Chapter 10
Chapter 10
He lay in the hospital bed for the rest of the day. He ate what was brought to him. He answered the doctors' questions. He stared at the window until the light changed.
Then he checked himself out, went home, and called about a job.
Three years later.
The company was called Whitmore & Co. — he hadn't had a better idea, and it seemed right that the name should carry the weight of where it came from.
He stood at the window of the new offices and looked out over the city and thought about calling his mother.
He picked up his phone. Found the number. Pressed call.
The number you have dialled is not available.
He put the phone down.
Gemma knocked and let herself in. She was carrying two cups of coffee and a folder she needed him to sign.
He signed where she pointed. She took the folder back.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"I want to come with you," she said. "When you go."
He looked at her.
"To see your mother," she said. "I want to be there."
He thought about it.
"All right," he said.
They went on a Sunday.
Diana Whitmore opened the door in a cream wool cardigan and reading glasses she immediately took off and held in one hand.
She looked at Ethan.
She looked at Gemma.
She looked at Ethan again.
"Mum," he said. "I want to marry Gemma. I wanted you to know."
Diana looked at Gemma.
Gemma looked back at her with an expression that managed to contain approximately seventeen different emotions and resolved itself into something that looked like: Please don't make this harder than it needs to be. For either of us.
"That," Diana said, "is between the two of you."
Gemma said: "Right. Yes. Absolutely. However." She tilted her head. "There's the matter of my mother — she has very particular feelings about celebrations and if there isn't some kind of occasion involving food, she'll be insufferable. So I was thinking—"
"Gemma," Ethan said.
"—I was thinking a hot pot dinner. Just the three of us. And possibly—"
"Gemma."
"—and possibly a film after, if you're not too tired, Ms. Whitmore, because there's that one you mentioned wanting to see and it's still on—"
Diana took her glasses off her hand and put them on the side table.
"Fine," she said. "Come in."
It became a habit, after that.
Gemma created occasions the way a gardener creates conditions — carefully, without forcing anything, trusting the thing to grow on its own schedule. Sunday dinners. A birthday. New Year's Eve, which became a tradition with handmade dumplings that Gemma was terrible at folding and Diana showed her, twice, patiently, until she got it nearly right.
The child came home from Brightfields.
He was small for his age and very quiet, with Ethan's eyes and a way of watching things that suggested he was absorbing far more than he let on.
The first time he looked at Diana, he said: "Are you the grandma?"
Diana said nothing for a moment.
"You can call me Diana," she said at last.
He considered this.
"Can I also call you Grandma?"
She looked at the top of his head for a long time.
"You can call me whatever you like," she said.
The year Diana died, Ethan sat in the hallway of St. Claire's Medical Center for nine hours. When it was over, he couldn't stand up for a long time. Gemma sat beside him with her hand on his back and said nothing, which was the right thing.
He apologised, eventually, to the space between them — to the air in the corridor, to what remained.
I know it wasn't enough. I know it never balanced. I'm sorry.
The child, fifteen now, held his hand on the drive home.
After the arrangements were made and the papers were signed, Gemma brought Ethan a cup of tea and sat across from him at the kitchen table.
"I want to talk about us," she said.
He looked at her.
"I love you," she said. "I want you to know that. I want you to always know that." She wrapped her hands around her own cup. "But I think we should separate. I think it's time."
He was quiet for a while.
"Is it because of Mum?"
Gemma shook her head. "It's because of me. I have some things I want to do on my own. And you have some things you need to carry on your own for a while." She gave him a look that was very Gemma — direct, warm, completely unmoved by the possibility of disagreement. "We'll be fine. All three of us. I promise."
She left the following spring, with the child and a single suitcase and the standing order she'd set up to cover the boy's school fees and the meal plan she'd arranged for Ethan because she knew perfectly well that without structure he would simply forget to eat.
What Ethan never knew — what Diana had never told him — was this.
When Gemma was nineteen, her father had just died and her mother had been diagnosed with something that required expensive, ongoing treatment. She'd been about to drop out of university.
A letter had arrived. Anonymous, from a charitable foundation. It covered her tuition and her mother's care.
Her mother had said: Some people are good. Remember them.
Gemma had looked for the source for two years, and when she'd finally traced the donation back to the foundation that Diana Whitmore funded — when she'd understood who had quietly paid for her education and her mother's recovery — she had already been working at Whitmore Enterprises for four months.
She had not said anything.
She had simply stayed, and watched, and when the moment came, she had chosen to repay the debt in the only currency that seemed to matter: she had given Diana Whitmore a reason not to be alone.
She had never regretted it.