Chapter 6 - The Name We Chose
That evening they wheeled Marin into the NICU. She found me next to the incubator with my jacket off and my tie stuffed in my pocket.
"You're still here."
"Where else would I be?"
She didn't answer. She didn't have to. Six months ago, we both knew, I'd have been on a plane.
I told her I'd been thinking about a name.
Her grandfather was Elliot Hale. He'd raised her after her parents died when she was nine. She'd talked about him our whole marriage — a carpenter out of Arkansas who used to say a man's word was worth more than his bank account.
"What about Eli?" I said.
She looked at the incubator. And for the first time all day, she smiled.
"Eli Hale Calloway."
"I like it," I said.
We sat there together. For a few minutes the divorce didn't seem to exist.
Then my phone buzzed. A text from Renata, my assistant.
"Want me to cancel the Seattle investor dinner? I'll tell them you had a family emergency."
Family emergency.
I stared at those two words. And then I remembered what Marin had said. That she'd called. Over and over.
I opened the blocked-call log on my phone — a screen I almost never looked at, because Renata handled nearly everything that came in.
Dozens of filtered numbers. One of them showed up again and again.
Marin Hale.
Six calls.
My chest went tight.
May you like
Then I found the voicemail folder. Three messages, automatically dumped into a deleted list I'd never opened.
I hit play.
