Read Online A Necessary End by Holly Brown - Free Book Online

running a game on me.
    Gabe can’t see through it, of course, same as he couldn’t see through mine half a lifetime ago. But I had good intentions. I wanted to love him forever. What does Leah want?
    â€œI’ve got to work later,” he’s telling Leah, “but tomorrow’s my day off. Where do you want to go?”
    I snap to attention. I don’t have off tomorrow. It’s Monday, a school day. Maybe I could call in sick? It would mean doing a bunch of work tonight to get ready for the sub, but it might be worth it. I have to do my prep for the week anyway.
    â€œWe need to go to San Francisco,” Leah says, “obviously.” She smiles.
    Gabe and Leah touring San Francisco by themselves? Yeah, I’m calling in sick. “Where in San Francisco?” I try to sound friendly and interested as I keep my eyes down on my plate. In case eyes really are windows to the soul, I better keep my blinds shut.
    â€œI don’t know.” I’m pretty sure Leah’s windows are trained on Gabe. “Any suggestions?”
    Gabe goes into this spiel about the merits of exploring different neighborhoods versus going to tourist spots, and I’m staring at my egg-white omelet. I can’t help thinking about how young Leah’s eggs are, how fresh. I didn’t pay enough attention in health class, so it wasn’t until Gabe and I were trying (and failing) to conceive that I learned women have all the eggs they’re ever going to have at birth. It’s downhill from there, a slow degradation until they reach their expiration date.
    That’s how they made it sound at the fertility clinic. Apparently, there’s no upside to aging for an egg. It doesn’t get seasoned with life experience, it doesn’t marinate in self-improvement. No, if I’d gotten knocked up at Leah’s age, as selfish and callow as I was, my eggs would still have been all the better for it. They would have been more viable.
    Leah, sitting there chomping on a slice of bacon while I avoid yolks, is more viable than I am.
    â€œYou’re a teacher, right?” she says. “That’s, like, such an important job.”
    â€œI love the kids,” I respond, which is true.
    But she’s put me over a barrel. If I call in sick, it could look like I’m not devoted to my job—not devoted to the children—and that’s not the impression I want to give, in case Leah really is assessing my maternal instincts.
    Also, if I call out of work, it could look like I don’t trust my husband to be around Leah, and that’s definitely the wrong impression. As far as Leah is concerned, Gabe and I are the Greatest Love of All (not the Whitney Houston version of self-love—why did it never previously occur to me that that song could be a paean to masturbation rivaled only by Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself”?). The Greatest Love of All is supposed to be Gabe and me, as stand-ins for Leah and Trevor.
    Besides, I do trust Gabe. His love for me, his basic honesty, his fidelity—none of that is remotely in question.
    I just don’t trust Leah. I sense her capacity for manipulation, which, combined with his susceptibility to it, could make for a hairy situation. I don’t like imagining what information she could get out of him, what promises she could extract.
    But if I call in sick and Leah realizes that I have her number, that could queer the deal, irreparably. Leah might be looking for easy marks, and I’ll need to play one, at least for a while longer.
    I’m managing to think all this as I tell one of my go-to cute-kid stories (complete with lisping mimicry), and Leah is smiling in all the right places. It occurs to me, too late, that I shouldn’t remind Leah how cute kids are.
    Because it’s possible that Leah is just a normal birth mother, and all my suspicions are coming from my last experience. Unfortunately, a normal birth mother