even seem like her.

“Of course — I’m on my way.”

I hung up. I hung up and I punched the steering wheel. Some things were not meant to be.

When I arrived at the hospital, Leah was awake and asking for me. I walked into her room, and my heart stopped. She was lying propped up by pillows, her hair a rat’s nest and her skin so pale it almost looked translucent. Her eyes were closed, so I had a moment to rearrange my face before she saw me.

When I took a few steps into the room, she opened her eyes. As soon as she saw me, she started crying. I sat on the edge of her bed and she latched onto me, sobbing with such passion I could feel her tears soak through my shirt. I held her like that for a long time. I’d like to say I was thinking deep thoughts during those minutes, but I wasn’t. I was numb, distracted. Something was agitating me and I couldn’t place it.
It’s cold in here
, I told myself.

“Leah,” I said finally, pulling her from my chest and settling her back onto the pillows. “Why?”

Her face was slimy and red. Dark half–moons camped around her eyes. She looked away.

“You left me.”

Three words. Then I felt it: so much guilt I could barely swallow.

It was true.

“Leah,” I said. “I’m not good for you. I-”

She cut me off, waving my comment away on the frigid hospital air.

“Caleb, please come home. I’m pregnant.”

I closed my eyes.

No!

No!

No…

“You swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and tried to kill yourself and my baby?”

She wouldn’t look at me.

“I thought you left me. I didn’t want to live. Please, Caleb — it was so stupid. I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t name the emotion I felt. I was somewhere between wanting to walk out on her forever and wanting to stay and protect that baby.

“I can’t forgive you for that,” I said. “You have a responsibility to protect something you gave life to. You could have talked to me about it. I’ll always be around to help you.”

I saw some color come back into her cheeks.

“You mean … help me while we’re divorced?” She lowered her head and looked up at me. I thought I saw some fire in her irises.

I didn’t say anything. We were locked in a staring contest. That’s exactly what I meant.

“If you don’t stay with me, I’m not keeping this baby. I have no intention of being a single mother.”

“You can’t be serious?”

Never did I think she would threaten me with something of this nature. It seemed beneath her. I opened my mouth to threaten her — to say something I’d probably regret, but I heard footsteps. The brisk kind that said
doctor
.

“I’d like some privacy to talk to my doctor about my options,” she said, quietly.

“Leah-”

Her head snapped up. “Get out.”

I looked from her to who I presumed was Doctor Letche. Her face was pale again, all the anger gone.

Before the doctor could say anything, Leah announced that I was leaving.

I stopped in the doorway and without turning around, I said, “Okay, Leah. We’ll do it together.”

I didn’t need to look at her face to know it held triumph.

I have a decision to make. I’m pacing it off. That’s what my mother would call it, pacing it off. I did it as a kid, across my bedroom. I guess I never grew out of it.

Olivia is making her decision, whether she knows it or not. Noah is going to come back for her, because she’s that girl, the one you come back to again and again and again. So, I fight. That’s it. That’s my only option. And if I don’t get her, if she doesn’t choose me, I’m going to be
that
guy—the one who spends his life alone and pining. Because I sure as hell am not going to replace her with any more Leahs or Jessicas or any-goddamn-body else.
Fuck it
. It’s Olivia or nothing. I grab my wallet and keys and jog down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. I go directly to her office. Her secretary holds Olivia’s door open for me as I step in. I smile at her and mouth my thanks.

“Hi,” I say.

She’s in the middle of sorting through a mound of papers, but when she sees me, she smiles — all the way to her eyes. Almost as quickly, the smile sinks out of her eyes and the lines of her mouth firm into a straight line. Something’s up. I walk around her desk and pull her against me.

“What’s wrong?” I kiss the corner of her lips. She doesn’t move. When I let her go, she drops into her swivel chair and looks at the floor.

Okay.

I grab a chair and pull it up to hers so that we’re facing each other. When she spins her chair away from me to look at the wall, I know some type of shit has hit the fan.

Please God, no more shit. I’ve had about all the shit I can handle.

“Why are you being so cold with me?”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“What?”

“This,” she says, motioning between us. “It’s so wrong.”

I rub my fingers over my jaw and start grinding my teeth.

“We are kind of experts on doing what’s wrong, no?”

“Ugh, Caleb. Stop it. I’m supposed to be thinking of ways to make my marriage work. Not building a new relationship with someone else.”

“Building a new relationship with someone else?” I am confounded. “We’re not building anything. We’ve been in a relationship since before we were actually in a relationship.” In actual fact, I tell people we were together for three years, even though it was only one and a half, because I was emotionally
with
her from the moment we met.

“Why are you saying this, now?” I say.

She opens a bottle of water that is sitting on her desk and takes a sip. I want to ask when she started drinking water, but I’m pretty damn sure my non-girlfriend is trying to end our non-relationship, so I stay still and quiet.

“Because it’s better for everyone if we’re not together.”

I can’t keep the sneer off of my face. “Better for whom?”

Olivia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Estella,” she says.

It feels like someone has reached a hand into my belly and grabbed hold of my organs.

Olivia is chugging her water, her free hand limp in her lap.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I haven’t heard her name in a long time. I’ve thought it plenty, but Olivia’s voice wrapping around the syllables is jarring.

Her nostrils are flaring as she breathes. She still won’t look at me.

“Olivia…”

“Estella is yours.” It’s a blurt. I blink at her, not sure where that came from, or why she’s saying it.

Being told I had twenty-four hours to live would have been less painful than that statement. I don’t say anything. I stare at her nostrils, which are working like fish gills.

She spins in her chair until her knees bump into mine, and she’s looking me straight in the face.

“Caleb.” Her voice is gentle, yet it makes me flinch. “Leah came to see me. She told me she’s yours. She’ll take the paternity test to prove it. But, only if we’re not together.”

My head and my heart are in a battle for who can host the most pain. I shake my head.
Leah? Was here?

“She’s lying.”

Olivia shakes her head. “She’s not. And you can get a court-issued paternity test. She can’t keep Estella from you if you are her father. But Caleb, think about it. She’ll use her to hurt you. Forever. It’ll affect your little girl, and I know what it feels like to be a parent’s weapon.”

I stand up. Walk to the window. I’m not thinking about how Leah could use Estella to hurt me. I’m thinking about Estella being mine. How could something like this be true and I not know it?

“She was pregnant before Estella. We were separated, but we had sex once during that time. Anyway, she lost the baby after she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and had to have her stomach pumped. That’s why we went to Rome. She said that she wanted to reconcile, and I felt so guilty about her sister and the miscarriage.”

I look at Olivia when I say that. Her lips turn white as she presses them together.

“Caleb, she wasn’t pregnant in the hospital. She lied to you. She told me that too.”

I always wondered what Olivia felt when I told her I faked my amnesia. Painful truth is ineffable. It swings you around a couple times until you’re dizzy, and then punches you hard in the stomach. You don’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t hurt so badly if on some level you didn’t know it was true. I run with denial for a few more minutes.

“She bled. I saw her bleed.” Denial is such a friendly companion. It’s normally Olivia’s best friend. Suddenly, I want in on the party.

Olivia looks so distraught.

“Oh, Caleb. It wasn’t from a miscarriage. She probably just got her period and passed it off as that.”

Damn it. Fuck.
Olivia is looking at me like the naive, gullible fool I am.

I remember how Leah chased me out of the room before I could speak to the doctor. How I stood in the doorway and told her I’d stay just so she’d keep my baby. She was clearly trying to get me out of there before the doctor revealed the truth.

I don’t need to say anything to Olivia. She can see I’m getting it.

I’m feeling smaller and smaller. During my back and forth time with Leah, Olivia was falling in love with someone else. I could have just walked away with Olivia in Rome and spared us years of this tangled, twisted mess.

“How did Estella come to be?”

“After Rome we made it another month. She was angry with me. She accused me of not being present, and she was right. So I moved out again.

I was at a conference in Denver and she was on a trip with her friends. We ran into each other at a restaurant. I was friendly, but kind of kept my distance. She showed up at my hotel that night. I was pretty drunk and landed up sleeping with her. A few weeks later she called and told me she was pregnant. I never even questioned it. I just went back to her. I wanted a baby. I was lonely. I was stupid.”

I don’t tell Olivia that I found out she was seeing someone during that time. That when Leah came to me, I fell into her because I was trying to fill that Olivia hole in my chest again.

“So, she told you Estella wasn’t yours? That night you told her you wanted a divorce?”

“Yes. She said she’d slept with someone else before the ski trip. She also told me she only went because she knew I’d be there and she wanted to make me think she got pregnant that night.”

“It was all a lie,” Olivia says. “Estella is yours.”

I see the tear in the corner of her eye. She doesn’t swipe it away and it rains down her face.

”She’s going to keep hurting you and Estella as long as I’m in your life. I have a husband,” she says softly. “I should work things out with him. We’ve been playing house, Caleb. But, this isn’t real. You have a responsibility to your daughter…”

All of it — Olivia, Leah, Estella — ignites a fury in me. I spin and walk to her chair, leaning down and placing both hands on her armrests and get right in her face. All I want to do is go find my daughter, but first things first. I’ll deal with them one at a time. We are breathing each other’s air when I speak.

“This is the last time I’m going to say this, so listen carefully.” I can smell her skin. “You and I are happening. No one is keeping us apart again. Not Noah or Cammie, and least of all, fucking Leah. You are mine. Do you understand me?”

She nods.

I kiss her. Deep. Then I walk out.