Chapter 16
She flung herself into the chair opposite the desk as Royal followed close behind her and firmly shut the door.
“You can’t keep coming to my work and harassing me.”
“So where can I harass you?”
“Very funny.”
“You can’t keep avoiding me, Famke. We need to talk about this.”
“Why? Why do we need to talk about anything?”
“I’m angry.”
“I did nothing to you!”
“I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at my brother. I’m angry at my sister-in-law. I’m angry they left me with this mess to clean up.”
“You mean raising your niece?”
“No. I mean sorting through the mess of their marriage and their bullshit. My brother,” he stroked his forehead, “I think he was so unhappy with his marriage to Mindy he created a fantasy of the time he spent with you. I knew him better than anyone else. When I read his letters to you, I could hear him in his own voice. Famke, there is no doubt in my mind he loved you.”
“But it wasn’t reciprocated.”
“What if he’d come for you? What if he had been brave like he’d wanted to be and had come for you?”
She exhaled and shook her head, “I didn’t feel those kinds of feelings for him.”
“Would you have let him down easy?”
“Royal, it would never have happened.”
“Okay but hear me out. If he came to you and said he and Mindy got divorced and he wanted to date you.
If he wanted to be a family with you. Would you have given him a chance?”
She took a breath and shook her head, “no.”
“No? Why not?”
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“Because he hurt me!” She almost screamed at him, unbidden tears welling in her eyes. “He hurt me. Mindy hurt me but he hurt me too. It was he who promised to allow me to be part of their lives. It was he who would kiss my belly and tell us we would always be in each other’s lives, and I could always count on him. They said they would never leave me. They were my friends. He was my friend and he left me and never looked back. I went from having a support system while my brother relearned walking and talking to having nobody. They abandoned me and I hated them for it. I hated them.” She felt the tears streaming down her face as she rocketed out of her chair and turned to punch the office door angrily as she admitted aloud for the first time how much they’d hurt her. “They left me all alone to go live their perfect life and they forgot all about me and my troubles. I hated them.”
His footsteps approached and he rested his hands on her shoulders, “I’m sorry Famke. What they did was
wrong.”
She sniffed as she kept her eyes closed, “I never understood, you know. I would have given them anything and they couldn’t even say goodbye. If they had said to me, they wanted to move to where his family was from, I wouldn’t have said a word, but they left as if I was some horrible dirty secret they needed to run from.”
“They have a photo in their house,” he said quietly rubbing her shoulders softly, “it’s one of my favorite photos of him. It’s him on his knees and the happiness on his face is tactile. He’s holding a belly, and his lips are pressed to it. We all thought it was a photo of him and Mindy. They faked the pregnancy. When you would have been about three months they came home for a weekend, and she announced her pregnancy. She rubbed her tummy, refused alcohol, and then gave us a big spiel how she wanted to have her baby in the same city her parents were from.” He was speaking softly, “when I went back and watched the videos of that day, it was clear she blindsided him. I think, in watching his reactions with the knowledge I have now, he was expecting to announce they had a surrogate. I had my mom watch, and she agrees with me. Mindy put him in a bad situation, and he didn’t know how to get out of it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We will probably never know. What I do know, is my brother lived with terrible regret about keeping Precious from you and I know, I must do right by him.”
“I can’t be her mom,” she whispered. “She had a mom. He even said in his letters Mindy was a good mom
to her.”
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