The Side Effects of Marriage

Chapter 25

"How's Hayden doing?" Tatiana asked as Layla paced the living room of her best friend's palatial mansion on the outskirts of Maryland. It was a far ritzier neighbourhood than the one Layla occupied with her husband. "Is he healing?"

"I wouldn't know." She was no longer permitted to help him change his bandages or apply aany ointments. It had been two months since the... incident that had left him so scarred, and he was slowly regaining the use of all his limbs and appendages. His skin was slowly healing. She hadn't seen him in anything more revealing than boxers and a t-shirt in just as much time. She didn't care who he spent his time with, now that he'd been approved by the doctor to drive again. Her life was centred on keeping the two children inside of her alive.

It was all she had left to care about.

"You two are still on the rocks, huh?" Tatiana flopped down next to Layla and passed her a Diet Coke, their preferred drinks back when they'd been college girls. Layla hadn't touched the stuff in years, but she took a sip now, longing for the days when they'd had no higher purpose or greater stress than their next midterm or passing their classes. Something with a clear-cut benchmark and definition of success.

Nowadays, she wasn't sure what her definition of success would be, except for making it through childbirth. They hadn't even picked out baby names yet, though her pregnancy was six months along now.

Her to-do list was cluttered with other things. On the surface, she might as well have been the neglectful parent she'd accused her husband of being, even if it was because she was busy tracking down her coworker's mysterious activities.

"Sometimes it feels like we'll always be on the rocks." They were a ship that had been made too top-heavy, too loaded down with secrets and lies, to ever make it out of the harbour. Just like the Vasa, that great Viking ship in the Swedish sea, doomed before it ever began because the king had ordered it to be built with too large a mast. "Or maybe we've always been on the rocks."

"Layla," Tatiana said, but her tone was only half admonishing. The other half seemed resigned. "You don't mean that."

"Oh, but I do." She rubbed a hand over her bump absently. "I feel sorry for these kids. Screwed up before they even begin."

"Cheers to that," Tatiana said drily, clinking a glass of sparkling water to Layla's tap. "It's okay. I turned out alright."

"Not all of us do," Layla murmured. Her own parents, while loving, had been distant, separated by the fact that Layla was an accident after ten years, when they'd expected to only have only one daughter. She'd been a hoped-for son, when her parents found out they were having what would likely be their last child. Then, after her birth, she'd been looked at as surplus. It wasn't until Amara's disappearance that her father had ever spoken to her about anything important at all.

"What was that?" Tatiana looked over at her, having been distracted by something or other outside the window.

Was that a flash of lightning?

No, the sky was perfectly blue.

"Nothing." She scanned the window again. What had it been?

A drone.

A camera flash from a drone.

"Tati," Layla said. "Close the curtains, please."

The urgency in her tone must have commanded speed, because Tatiana scrambled for a remote that immediately turned the curtains from sheer drapes to blackout curtains and tinted the windows to a dark charcoal.

"What's up?" Tatiana said quietly. Like she, too, knew that they were being surveyed.

"I believe we have a stalker." Layla felt goosebumps rise on her arms. "I can only guess who."