Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
He didn’t touch anything, just stared at the pictures in frames. Some art I collected from antique stores and flea markets, anything with woods or fairies or a little bit magical. Crystals were placed around various surfaces, same with candles. Photos of me with friends and of me with Daisy. I didn’t look too closely at those. I was a different person in them.
The one frame he did pick up was my most treasured. Two small, beaming girls with dirt on their faces, clinging to a long-haired woman in an apron, with the backdrop of the Appalachian woods.
The last photo we had taken with my grandmother.
Knox stared at it for an impossibly long time before setting it back down with the utmost gentleness.
He was a slash of black in my colorful space. So large in it. I worried if I blinked too much, he’d disappear.
There was no food in my fridge, since I’d been gone for a month, but he’d found things in the pantry to cook. Pasta, olive oil, some fancy tinned fish I’d paid way too much for and hadn’t known what to do with.
“Do you want children?” he asked as he set various ingredients out. I’d leaned on my kitchen table, watching him.
I pondered the question which had been hurled out of left field. Of all the things I’d thought he might ask me, that was not one of them.
“I can’t have children, remember?” I replied carefully, though I was pretty sure he remembered. He held on to the most minute details, saving them up, storing them somewhere important. That’s how intense his feelings were for me. It felt immensely world changing to have someone want to know you that deeply. Study you that deeply.
“Yes, but do you want them?” he probed. “Traditional pregnancy is not the only way to be a mother.”
I watched his face for a sign of where his mind was going, but he wore a mask so solid, even I couldn’t find a tell. And I’d made it my business to study this man very deeply.
I tapped my finger against my thigh. “No, it’s not the only journey to be a mother.”
I’d thought about being a mom many times over the years, more since my thirtieth birthday come and gone. Then my thirty-first, and so on. I might not have had a biological clock, but I felt the window of time closing in on me. If I did choose to be a mother, the process was infinitely more complicated for me—especially doing it alone. It would take a long time to even get a child, by then I’d be older, and society demonized older mothers almost more than those who didn’t have children at all.
“The process is long and expensive…” I said instead of voicing the conclusion I’d come to long ago, what I’d always known in my heart of hearts.
“Money is no object, and I could get you a baby within a month, if that’s what you wanted.” His posture was rigid, eyes full of ice.
I stared at him. “You don’t joke, and now is a super weird time to start.”
He didn’t answer me, which I assumed was his menacing way of saying he was not joking.
“You could ‘get’ me a baby?” I air quoted. “You’re in the business of trafficking infants?” Previously, I had been certain that there was nothing Knox could do that would affect my feelings toward him, taint them. But children were a hard line. I’d been sure that he wouldn’t touch them, wouldn’t harm them.
He shook his head, and I sagged with relief, knowing he caught the gesture. “I know powerful people, and I have money. I’m owed a lot of favors.” He filled up a pot with water. “You think the billionaires of this world wait for anything? They jump the line for healthcare, organ transplants, drugs not available to the general public and children—if they want them.”
Okay, he was serious. Deadly serious. And deadly rich if he was talking about having the kind of money required to procure a baby through murky ‘legitimate’ means.
I hadn’t thought about Knox’s financial situation. It hadn’t really been top of the list when we first met. Or any time after. Sure, he wore very nice suits, everything about him was expensive and sophisticated, but I’d never equated that with what it might’ve meant in the real world.
We’d lived in a suspended sort of reality, never giving myself the luxury of thinking about us in the real world. I was suddenly clutched with panic as to what that would look like.
How that would work.
We’d made it through the entire Italian mob trying to get us and a boatload of childhood trauma just to have the mundanity of life destroy us? Surely not. That was too tragic for even a tragic love story.