An Illusion of Trust (Sequel to The Brevity of Roses) Read online

  “And a remark like that qualifies you as a smartass.”

  He shakes his head, sighing. “Right in your innocent son’s ear.” He makes a show of shifting Adam to his right shoulder, away from me. “You are determined to corrupt this child.”

  “Like I corrupted you?”

  “Yes, you evil bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The woman’s voice startles Jalal. I smother a laugh as he apologizes to the offended flight attendant standing beside him. With Adam blocking his peripheral vision, he hadn’t noticed her approach to take our drink orders. He orders a scotch for himself but only water for me.

  “I want a Coke,” I tell him.

  “She will have a Perrier,” he says to the attendant, who now looks confused but nods and moves on. He flashes me a triumphant grin.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He cocks a brow. “Serves you right for not telling me she was there.”

  “How was I supposed to know you were going to call me such a thing? Isn’t that one of the words on your forbidden list?”

  “Whatever happened to wives who honor their husbands with silence?”

  “Misogynist judges sentenced them to prison for murdering their prick husbands.”

  His other brow rises to join the first. “I love you,” he says quickly.

  “Damn right you do.”

  “Your language is hopeless.”

  “Yeah, but you love me anyway.” I take the baby, so Jalal can calm his flight jitters with his drink. Adam’s eyelids flutter during the transfer. As I rock him back to sleep, I resume the conversation about the proposed renovation. “I think giving Aza and Kristen their own space is best. How much will that cost, do you think?”

  “That is not something you need to be concerned with. I will call tomorrow for new estimates.”

  “Call who? And what do you mean new estimates?”

  “I already have a few for remodel—” He grimaces and then sighs. “Estimates for remodeling the master suite. It was going to be a surprise, a gift to you.”

  A gift for me or so nothing in that room will remind him of Meredith? I hide my suspicion behind a smile. “Well then, thank you.” I crook my arm through his and lean my head against his shoulder. “But you should start work on Aza’s apartment first. We’ll be fine in Bahía for a while longer.”

  Two

  Adam is overly tired when Jalal brings him back from their beach walk, so it takes me longer than usual to settle him down for his nap. When he finally falls asleep, I turn on the monitor and creep out of his room. Jalal, having already cleaned up from lunch, sits at the kitchen table with the blueprints to the Coelho house spread out before him. In the two weeks since we got back from Seattle, he’s decided to do more than just remodel our bedroom and renovate the apartment for Aza and Kristen. I listen to his plans and try not to think about how much it will cost. That’s a habit I can’t break even though Jalal’s inheritance and investments make money worries a thing of my past.

  I open the fridge and reach for a Coke before remembering I’ve already drunk my one-a-day allotment. “Crap.” I glance at Jalal. He pretends he wasn’t watching me, but the pursing of his mouth is a dead giveaway he’s holding back a smile.

  “Problem?” he asks.

  I grab a bottle of water and slump down at the table. He’s only reinforcing the obstetrician’s restrictions. It pisses me off anyway. “Why is it I’m allowed to drink all the tea I want, but you limit my coffee and Coke? Tea has caffeine too.”

  “My mother drank tea through seven pregnancies and we all turned out fine.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well … true, some of us are superior to the others.”

  “Yeah, it’s unfortunate she didn’t cut down when she was pregnant with you.” I emphasize the last word with a kick to his shin, but as usual my feet are bare, so I’m sure it hurts me more than him.

  Jalal shakes his head wearily, but again he’s trying not to smile. Good to know my sacrifice is a source of amusement to him. We sit in silence for a few minutes while I grumpily sip water and he looks at the plans. He pulls out another blueprint from the pile and studies it for a moment before he frowns. “Interesting,” he says.

  “What is?”

  “According to these old blueprints, the house originally had a small, one-room building behind it.”

  “Where the swimming pool is now?”

  “Yes. Well, a few feet further back. STUDIO is how it’s labeled here.”

  “An artist’s studio?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Did Meredith tear it down?”

  “No, the pool was there when she bought the house.”

  “How do you know?”

  He picks up my bottle and takes a drink. “Because the pool was Stephen’s deciding factor on buying the house.”

  Stephen, Meredith’s first husband, a man neither of us ever met, is a part of our life because he was part of Meredith’s life. Talking about her is always a risk. I no longer worry about Jalal drowning in those dark waters. Still, sometimes just a stray comment sparks a memory and he drifts away from me for a while. True, those drifts have decreased, in both length and frequency, during the two years I’ve known him. But what if that’s only because we’ve built a new life together here in Bahía de Sueños? What if, by moving into the Coelho house, the place he most associates with Meredith, he heads straight back into the undertow? “Speaking of the pool …”

  Jalal stretches and leans back in his chair. “The stone wall will be finished before we move in. Adam would have to fly to get to the pool on his own and the last time I checked, he was still wingless.”

  I force a smile. “I know you think I worry too much.”

  “No.” He reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. “I shared your concern about the pool. But some of your worries … this thing about Adam sleeping with us—”

  “Oh,” I say. “Show me again. Which will be Adam’s room?”

  “Renee …”

  I press my finger on the blueprints. “Is it this one?”

  He sighs. “Yes.”

  I look closer. “Where will you put the door?”

  “The door is there.” Jalal slides my finger an inch to the right.

  “No, not the door to the hallway. Where will the door from his room to ours be?”

  “Renee, I promise we will have a state of the art monitoring system. If Adam wiggles a toe, you will hear it. If he so much as blinks, probably.”

  I jab at the blueprints. “There has to be a door between our rooms. No. Wait. Which room will be the baby’s?”

  “Well, we both know the baby will sleep in our room for a year—at least. But you could decorate the room next to Adam’s as the nursery.”

  For a moment, I stare at the blueprints and then fear slams me. “This won’t work. That house is too big. The rooms are too far apart. We can’t live there, Jalal.”

  He looks at the ceiling and blows out a breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have paid closer attention before you started—”

  “We are moving, Renee.” He stands and pulls me into his arms. “Beginning tomorrow, you will go with me every day to the house and practice sprinting down the hall from our bedroom to the nursery, so when I finally convince you to let the baby sleep there, you can break the sound barrier every time you hear a peep on the monitor.” He tilts my chin up so our eyes meet. “Or … I will tell Ben to install a doorway from our room to Adam’s. The nursery is already connected to his through their bathroom. Straight shot.”

  I hug him. He tries so hard to allay my fears. “Thank you for putting up with my craziness.”

  “I love your craziness.” He slides his hands down to cup my ass and presses me closer. “How long do we have before Adam wakes up, Mrs. Vaziri?”

  “Long enough, Mr. Vaziri.”

  Later, when I hear Adam stir, I jump out of bed and scramble for my clothes. Jalal will never under
stand how it rips my heart to hear Adam cry out when he realizes he’s alone.

  “Hey,” Jalal says. “Are you coming to Coelho with me tomorrow?”

  “Why? You said you’d add the door.”

  “The door is a done deal,” he says. “I want you to look at each room and discuss the remodeling with me.”

  “Each room?” He starts to respond, but I wave him off. “Adam’s awake.”

  Adam stands in his crib, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I pick him up, barely settling him on my hip before I lean over his crib and vomit. He begins to cry. In seconds, Jalal appears and takes him from me. I wipe my mouth with a corner of Adam’s blanket.

  “Morning sickness?”

  “Uh-huh.” I close my eyes against the mess in Adam’s bed. But I don’t straighten up for fear I’ll set off another wave of nausea.

  “Do you still have any of those pills the doctor gave you last time?” he asks. Before I can answer, he carries Adam from the room.

  Despite my earlier caution, the stench is just as threatening, so I straighten up by inches and push away from the crib. In the guest bath across the hall, I rinse my mouth and splash cold water on my face. Jalal meets me at the door and hands me one of the little white tablets I took three times a day for weeks during my first pregnancy. Back then, I could spend half the day lying around; now with Adam to care for, I can’t do that. Won’t. “Where’s Adam?”

  “Safely corralled in his play area. Take your pill.” When I place it on my tongue to dissolve, he pulls me close and cradles my head against his chest. “I hate this part for you,” he says. “Go lie down. I will take care of Adam and clean up in here.”

  “I’ll just rest in the living room for a bit,” I say and push past him, ignoring his disapproving huff. I stretch out on the couch where I can watch Adam.

  A minute later, Jalal hands me a glass of ginger ale with a straw. “Remember to sip,” he says and returns to Adam’s room to gather the bedding.

  On the way to the washer, he stops behind me. I look up to see what he wants, but he’s only stopped to watch his son. Adam smiles at Jalal and holds out his hand, offering a toy. I’m not surprised at the conflict evident in Jalal’s expression. He never ignores his son, but he’s holding a wad of filthy laundry.

  I stand and move toward the corral. “Daddy will play with you in a minute, little man.” It’s picking at a scab, but whenever I watch Jalal with Adam, I can’t help wondering how my father could have left me when I was four. Adam has already become our life; how much more will he mean to us by the time he’s that age? But then Adam is an adorable child.

  After Jalal starts the washer, he comes back and sits on the floor with us. I’m stacking blocks, which Adam delights in knocking down. Jalal says nothing to distract him. How generously he shares his son. I shove the blocks closer to him. “Watch Daddy build a big tower, Adam.”

  Being with a man who doesn’t hide his emotions is a new experience for me. Sometimes he looks at me with such love it breaks my heart. And now with Adam, it’s the same. How easily Jalal wells up when he looks at him. When he told me the story of his estrangement from his father, I couldn’t imagine how he stood it, how he kept himself from begging his father to love him. And it was all for nothing, just a misunderstanding, because a hurt so deep in Jalal’s childhood left a hole he could not fill and would not let his father fill.

  I can’t stand the thought I could wound my children. I fear that more than anything.

  “I really think you should consult Azadeh about this renovation, not me,” I tell Jalal, as we climb the steps along the outside wall of the garage. Garage, what a laugh. Yes, it houses cars, but it looks more like a showroom than any garage I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t be surprised if it equals the square footage of our beach house. The apartment above it is surely just as spacious.

  Jalal holds a ring of unmarked keys, trying one after another in the door lock. “She will have her say, but this is your home now, and I think you should be involved.”

  It’s going to take time for me to feel at home in this house. Meredith’s presence feels strong to me, but Jalal acts indifferent to it. If that isn’t just an act, it’s quite a change from two years ago, when he truly faced Meredith’s absence here for the first time. Right after her funeral, he walked out the door and drove away. It took him almost three years to work though his grief and find the courage to let her go. He took a big step toward healing on the day he came back here and said goodbye to her, but since then the house has served only as a guest house for his visiting family members. I certainly never pictured myself living here.

  Jalal finally unlocks the door and we step inside. He opened the windows days ago, so though it needs a serious cleaning, the apartment doesn’t smell musty. I walk through the empty living room and dining area into the kitchen, which is nicer than I expected, though nothing like the gourmet setup Jalal has in the main house. But then, even the best apartment I ever lived in ranked only a few notches above slum. “What exactly do you plan to change?”

  “New carpet and paint, certainly. And I think we should update the kitchen and bathrooms. Is the layout good, do you think?”

  “Sure.” I’d glanced in the bedrooms as I walked past, and now I open the door at the end of the hall. “Where do these stairs lead?”

  “Down to the laundry room, which has doors to the garage, the patio, and our kitchen.”

  Three staircases in one house. I’ll be living in a maze. I point to the door directly across the narrow landing. “Does that lead into the upstairs of the house?”

  “Yes,” he says. “It can be locked from our side, but since Aza and Kristen are family …”

  “That’s fine.”

  When I close the door and turn, Jalal motions for me to follow him into one of the bedrooms. He crosses the room and opens the door to a walk-in closet. “These are the same in both rooms. They are nothing like your closet will be, but will they work? Of course we will have them fitted with all those drawers and cubbies you like.”

  “Do I?” I’m teasing. I’ve never had such a closet, but I’ve seen enough in magazines to have a healthy dose of organizer envy. “You’re asking the wrong person. As it is, this is a bigger, nicer, closet than I’ve ever had.” I open what I expect is the door to the bathroom. “Gross.”

  Jalal peers over me. “Bad, huh? Like I said, the bathrooms need updating.”

  “Surely that hideous pink tile is not original to the house.”

  “No. Someone remodeled … in the 50s maybe.”

  “Put it back to the original. Subway tiles, wouldn’t it be? And order those reproduction period fixtures. All white, so Aza and Kristen can add their own colors.”

  Jalal wraps his arms around me and rests his chin on my head. “I knew you would have good ideas. Give me some for the kitchen?” He takes my hand and leads me there. “I think we should gut it,” he says. “New cupboards, new floor, counters, appliances … everything.”

  “Do it.” Anticipating his response, I press my fingertips against his lips. “Don’t ask me to choose anything. You and Aza should decide.”

  He kisses my fingertips and then pulls them away. “You will have plenty of decisions to make for our house. Come.” Jalal leads the way back down the hall to the inner staircase and down to our kitchen door. Halfway across the laundry room, he stops and turns to me. “Why are you out of breath? Were the stairs too much?” He splays his fingers across my stomach as though to shield the baby from the cause of my distress.

  “I’m fine,” I say, lying just like Jalal does when he refuses to admit he’s anything but fine. My heart pounds, not with exertion but with dread. What do I expect; that Meredith’s jealous ghost will rush at me, her nails clawing at my eyes for daring to claim my place in her house? Stupid. Yet, as we step into the kitchen, I’d swear it dims as though the sun sucked some of its light back out the windows. I am not welcomed. Threatened tears sting my eyes. Hormones. This has to be the pregnancy hormone
s. What next, a return of the mood swings that knocked Jalal off-balance and kept him on constant alert? I hug him tight.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Are you sure nothing is wrong?”

  I nod against his chest, breathing in the scent of tea and spice that lingers on his skin, familiar, comforting. Then I give him another squeeze and push him away. The weird darkness still hangs over the kitchen, so I lead him out into the hall. “You’re not really making changes to every room in the house, are you?”

  Jalal stops at the entrance to the dining room and glances in, then turns and crosses the hall to the door of a room I don’t know how to identify—what they call a sitting room, maybe? I hold my breath. Is he picturing Meredith in each room? Is he caught up in those memories? His silence makes me feel like a voyeur.

  “Would this be good for a play room, a family room?” he asks. Then he frowns. “It would be nicer opened to the kitchen to make a great room, but that would require another remodel. Maybe later?”

  “That’s perfect,” I say, hiding my relief. He hadn’t been thinking of Meredith at all.

  For another minute, Jalal stands in the doorway and then walks in. I fill his vacancy at the door. He stands in the center of the room staring at one wall. “On second thought, if we relocate the bank of cupboards on the other side of this wall, we could install an archway from this room to the kitchen now. Not quite a great room but close.” He turns to me, brows raised.

  “You’re going to do all this work before we move in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Won’t that take months … several months? I thought we’d be settled here long before the baby comes.”

  “No problem. I will offer them a bonus to work harder.”

  “I thought you were talking minor changes. Painting and stuff.”

  “Oh yes, that too,” he says, backing me into the hall.

  Jalal heads toward the living room with me on his heels. This massive space has numerous leaded-glass windows. Despite its facing north, light floods the room. My mood lifts, even though evidence of Meredith’s interests—and Meredith and Jalal’s travels too, I suppose—fill the walls and shelves in the room.