My Lover Called Our Dead Baby a Bastard

The phone rang while I was chopping onions for Evander's dinner.

Unknown number. I almost let it go.

“Is this Iris Lawrence?” A woman's voice, flat and fast. “Evander Pierce listed you as his emergency contact. He was hit by a car in Midtown. He's at Mount Sinai.”

The knife stayed in my hand. Onion juice burned my eyes. I didn't feel it.

I turned off the stove. Grabbed my coat. Left everything else.

Six years. That's how long my name had been on that form. Ever since my husband, Noel, died, and his best friend Evander sat in my kitchen with red eyes and promised Noel he'd look after me. Somehow it flipped. I was the one looking after him. His meals. His bills. His production company's midnight spreadsheets. Nobody asked me to. I just did it.

The ICU was cold and too bright. Evander lay in the bed with a tube in his throat, his face the color of paper. A monitor beeped beside him. This was a man who never sat still. He paced. He ran his hand through his hair. Now he didn't move at all.

“Ma'am, you can wait outside,” a nurse said.

I sat in the plastic chair in the hallway. I didn't take off my coat. My hand slid to my stomach and stayed there. Eight weeks. Nobody knew. I had planned to tell him next week, over dinner, when he was in a good mood.

I looked at the closed door and thought, *Just wake up. Then I'll tell you.*

Five days.

I lived on vending-machine coffee and granola bars that tasted like cardboard. I signed the consent forms. I argued with the insurance company for forty minutes on hold. During the ten-minute visiting windows, I sat beside his bed and whispered.

“The Hendricks meeting got moved. I handled it. Your assistant is fine. Just wake up.”

He never answered.

On the second day, the peonies came. Huge, pink, wrapped in silk ribbon. The card was tucked in the center.

*I never left your side.*

“Your friend sounds so sweet,” a nurse said, smiling.

Chelsea Robertson. Evander's childhood friend. Glossy hair, soft voice, a little cough every time he looked away from her. His phone buzzed on the bedside table all week. *Praying so hard for you.* *Can't breathe without you.* The lobby was twenty steps from the elevator. She never walked them.

I said nothing. I put the flowers closer to his bed, because that's what I do.

On the fifth night, it was after midnight. The corridor lights hummed. I was walking back from the vending machine when a cramp folded me in half.

It wasn't like a normal cramp. It was a hot wire, pulled tight through my middle.

My coffee hit the floor. I grabbed the wall and slid down it. The linoleum was freezing against my knees. Then something warm ran down my legs, and I knew.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, please.”

Nobody heard me. I curled on my side and pressed my cheek to the cold floor. I thought, stupidly, *I didn't even get to tell him.*

“Oh, honey. Stay with me.”

A pair of warm hands. A badge that said *Clara Jenkins, RN*. She was shouting for a gurney, and her voice was steady, and I held onto it.

The rest came in pieces. White ceiling. A needle. A doctor speaking softly. The word *gone*.

“Is there someone we can call?” Clara asked.

I stared at the ceiling. Noel was dead. My parents were years in the ground. The only man I would have called was unconscious down the hall.

“No,” I said. “There's no one.”

Two days later, Evander woke up.

I was in the chair beside his bed when his eyes opened. I'd put on lipstick to hide how pale I was. My legs shook under the blanket I'd wrapped around them. But I was sitting up.

His eyes slid across my face. They didn't stop. They went straight to the peonies.

He saw the card. His whole face softened.

“Chelsea,” he rasped. He grabbed his phone with a clumsy hand and dialed. His voice cracked. “Chels. Hey. I saw the flowers. You never left, huh? I knew it. I knew you'd be there.” He wiped his eye. “Thank you. Seriously. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

I sat three feet away. He could have seen me if he'd looked.

He hung up and finally turned his head. His eyes were cold.

“Where were you?”

My mouth opened. “I was—”

“Chelsea told me everything. She said you barely showed up.” He shook his head slowly, like he was disappointed in a stranger. “I almost died, Iris. And you were what, busy?”

“Evander, I was here every—”

“Heartless.” He said it quietly, which made it worse. “That's what you are. You don't care about anyone but yourself. Noel would be ashamed.”

The monitor beeped. The peonies sat there, pink and perfect, smelling sweet.

I thought of the cold floor. The blood. Clara's hands.

I opened my mouth again. Nothing came out.

Something inside me went tight, then thinner, then thinner still. It didn't break loudly. It just gave way, like a thread that had been pulled for six years and finally had nothing left to hold.

I looked at him. He had already turned back to his phone.