“Damn straight.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Goodnight, Bella.”
“Goodnight.”
Chapter 3
The next day at work, she was edgy, anxious, waiting for Harvey to call her to his office or to come up behind her and demand to discuss how they would proceed. Bella went to meetings, returned calls and emails, and sat on the edge of her seat, always at the ready. She couldn’t make herself eat lunch, could barely sip her bottled water because she was so nervous about what he would say. She called up to his office but she was dropped straight to voice mail with a message that he was out of the office for the day. She decided to believe that, to accept that he was out of town today on some planned business meeting she knew nothing about rather than spend her time worrying that he was holed up in his palatial office briefing his legal team on how to take her down. That was far-fetched. It was paranoid. It made her sick to think of it.
She finished up at work, went home and made spaghetti and meatballs for her family. Then she snuggled up with the twins to watch a DVD, all the while feeling jumpy, her eyes skirting to her phone, waiting for him to call, to demand to see the children, to demand rights and acknowledgement and to demand that she confess to Caden and Corinne that she’d lied about their daddy. She cringed at the thought, then tried to laugh it off when Caden, who was leaning up against her on the couch, looked up in puzzlement at her sudden movement.
“Oh, the movie just scared me,” she laughed nervously.
“You’re scared of the minions?” Corinne put in skeptically.
“Yeah, they’re really….loud,” she finished lamely, “who wants grapes? I just washed a fresh bunch,” she said.
Bella levered herself off the couch and brought them each a bowl of fruit. She usually didn’t let them eat on the furniture, but, much like not sleeping in the big bed with her, those rules seemed to fly out the window when she felt the danger of losing them entirely. No matter how hard she fought, he could simply hire a team of lawyers to destroy her. He had an endless supply of money. She didn’t.
When she’d tucked her kids into their own beds, congratulating herself on being such an adult about it, she let herself wonder why Harvey hadn’t contacted her. Had he taken the day off because he was so furious he couldn’t trust himself? Or did he plan to get in touch with her via his lawyer? Or his mother and her team of lawyers? Bella clutched her roiling stomach at the thought. She was not powerless. She was not unfit. And she was not losing her kids. She was just making a catastrophe out of a difficult situation. Her hand hovered over her phone, wanting to call him, to find out what he was thinking.
“Damn it! Why doesn’t he call?” she muttered to herself. “What game is he playing?”
She stopped herself, knowing that he had the right to some space and time to figure things out. He didn’t owe her an explanation of his feelings, and she’d be unreasonable to demand that he give her a full disclosure of his plans after she’d hidden twins from him for five years. She was uncomfortable not having the moral high ground in this, and she worried a lot about what he would do.
Chapter 4
The next day dawned, she got the children off to school with their lunches and their backpacks and their extra shoes for gym class. At the office, she rang Greta, who told her that Harvey wasn’t coming in again today.
“Did he say why?”
“Not to me,” Greta said, “I’m just the one who takes his messages. I don’t get a lot of explanations out of him.”
“Right, sorry. I was being nosy. Hey, if you can send all his calls to voicemail since he’s gone, we could go to lunch today!”
“I would, but I have to meet with the other executive assistants today at lunch for a training session on our new phone system.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Yeah, total thrill. I bet there isn’t even a free margarita bar.”
“There should be if you have to spend your lunch watching a Powerpoint about how to use a phone.”
“It’s not like anyone’s going to listen. We’ll nod and scribble notes, and then leave and bitch about the meeting. Then when I have a problem, I’ll call IT and make them fix it. It’s their system.”
“So you could skip the meeting and get an email with the instructions and it’d be more useful?”
“Basically. And it would save IT approximately three thousand distress calls.”
“Right. I’m on it.”
“What?”
“I’m an executive veep. Consider this an efficiency recommendation from the marketing department. I’ll call you back.” Bella contacted IT and found out that it was just standard practice to hold a lunchtime training—no one higher up the food chain had ordered it. She asked if IT could just send an email with bullet point instructions and a link for support, and she could hear cheering in the background. IT, evidently, didn’t like giving up lunch breaks for pointless meetings either.
She checked with HR to make sure it was okay to change training formats to email instead of face to face and they were fine with it. She even made up a survey for the participants so they could rate their training experience and compare it to lunch meeting seminars for future reference and forwarded it to HR.