He Planned My Fall, Then Fell for Me

I called Derek seven times.

Seven. I counted every one, standing in the registration line at the children's emergency wing with Leo burning up against my shoulder. Fever at 39.8 and climbing. Eleven o'clock at night, and I was doing this alone.

The line wasn't moving. Leo made a small, exhausted sound against my neck. The kind that meant he was past crying, past fighting it.

I hit call again. It rang out. I hit it again.

By the seventh call, I already knew he wasn't going to pick up.

I told myself there was an explanation. Dead battery. A meeting that ran over. I'd been telling myself things like that for years. The alternative, that he simply saw my name and chose not to answer, was something I kept pushing to the back of my mind.

We were almost at the desk when I passed the OB-GYN wing.

My feet stopped before my brain did.

Derek was standing there. His arm wrapped around a woman's waist, easy, familiar, like it had been there a thousand times. A registration slip in his other hand. He leaned down to say something close to her ear.

Clara Whitmore.

The woman he'd loved before me. The woman he'd never quite stopped loving, even after seven years and a son and a life we'd built together.

I knew her face before I let myself process what I was looking at.

Leo lifted his head against my shoulder. "Daddy."

His voice was small and rough from the fever. But it carried.

Derek turned. He saw me. He saw Leo, the red face, the glassy eyes, our son barely holding onto my collar with his small fists.

He walked over. For one stupid second, relief flooded through me. He's coming. He's going to take him. We're going to be okay.

He looked at Leo. Then he looked at me.

"How did he get this bad?" His voice was flat. "What kind of mother of you to let this happen?"

"I called you seven times."

Nothing. Not a flicker.

Behind him, Clara drifted closer, her face arranged into something warm and concerned. "You should really get him to a doctor right away," she said softly.

Her tone was impeccable. I'll give her that.

Derek put his hand on the small of her back. "Go ahead with him," he told me. Like I worked for him. Like he was delegating to staff. "I'll find you when I'm done here."

"Daddy." Leo reached both arms toward him, fingers spread. "I want Daddy. I don't feel good."

One look. Long enough to register. Not long enough to mean anything.

Then Derek turned, put his arm back around Clara, and walked her around the corner. Gone.

I stood there with Leo getting heavier in my arms, people moving around us like nothing had happened. For them, nothing had.

"Mommy." Leo pressed his hot face into my neck. "Why won't Daddy look at me?"

I didn't have an answer. I carried him toward the desk.

A nurse glanced at the empty space beside me. "Is Dad on his way?"

"No." I didn't elaborate. "It's just us."

She nodded and went back to the form.

I checked Leo in and found two chairs against the wall. My phone buzzed. Bella.

"Hey," I said, keeping my voice low.

"You're not answering my texts. Is everything okay? Is Leo okay?"

"We're at the children's ER. High fever. They're getting us a room."

A pause. "Where's Derek?"

I looked at the corridor he'd disappeared down. "Busy."

"Ella." Her voice sharpened. "Where is he?"

"I saw him, Bella. With Clara. In the OB-GYN wing."

Silence. The kind that said more than words would.

"I'm coming down there," she said.

"Don't. Leo needs to sleep and so do you. I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You're saying it the way you always say it when you're the furthest thing from fine."

"Bella. I have to go."

She didn't argue. "Call me the second you know more. I mean it."

"I will."

I hung up and sat down with Leo in my lap, his small fingers wrapped around mine even as his eyes closed.

A doctor called his name a little after one in the morning. I carried him back and answered the questions while a nurse found a vein on the second try. Leo cried and gripped my fingers hard enough to leave marks.

"He's dehydrated and the fever's high," the doctor said. "We'll get fluids into him, keep him overnight. He should be fine by morning."

"Thank you."

She glanced toward the door, the obvious unspoken question hanging between us. I didn't offer an explanation. She didn't ask.

They wheeled us into a room. I pulled a chair as close to the bed as it would go and sat down, Leo's hand still curled around two of my fingers in sleep.

There was a photograph I'd found once, in the bottom drawer of Derek's study. Derek and Clara, laughing at something off camera. He'd looked lighter in it than I'd ever seen him in real life. He'd never once looked at me that way.

Seven years with a version of someone. You build a child, a home, a life that looks right from the outside. Then one night you walk past the wrong corridor and you understand exactly what you'd built it all with.

Leo whimpered and tightened his grip on my hand.

"I've got you," I told him. "I'm right here."

That much was still true.

I sat in that chair and waited for the night to end, while somewhere in the OB-GYN wing of the same hospital, my husband held someone else's hand.

It was our wedding anniversary.

I hadn't remembered until just then.