Clockwork [final]

Twenty-Three

It was dark when Adette and Derek arrived back home. Despite their success, Adette was still quiet and distant. Derek supposed it was fair enough; she’d had an emotional day. They let Lassie out of Adette’s room and were greeted with excited barking and a wagging tail. It at least made Adette smile, and she scooped Lassie up in her arms and carried the wriggly little dog into the lounge. Derek checked the phone for messages and made them both a cup of tea. When he walked in, she was just sitting on the couch with Lassie in her lap, staring at the blank television screen.

He didn’t ask, instead just sitting next to her and holding out the cup of tea. She silently took it and flashed him a grateful smile. For a long time they just sat there attempting to drink their tea in silence.

“So… you were going to have a son?” Derek mumbled, unsure whether he was meant to bring it up or not.

Adette nodded slowly, her eyes clouded with some distant memory. She subconsciously touched her stomach and sighed. “Yes, but I wasn’t ready to be. It was what Kevin wanted. But he stressed me out too much, and the baby was born premature… stillborn.”

He gently put an arm around her waist and pulled her close, planting a soft kiss on her forehead. “I’m sure you would have been a great mother.”

She looked up at him, a vulnerability shining in her eyes that she rarely showed. “Really?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he smiled, “Look how well you’ve taken care of me. I’m not too different from a child.”

Despite herself, Adette giggled. “Okay, fair enough.”

He paused for a moment before cautiously asking, “You were going to call it Derek?”

Adette smiled, a soft look coming across her face as she pushed her glasses up her nose. “Yes. It’s always been a name I liked.”

Derek thought for a while and then laughed a little. “It’s almost too coincidental that you met me, then.”

Adette grinned at him. “It was another thing that made it seem like we were somehow meant to meet.”

It seemed to take a few days after the court case before Adette even truly realized that Kevin was gone. She still stared out the window, woke up suddenly in the night and jumped when the phone rang. It was difficult for Derek to watch; she’d been through so much, it had been unrealistic of him to expect she’d automatically relax with Kevin behind bars. He resented how brief the jail sentence was. Surely what Kevin had done was attempted manslaughter. Didn’t that require a harsher sentence? But then again, the investigators couldn’t prove what Kevin’s motive was; in fact, he was only even linked to the crime by his behaviour surrounding the time of the explosion. But, as always, the man had somehow escaped any serious consequence. Derek could only hope he would obey the restraining order when he got out of jail.

Derek couldn’t help but feel like there was something else on Adette’s mind she hadn’t told him about, too. She seemed distracted at best and was far from her usual bubbly self. She spent a lot of time staring out the window and he noticed she was getting up often in the middle of the night. He had weakly attempted to get her to tell him what was wrong, but when she brushed him away he realized he should respect her privacy and let her be. If she wanted to tell him, he knew that she would in her own time.

In the meantime, he did his best to help her find her feet again. He helped her start renovating the lab again, though it wasn’t the same; but he knew it would be good to at least have some shelves, cupboards, tables and supplies set up in case she felt like trying to get back into it again.

“Adette,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow after shifting a large desk into the laboratory, “What are we going to do about money? Surely what you made off your robots won’t last forever.”