Love Is More Than Skin Deep (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 4) (19 page)

When Mark suggested that perhaps I was brought into his life for a reason, I don’t think that this is what he had in mind, but I am honored to play this role if it helps a little girl believe in her potential.
 

THROWING MY BRIEFCASE ON THE long L-shaped bench in the quiet homey-restaurant, I reflexively loosen my tie. I have to carefully bite my tongue before formulating an appropriate greeting for my ex-wife. After all, I did call this meeting and it’s not Tanyanita’s fault that Treadwell was able to land first chair in this trial. In my opinion, he not only needs to stay light years away from this trial, but from any trial. Sadly, my opinion doesn’t seem to count for squat these days. Some days, I wonder why I bother to try.

Tanyanita doesn’t say much as she watches me settle into the booth. Still, I feel compelled to apologize, “Sorry, it’s just been one of those—”

“Mark, it’s lunchtime. Eat,” she directs as she points to the food in front of me. “It’s not quite like we eat back home, but it’s pretty close. I still miss fry bread. With the increase in soul cooking like this place, it’s a little easier to find savory bread pudding, but it’s still not your mom’s cooking.”

I look down at the plates and I’m surprised to see a collection of my favorite foods. I was so preoccupied by the rest of my day that I didn’t even notice the overflowing plates of food. “You didn’t have to do this. How long have you been waiting?” I ask, suddenly embarrassed by her efficiency and my ineptness.

“Look, it’s been years, but your tendency to cram ten things into the amount of time in which you probably should’ve done three isn’t something that you likely outgrew in your old age,” Tanyanita teases.

“I would probably take offense to that, but I was the one who was late, so I don’t think I have much room to talk. I swear, in this case it wasn’t really my fault. I have a person in my office who, unfortunately, I have to call a ‘colleague’ who is making my job very difficult. I spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning up after his sloppy ass this morning on redirect. He did such a piss-poor job on direct that even the judge was confused.”

Tanyanita shoots me a sympathetic look as she responds, “Aren’t you senior partner? Can’t you do something about this guy?”

I shrugged as I respond, “Allegedly, I am supposed to be doing something about it. I’m mentoring him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be listening to any of the guidance that I’m giving him. In fact, if I give him advice he seems to do exactly the opposite of what I tell him to. It’s absolutely infuriating.”

“What do Susan and Jake say?” Tanyanita asks.

It’s all I can do not to break down into a completely inappropriate fit of laughter. This reminds me so much of when Tanyanita and I would strategize throughout law school. We were always friends and partners first, before the colossal mess that was autism and presumably postpartum depression. I struggle to focus on her question as I answer, “Well, Jake has unofficially declared himself on a mental-health break, because he and Charlesse broke up and are in the middle of a divorce. The man has a decent-sized divorce practice, but you would think that he’s the only person to ever experience divorce on the whole planet. He’s on his eighth month of this. Some women have babies faster than he’s processing his emotional grief over it all.”

Tanyanita’s jaw just drops to the ground at the bitterness in my tone. “Wow, way to be a sympathetic friend there,” she replies sarcastically.

“Oh, my sympathy ended about the time that he started bringing girls around the office who were barely older than Ketki to make him feel better about leaving his wife,” I explain, wrinkling my nose in displeasure.

“Consider him off my Christmas card list,” Tanyanita comments sardonically.

“Are you shitting me? You didn’t talk to me for more than half a decade, but you send my partners Christmas cards? What in the hell—”

“Hold on,
Unaduti
. You don’t have a whole lot of room to talk. I’ve had the same PO Box since I started applying to colleges—it never changed. Where are my letters from you? The only letter I ever got from you was the divorce papers. Last I checked, communication goes both ways. You’ve known how to get a hold of me too. So, before you go and play the martyr about how awful it was that I left you and Ketki — and it was terrible. Just remember, you allowed yourself to be left. You knew where to reach me. I had the most obvious disappearance on the planet. I went to school in the same town, we had the same friends, our families stayed in close touch — Hell, we even use the same pharmacist. For the longest time I knew every time that Ketki had a ear infection because he would tell me on the sly just so that I wouldn’t worry. Of course, he didn’t know that he broke my heart with every update.”

Feeling cornered, I lash out viciously, “So you’re telling me you don’t have any idea why Sid did that?”

Tanyanita just blinks at me with a crushed expression on her face. That should’ve been enough to stop me, yet somehow it’s not.

“I’ll tell you why he told you all that stuff. He assumed that you would care, that you would be like a normal mom and care that you wouldn’t abandon your daughter—y
our disabled daughter
. Do you get that? Do you know how much she struggles every single flippin’ day?”

She just looks at me as if I have slapped her and in a way, I suppose I have. She takes her time as she stacks the plates carefully and moves them out of the way before she leans forward and looks directly in my face. She gets about six inches away from me before she says in a low, lethal voice “Of course I do. I am
a
nurse
. A highly trained nurse with many specialties.”

“Then how in the world could you just walk away?” I accuse. How could you—knowing all that she would need from parents— as in two parents— just go on with your life?”

Tanyanita whips her hair around and pops it back in a bun using a pen that was sitting on the table to hold it into place. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me Mark, I thought I explained all this before. You acted like you understood where I was coming from, so what is this all about?”

My anger is taking me a little bit by surprise too, so I’m not really sure how to answer. I thought I had worked through all of this years ago. Actually, I wasn’t even sure I was all that upset about it. I spent so many years telling people that it is no big deal that Tanyanita had simply walked away from our marriage and her daughter that I guess I started to believe my own hype. Clearly I’m a lot more pissed off than I’m willing to admit.
 

I shove a few bites of food in my mouth, but I couldn’t tell you what I’m eating. It’s just a stalling technique until I can bring my chaotic thoughts and emotions under a bit little of control. Right now, I can’t blame Tanyanita for not being able to make sense of what I’m doing or saying, because even I can’t untangle my thoughts.

Finally, I set the fork down and face her again as I continue the conversation, “I thought we had things under control too, but that was before our daughter decided to start telling everyone that she thought that you hated her enough to kill yourself to avoid being in a relationship with her.”

For that instant all animosity toward Tanyanita dissipates as I watch her visceral reaction to my words.

“Do you suppose she
knows
?”

“Knows what?” I parrot, having completely lost track of the flow of the conversation.

“Maybe she doesn’t know, because even you didn’t—but there was a time right before I left that I was sure if something didn’t change I was going to hurt myself, or Ketki, in the process. Things were that mixed up in my world,” Tanyanita admits as she tears a napkin in front of her up into small little pieces.

“Nita, you
never
said a word about that!” I exclaim. “You made it sound like you are just tired of the whole motherhood gig. My God! If I had known things were so bad, we could have done things so much differently, I didn’t have any sympathy for you because I was exhausted too, I was in law school and trying to study for the bar. I thought you were just whining over dirty diapers. I didn’t have any idea you had any of that stuff going on.
God
, Nita, I had no idea you were planning to hurt yourself or Ki.”

“All of that is why I
couldn’t
tell you what was going on. You didn’t need one more thing to juggle. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I thought I was going absolutely crazy. Nobody I knew had the same reaction to babies except stupid characters on TV. All the people that I saw on TV and in the movies who acted like I did were certifiably insane, so I thought that’s what was happening to me. I was going completely crazy for no reason. I had friends like this in high school that lost their minds, but they were using drugs and alcohol.”

“Nita, I knew you weren’t doing that stuff — you’re too smart for that,” I allow.

Tanyanita continues as if I didn’t speak, “I wasn’t doing any of that because I was at least trying to breast-feed Ketki. But that wasn’t going well either and so I felt like an abysmal failure as a mother, my child hated me and cried all the time and then I cried because my child cried — it just went on and on. I was supposed to love this motherhood thing and all it did was make me feel like I couldn’t breathe or swallow or move. I felt paralyzed. Stuck. I couldn’t help me, I couldn’t help you, and I sure as hell couldn’t help Ketki. I felt if I stayed one more second, I would put us all in grave danger.”

Tanyanita’s words stop me cold. I realize instead of being angry at her, I should be grateful that she left instead of hurting herself or Ketki. I’ve personally led civil cases against mothers for wrongful death. It’s humbling to realize that I could’ve been sitting in a completely different chair right now. We could’ve been facing each other in a courtroom had she not made a safe choice.

“I didn’t say this before, I guess I was too busy being an asshole before, but I’ll say it now. Thank you.”

A pained look crosses Tanyanita’s face and she holds up her hand to stop me. “Mark, no.”

“No, I mean it. You made an incredibly brave, mature decision under really hard circumstances. I was giving you absolutely no support when I should’ve been,” I argue. “You deserve credit for that.”

“Mark, I don’t deserve credit for a decision I’m not sure that I would make again. Don’t you get it? Sometimes I regret that decision every other minute. I try not to even think about it, I try to pretend like I never had a daughter. How awful does that make me? I can’t watch television because there are diaper commercials, Disney World commercials and commercials for IHOP and car rentals. Do you even know how many stupid items they advertise using children? It’s thrown in my face everywhere I turn —”

I can feel Tanyanita’s anxiety in the pit of my stomach. She doesn’t deserve this much pain. We may not have been the perfect star matched lovers, but we were always really great friends and it hurts me to see her in pain.

“Nita, Ketki is still your daughter. She’s not dead. She lives less than an hour from you. She is smart, funny and laughs just like you. I think that it might be better for both of you if you reintroduce yourself,” I suggest quietly.

“What if she hates me?” Tanyanita asks me with fear dripping from every syllable.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I assert. “I think that Ketki really wants you in her life. I believe that she misses you. If nothing else, she’s very curious about you and has a lot of questions.”

“How do I even begin to answer those questions?” my former wife frets.

“With Ketki, there is only one approach that works. Complete and total honesty. She has a way of seeing through everything else like a laser guided missile,” I caution.

“Really? You think I should tell her the whole story?”

“An age-appropriate version of it? Absolutely. She needs to understand that you didn’t just leave because you thought motherhood was a bad deal,” I reply.

“What does Shelby think about me being back?” Tanyanita asks as she scoops up all of the pieces of napkin she’s left on the table.

“She’s fine with it,” I answer confidently. “She wants to do whatever is best for Ketki.”

Tanyanita shakes her head and looks at me with an expression of pity as she asks, “Mark, you know that I’m saying this for your own good, not because I have any misguided idea that there might someday be another chance for us, right?”

I chuckle softly as I respond, “I think everyone on the planet knows that that ship has sailed a long time ago and there are no more boarding passes. You were right to call me
Unaduti
, I was wool-headed.”

“I want to make sure that Shelby knows that there isn’t anything between you and I and there isn’t going to be, even if I come back. If I decide to do this, it’s only because I never stopped loving Ketki and I don’t want her to think that something awful happened to me.”

“You know, a lot of guys hate their ex-wives but you keep doing these really decent, heroic things that make it terribly hard for me to hate you. Bizarrely, I’m inclined to give you a hug right now, which is pretty surprising since a few minutes ago I was ready to scream at you.”