48. Fischer

48

FISCHER

G ibson and I are both drunk when the sun comes up. We've talked for hours. Mostly about the custody situation. Lawyers. How to handle Nicole. But now we've meandered to the subject of Matthew because with each passing hour, I feel his absence more acutely than the last. His texts break my heart, but I don't know how to respond. This has to be killing him because it's killing me. I pray to whatever higher power there is that he knows—he has to know —that I wouldn't survive losing Vaughn. That I could never abandon my son the way someone once abandoned me.

"I had a feeling about you two," Gibson says.

"How's that?"

"He made you smile," my friend adds. "Not easy."

"No," I admit. "It's not."

"For now, I think you have to stick with denial. Obviously you can't deny the legal facts—he's your brother, you were raised by the same people, and you're thirteen years older than he is. She has no proof—unless you give her a chance to get some—that you've slept with him. Neither does Ms. Gallo."

"We're two consenting adults. Even if there were proof that we're in a relationship now, no one could prove we had one before."

"Except for the fact that you shared an address while you were old enough to?—"

"Okay, okay. I get it. So it's the fact that I'm old—that's the real issue here?"

"Which is why you have to deny everything."

"So how do I keep seeing him?" I ask.

Gibson gives me a grim look. "My best advice is you don't."

"Like ever ?"

"I don't know about ever, but you might have to make peace with the fact that this might not work out for you two."

His statement makes no sense to me. How could it not work out when it works perfectly? When we're made for each other? But that's not what he's saying. I get that. He's saying Matthew might be the price I have to pay to be a father.

I know better than anyone life isn't fair. It doesn't matter how much you've suffered—there's always more. Always some new, horrible lesson to be learned.

"I'm not ready to accept that," I say.

"Look, let's see if I can help. You don't happen to have any dirt on Nicole, do you?"

I make a disgusted face.

"She's practically accusing you of being a pedophile. That doesn't piss you off?"

"I'm too drunk and tired to be anything but depressed."

"I think you need to cycle back up through the stages of grief, then. Turning the other cheek and taking the beating isn't gonna get you your kid back."

I flip my palms up in defeat. "She's a good person. A good mom. She's snorted some lines at parties before, but I'm not sure she cares about anyone knowing that."

"A family court judge might care. And I can put some of my people on it. See what she gets up to when she goes out."

"Ugh. I'm gonna be sick."

"Fish, look. You got lucky with your divorce. I've seen friends get obliterated by a woman hell bent on taking them for everything they're worth because they were too scared to fight back. She's putting your kid at stake. She did that. She would have to prepare herself for whatever you come at her with. And if she didn't, she's not as smart as I thought she was."

I stare across the street at the park—the trees filling in with leaves as summer nears. Gibson empties the vodka bottle into two last shots.

We click them together and drink.

"I don't think I can stay away from him," I say.

"Is he more important than your child ?"

" God …" The word wrenches through me, and I pull my good knee to my chest, curling over it and wanting to fucking die.

"This is so interesting," he observes.

"What?" I moan.

"Just this whole realization that you have feelings. A heart. That can break apparently."

"I don't think it's ever not been broken."

"So, can you do it?" he asks. "Stay away from him?"

I bite down on the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from dissolving into tears. And I nod. And then I gasp like my life is ending, and I nod again before dissolving into tears.

I feel Gibson's hand on my back, smoothly rubbing, and I hear him saying he's sorry. But all I can think about is Matthew's arms clenching around me the first time I woke up in a cold sweat in the dark. His cheek on my neck, and the whispered reminder, over and over, " I've got you. "

It was Luke I am your father. It was Tower One has fallen. It was Sweetie, you were adopted. It was What if this is the worst idea ever.

It was the moment everything changed. Where what I thought was real and true and forever shattered and was replaced with a completely new reality.

He's the wound I'll never recover from.