“What the hell, Simon?”
“Could she have slept with someone else?”
“Ingrid?”
“Who else would I be talking about?”
“I don’t know. This is all such crazy talk.”
“So there’s zero chance.”
“Zero.”
He turned back toward his wife.
“Simon, what’s going on?”
“You can’t say for sure,” he said.
“Simon.”
“No one can say for sure.”
“No, of course no one can say for sure.” A hint of impatience had crept into Yvonne’s voice. “I can’t say for sure you haven’t fathered any other children either.”
“You know how much I love her.”
“I do, yes. And she loves you just as much.”
“But I don’t know the whole story, do I?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah, you do. There’s a part of her that’s hidden. Even from me.”
“There’s part of everybody that’s hidden.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then I don’t get what you do mean.”
“Yeah, Yvonne, you do.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“It’s coming from my search for Paige.”
“And now you think, what, that you’re not her father?”
Simon swung his body now, faced her full. “I know everything about you, Yvonne.”
“You really think so?”
“Yes.”
Yvonne said nothing. Simon looked back at Ingrid in the bed.
“I love her. I love her with all my heart. But there are parts of her I don’t know.”
She still said nothing.
“Yvonne?”
“What do you want me to say? Ingrid has an air of mystery, I’ll grant you that. Guys went gaga over it. And hey, let’s be honest. It’s one of the things that drew you to her.”
He nodded. “At first.”
“You love her deeply.”
“I do.”
“And yet you’re wondering if she betrayed you in the worst way possible.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
“But there’s something.”
“It has nothing to do with Paige—”
“What does it have to do with?”
“—or her getting shot.”
“But there are secrets?”
“There’s a past, sure.” Yvonne raised her hands, more in frustration now than confusion. “Everyone has one.”
“I don’t. You don’t.”
“Stop it.”
“What kind of past does she have?”
“A past, Simon.” Her tone was impatient. “Just that. She had a life way before you — school, travel, relationships, jobs.”
“But that’s not what you mean. You mean something out of the ordinary.”
She frowned, shook her head. “It isn’t my place to say.”
“Too late for that, Yvonne.”
“No, it’s not. You have to trust me.”
“I do trust you.”
“Good. We’re talking about ancient history.”
Simon shook his head. “Whatever’s happening here — whatever changed Paige and led to all this destruction — I think it started a long time ago.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
Yvonne moved closer to the bed. “Let me ask you this, Simon.”
“Go ahead.”
“Best-case scenario: Ingrid comes out of this okay. You find Paige. Paige is okay. She gets clean. I mean, totally clean. Puts this whole ugly chapter behind her.”
“Okay.”
“Then Paige decides to move away. Get a fresh start. She meets a guy. A wonderful guy. A guy who puts her up on a pedestal, who loves her beyond anything she can imagine. They build a great life together, this guy and Paige, and Paige never wants this wonderful guy to know that at one time, she was a junkie and maybe worse, living in some crack den, doing God knows what with God knows who to get a fix.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious. Paige loves this guy. She doesn’t want to see the light in his eyes dim. Can’t you understand that?”
Simon’s voice, when he finally found it, was barely a whisper. “My God, what is she hiding?”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“Like hell it doesn’t.”
“—just like Paige’s drug past wouldn’t matter.”
“Yvonne?”
“What?”
“Do you really think this secret would change how I feel about Ingrid?”
She didn’t reply.
“Because if that’s the case, then our love is pretty weak.”
“It’s not.”
“But?”
“But it would change the way you see her.”
“The dim in the eyes?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wrong. I’d still love her just as much.”
Yvonne nodded slowly. “I believe you would.”
“So?”
“So her distant past has nothing to do with this.” Yvonne held up her hand to stop his protest. “And no matter what you say, I promised. It’s not my secret to tell. You have to let it go.”
Simon wasn’t going to do that — he needed to know — but just then he felt Ingrid’s hand tighten over his like a vise. His heart leapt. He spun his head back toward his wife, hoping maybe to see her eyes open or a smile break out on her face. But her entire body convulsed, went rigid, began to spasm. Her eyes didn’t open — they fluttered uncontrollably so that he could only see their whites.
Machines began to beep. An alarm sounded.
Someone rushed into the room. Then someone else. A third person pushed him aside. More people flooded the room, surrounding Ingrid’s bed. The movement was constant. They were calling out urgent instructions, using unintelligible medical jargon in borderline-panic tones, as someone else, the sixth person to enter the room, gently but firmly pushed him and Yvonne out.
They rushed Ingrid into surgery.
No one would tell Simon anything of relevance. There was a “setback,” one of the nurses told him, followed closely by the old chestnut: “The doctor will be with you as soon as she can.”
He wanted to ask more, but he also didn’t want to distract anyone. Just work on Ingrid, he thought. Get her better. Then fill me in.
He paced a crowded waiting room. He started biting the nail on his pointer finger, something he’d done a lot when he was young, though he’d quit for good his senior year of college. Or so he thought. He paced from one corner to the other, pausing in each corner, leaning his back for a second or two against them because what he most wanted to do was collapse to the floor there and just curl up.
He looked for Yvonne, hoping to shake the damn answer out of her about his wife’s past, but she was nowhere to be found all of a sudden. Why? Did she want to avoid him, or was she just needed — especially with her partner out of commission — at work? Yvonne had said something about that, about taking care of the office, about pacing themselves for the “long haul,” about not needing both of them here at the same time.
Simon was somewhere between annoyed and angry with Yvonne, but he also recognized that her argument for keeping her promise to Ingrid had merit and even nobility. Simon had known Ingrid for twenty-four years — three years before Paige was born. How could anything from before Paige was born or even before Simon and Ingrid met, no matter how bizarre or sordid or just plain awful, factor into this?
It made zero sense.
“Simon?”
Elena Ramirez was suddenly next to him. She asked whether there was any update on Ingrid’s condition. Simon told her that Ingrid was in surgery and said, “So fill me in on what’s going on.”
They moved to one of those corners he’d been leaning against, the one farthest away from the entrance and general population.
“I haven’t put it all together yet,” Elena said in a low voice.
“But?”