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Chapter Thirty-Two
After an intense negotiation with Colby, I stayed true to my word and committed to decorating the nursery with him, but explained that this would happen before my band’s next tour.
Initially he’d wanted a room apiece, but after Billie explained twin babies should room in together and pointed out they’d had all that closeness inside her womb, it made sense they’d settle better if they were within a certain distance of one another. As soon as he understood this, he agreed they could stick to one room.
With Thanksgiving out of the way and my parents and siblings all desperate to meet the new additions to the family, my mom and sisters set about organizing a baby shower for Billie, but she was determined it shouldn’t take place too early, as she was still cautious about carrying two babies.
A few weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday, I heard Billie sobbing when I entered our apartment after taking Colby to school. My heart stuttered in my chest as it tightened when I thought she’d been hurt.
“Billie?” I questioned, as I strode quickly down the hallway toward our bedroom and the sound of her sobbing. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did someone upset you?” I asked, as I stepped close to the bed and shoved my heavy leather jacket off. It fell on the floor by my feet. I knelt on the bed and crawled across to her side where she lay. “Talk to me, darlin’, what’s going on?”
Turning her head to look at me, her red-rimmed eyes glistened with tears, and seeing the hurt in them it brought a thick lump to my throat. “Come here,” I urged, placing pressure on her shoulder for her to start rolling over toward me. Billie took my cue and slowly turned in my direction, her abdomen already looking much bigger than the fifteen weeks gone that she was.
“Talk to me,” I urged again.
“I … was thinking about … about Christ … mas,” she finally mumbled. She had been sobbing so hard, her breath hitched twice, and her words sounded broken.
“Jesus, darlin’, you gave me a fright, I thought something terrible had happened,” I replied, wrapping my arms around her and gently kissing her temple. Her body stiffened in my arms.
“It is terrible … awful. How do I go to your parents for Christmas lunch and watch everyone fuss over the children with Colby missing?” Immediately after she said it, I got it. I had been thinking about that particular scenario myself.
“We don’t have to go to my parents if it’s going to upset you.”
“Don’t you see, I’ll be upset wherever I am?”
“I get that this is about Colby. I don’t want him to be anywhere else either, but this is one of the horrible situations divorce brings.”
“Children aren’t belongings, Sawyer. They’re people with rights, thoughts, feelings and wishes. But we as the adults, take away their dreams of feeling secure and protected, and tell them what to feel and how to think. We may not do this with words, but our actions teach them this. A divorce with shared custody forces them to have split loyalties toward the two people they should love more than anyone else. All most kids wish for is the separation, fighting, and division to stop.”
For a long minute we lay staring at one another. Both of us absorbing the outburst of hurt she had aired and my stomach felt knotted because I knew no matter how I felt, that didn’t matter, not when I saw how devastated my wife was, not to mention how bad her internal feelings were for our babies.
Taking a sharp breath, I blew it out in a rush. “Okay. I’m going to speak to Logan. I refuse to have you broken-hearted when a solution may be at hand.”
“He’s not going to let Colby stay here,” she muttered, like she had already resigned herself to this.
“Trust me, I’ll do my best.” I said, and though my heart ached for her, as far as I was concerned, Logan owed her for the way he’d behaved in the past. As my exhausted wife lay in my arms, my mind spun with what I could do about her anguished state, but it wasn’t only her who had felt the weight of the holiday, which loomed upon us.
I’d also noticed Colby had begun to close off, spending more time in his room and although I had tried to talk to him, I felt he’d been holding something back from me. At first I thought it had something to do with Billie’s condition, but he was adamant in his denial and that only left me with one person to consider, Logan.
Framing her face in my hands, I tenderly wiped away her tears with my thumbs, closed the space between us and pressed soft kisses to her wet, tear-stained cheeks. I waited for a few minutes until I felt she was a little calmer, because no one could have a rational conversation with a woman loaded with hormones when she was distressed. Billie had taught me this.
“What do you want? Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll try to make it happen,” I said with certainty. If she felt pained, then Colby had to have felt the same. The last thing I wanted was to see her upset if there was a chance I could do anything to fix this.
No one needed to explain this for me, and it hadn’t mattered that I had no biological children of my own as yet; I still got it. Since Billie and I had been together, I’d already witnessed some of the effects Logan’s choices had brought to our family.
However, I’d gone into this marriage with my eyes wide open and the situation was what it was. Apportioning blame only added more toxicity into the mix, because nothing I said would ever change the circumstance of the fair arrangement they had made at the time, which had supposedly been in Colby’s best interests.
“Last year, Thanksgiving and New Year felt excruciating without Colby there,” she muttered. “Where do I find the strength to call my son on Christmas Day and say Merry Christmas without crying?” she blurted and burst into tears again.
Logan had missed out on Colby for Thanksgiving this time, but he had gate-crashed Billie and Colby’s home on Christmas Day the year before and Billie had been generous to a fault when she’d allowed Logan to spend the day with his son.
Now Logan was alone, but he had his parents, and I figured Colby and he were spending Christmas Day with them. Meanwhile, until the whole event was set, the stress for Billie would continue unless I did something about it.
“Do you want Logan to come here?” I asked. Even though I knew when I asked, if she said yes it would be so damned awkward, but I figured I’d cope fine, if this was what was necessary to calm my wife’s anxieties.
“I couldn’t put you through that, besides he’d never agree to come,” she mumbled and sniffed.
Since Logan’s drinking days, career loss and his mid-life crisis with Poppy, he had mostly learned to man up for his son, and he’d walked the line with Billie and Colby to Billie’s satisfaction. This was why I’d figured the least I could do was keep everyone happy by giving my hormonal wife her son for Christmas, even if it had meant spending it with her ex.
