Chapter Seventeen

Mason

“Are you sure that you can’t spend the evening here with me?” I asked.

Ella shook her head, gripping my fingers tighter where she held them between us.

“I have too much to do,” she told me. “Apparently Molly got herself into some kind of trouble and I have to fix it for her.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

After even the brief encounter I had had with Molly, I wouldn’t put much past Ella’s sister.

“I’m not entirely sure. I couldn’t fully understand her. But our neighbor is baking cookies with Edmond this afternoon so that I can help, and they’ll be done pretty soon, so I really have to go.”

“I want to spend more time with you,” I told her. “Come back here tonight and we’ll have dinner in the Café.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Molly isn’t going to be around tonight. I don’t have anyone to take care of my son.”

“Bring him,” I said.

Wow. What is it with this girl? I know she has a child and I still want her.

“I can’t bring Edmond on our date,” she said.

“No. I mean bring him to my apartment. Faye will take care of him. She loves little children. She has so many grandchildren that I can’t even remember all of them. She’ll love to spend time with him.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I nodded, leaning down to kiss her lightly.

“Say you’ll come. I can send my car for you if you want.”

“No.”

“No?” I asked, feeling my chest crush slightly.

“I mean, no you don’t need to send your car. I can drive here.”

“So, you’ll come?”

“I will.”

I smiled and hugged her closer to me.

It would only be a few hours between when Ella left and when she would return for dinner, but it felt like I was waiting endlessly. I wasn’t accustomed to waiting. It was simply something that I didn’t do in my life. I wanted something and it was there. Somehow, though, waiting for Ella made me want her more.

I expected Edmond to be asleep when she arrived at the apartment. I had even had Faye set up the guest room for him. The truth was I didn’t really know much about children. I was an only child, had no cousins, and had barely even been near a child that was younger than the sixth-grade daughter of a person who worked in the office. The hour, however, made me assume that he would have already been changed into his tiny little pajamas and be ready to sleep his way through our date, maybe even giving us some time to ourselves afterward. When they arrived, however, I was immediately proven wrong.

I opened the door and Edmond immediately ran inside. He was giggling, his hands up above his head as he rushed past me. Ella stepped inside, looking embarrassed.

“Edmond!” she called out. “We don’t run inside, baby. Don’t run in Mr. Mason’s apartment.”

I turned and saw the little boy rush back toward us. I was helping Ella take the bags that she carried off of her shoulders and wondering at the sheer amount of stuff that such a little child needed for a few hours somewhere other than his house when I saw Ella’s eyes open wide.

“Edmond, no! Don’t touch.”

I turned and saw Ella’s son standing next to the table that the staff had put back into the foyer. One chubby little hand was grasping the side of the silver frame, trying to drag it off of the edge toward him.

“Stop that!” I shouted. “Get your hands off of that frame!”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Edmond’s little face scrunched up and I saw tears forming in his once bright, smiling eyes. He let out a wail and I felt Ella’s hand grasp my back. She yanked on me, whipping me around to face her.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” she shouted in my face. “Don’t you dare talk to my son like that.”

All of the sweet softness that had been so appealing about her was gone, replaced by sheer fury. Her teeth were gritted so hard against each other that it seemed they would break. But I didn’t care. He could have pulled the frame down onto the floor and damaged it.

“He shouldn’t be touching that,” I said. “What have you been teaching him? To just go into people’s homes and touch whatever he feels like touching?”

Ella looked stung and she took an aggressive step toward me. Her hands were clenched at her sides and she had pulled herself up to her full height, forcing her chest toward me with everything in her. I could see her shaking, the anger building up inside of her until it was ready to explode.

“How dare you say anything to me about how I parent my child? Who are you to judge me, my son, or my parenting? You know absolutely nothing about raising a child. You know nothing about anything in the real world. You live with your head so far up your ass that you think that the way that you live is normal and that everyone has it exactly the way that you do. You don’t know struggling. You don’t know just going about your day without people fawning on you. With all of the staff that crawls all over this place, I wonder if you even know how to go to the bathroom by yourself. You think that you are so damned important that you can just push everyone around any way that you want to, and that everyone should bend to your will. It makes you think that it is perfectly alright for you to treat anyone like absolute trash if they dare do something that you don’t like. Like it’s alright for you to scream in the face of a tiny child for touching an empty fucking picture frame. A frame that’s probably empty because you don’t have a single person in your life who matters enough to put them in there.”

I was so stunned by her outburst that I barely registered Ella pushing past me to scoop Edmond up into her arms and hug him close, cooing soothing words to him before she picked up the bags that she had brought and stormed out of the apartment. The door slammed behind her, leaving me standing alone in the foyer. I felt like the silence of the space was closing in around me. Her words reverberated through my mind and I struggled to process them all, to put them into something that I could understand and that wouldn’t bore through me the way that they were.

I couldn’t. She had sliced into me, bringing up thoughts and emotions that I hadn’t felt, that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, in many years. I turned my eyes away from the door toward the small table. Edmond jumping away from it when I shouted at him had caused the frame to tip over and I reached out to put it back in its position in the middle of the table. Once it was in place I looked at it for a few seconds before picking it up.

I carried the frame with me into the living room and sat down on the couch, holding it in both hands so I could stare down at it.

“Is everything alright? Where’s the little one?”

I looked up at Faye, who stood at the entrance to the room, looking at me with concern in her eyes. I shook my head.

“He’s not here. Ella decided not to stay for dinner. Thank you, though.”

Faye nodded, but didn’t say anything else. I knew that she had heard the screaming. She had to have. But she would do what I had done for so long—just pretend it wasn’t happening. Faye walked away and soon I heard the door to the apartment close. I was still staring at the frame in my hands, thinking about what it meant to me and why it still sat on that table after so long. Soon my mind wandered to Ella and what she could mean to me if I only let her.