A Promise for the Baby. Jennifer Lohmann
Greta tell you?”
“No.” Malcolm smiled. “You should learn to keep your door closed. Your assistant has a voice like a bassoon. Everyone on this floor probably knows by now.”
“Yes, Malcolm. I’m married. I’d not planned to tell anyone.”
“Did you really think you could keep information like that a secret?”
Yes, he had thought he could keep this a secret, but apparently he’d been delusional. If Vivian had stayed in Las Vegas, they could have gotten the divorce and no one would have been the wiser. However, with her pregnant and in Chicago, he was going to have to tell people. Putting it off would only make the inevitable more painful—yet he was still thinking about postponing the inevitable.
“How did you meet the lovely new Mrs. Milek? You’re always working. Even when everyone thinks you’re relaxing, you’re working.” Malcolm stroked his chin, a parody of the thoughtful investigator. “What kind of woman was able to slip through those defenses?”
“I’m not going to answer any of your questions, so you might as well stop wasting the city of Chicago’s time.”
Malcolm’s grin widened. “It’s funny how you think you can keep information a secret from me.”
“Listen, Malcolm, if you’re so curious about my wife, then why don’t you just investigate her yourself—just as long as you don’t do it on work time.”
“Hah! And how much of the information I learn about the new Mrs. Milek do you want me to share when I’m done?”
“None.” It wasn’t a lie. Karl intended to find out everything he needed to know about Vivian before Malcolm could ferret it out.
“Apparently you don’t think it counts as lying if you’re also lying to yourself.” With a salute, Malcolm left.
Karl could still hear Malcolm chuckling as he walked down the hall. Karl turned back to his computer, clicked on a browser. The cursor hovered over the search box. In a moment of uncharacteristic indecision, he closed the browser window and opened up work files, determined to put Vivian out of his mind for now.
* * *
VIVIAN PICKED UP the note Karl had left her on Friday morning, balled it up and threw it to Xìnyùn, who lobbed it into a small glass she’d appropriated for the game. Since Karl had disappeared last Saturday after they returned from the library, Vivian and Xìnyùn had gotten very good at basketball. Her husband seemed to think communicating through notes was an appropriate way to manage a marriage.
Even if theirs had been a hasty, drunk marriage better left in Vegas, they couldn’t hope to raise a child together communicating only through notes.
Dear Karl,
Jelly Bean flipped me off this morning. Apparently you said it was a “salute.” Be careful what you say to a four-year-old.
Thank you for your concern,
Vivian
Of course that was ridiculous. Karl would be at work too much to teach Jelly Bean—the name Vivian had taken to calling the baby growing inside her—how to flip someone the bird.
Dear Karl,
Jelly Bean returns from visitation having forgotten how to talk, but has become a surprisingly good correspondent. His teachers are worried.
Talk, dammit!
Vivian
She needed things from him. Humiliating though it was, she needed a place to live and health insurance. And she had also needed to get out of Las Vegas. Karl had given her those things with a poof of his magic fix-it sense. But an apartment and health insurance—and food, and a laptop so she could search for jobs, and a transit card and gas to get her around Chicago and to interviews—only solved her physical problems, not to mention that they made her feel increasingly dependent and trapped.
Maybe she didn’t need someone to talk to, but she wanted someone to talk to. Jelly Bean was still abstract; she couldn’t feel the baby yet, but she could feel her body changing and she wanted to talk with someone about it. When she told Xìnyùn everything she ate tasted like metal, he only whistled. And she couldn’t face her Las Vegas friends—not yet anyway. Not until she found new bearings.
Chicago was a big city, with people who might be her friends, eventually. But right now she was alone and the one person she knew was hiding from her.
Plus, she had things she needed to discuss with him. Such as whether or not she was officially on his health insurance yet and could go to the doctor. And did he want to go with her? She didn’t expect him to be an equal partner in her pregnancy—they were married, but they weren’t intimate—she just wanted...
Hell, she didn’t even know what she wanted.
She wanted to be able to stay awake past nine at night and catch him when he came home so she could eat dinner with him, rather than leaving his food on the stove. Maybe have a conversation with an animal that wasn’t a bird. Play a game other than solitaire. Measure Karl’s head for the hat she was making him as a gift rather than just guessing his size.
Vivian put Xìnyùn back in his cage, packed up her purse and headed out the door with a list of potential employers to visit. Her solution to her current situation was to get a job. A job would give her money. Money would give her the freedom to get her own apartment. There was always the possibility she’d make friends with someone she worked with.
Besides, being unemployed was not something she could handle for long, if only because getting up in the morning and going to a job had been a part of her daily routine for so long. She’d been working since it was legal for her to do so. It had been the only way to make sure she had money to save for college and find a life that didn’t involve moving in the middle of the night.
Fat lot of good it had done her. Her father had taken her life savings and disappeared into the darkness, leaving her to do much the same.
She shook her father out of her head. He had no place in Chicago. He wouldn’t think to find her here and if he couldn’t find her, he couldn’t ask her for more money. All the money she got from a job would go to providing for her and Jelly Bean. And she’d start to get some of her self-worth back. With a job would come the knowledge that she wasn’t a leech on Karl’s silent kindness. And maybe the hope that she could pay him back, somehow.
* * *
WHEN KARL WALKED through the doorway to his apartment at eleven o’clock on Friday night to find Vivian had pulled a dining chair into the entryway and was reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, he knew it had been too much to hope that he could dodge her for eight months.
“Good evening, Karl.” She rested the book on her lap and looked up at him. “Have you been avoiding me?”
It sounded cowardly when she put it like that. He stared at the curve of her lips above her pointed chin—soft over sharp—and he had to stop himself from running his thumb over the bow. He didn’t have to be drunk to be susceptible to the arcs of her face, but he needed to remember that she was only temporary. The baby was permanent, but Vivian fleeting.
“I work a lot.” It came out like a defense.
“Well, you’re home now, and I’m still up, so we can talk.”
He beat her to picking up her chair to carry it back to the dining table. As he passed the bar area of the kitchen, someone whistled at him. The bird was climbing around on a miniature jungle gym. Xìnyùn whistled again, a high-pitched, squeaky wolf whistle. The bird was on his kitchen counter. And whistling at him. He stopped to look at the bird, who hopped in response.
Vivian made kissy noises—at the bird, not at him. “Xìnyùn always did prefer men.”
Karl shook his head and continued carrying the chair to the dining