Madame President - Tara Sue Me Page 0,37
been bold enough to ask for further explanation.
Across the table, waiting for my reply, Anna has no way of knowing this isn’t something I normally share. She’s watching me with those blue eyes of hers. They’re questioning me now because I’ve hesitated replying. All at once I realize I want to tell her everything. Not because she’s the President but because she, more than anyone else, knows how much I wanted to be a judge. Even more so, she’ll know the magnitude of what it would take to get me to walk away from that desire.
Chapter Nineteen
Her
The White House
Washington DC
He’s not going to tell me. I’m not going to take his silence on the topic personally. I’m not sure he’s ever told anyone why he quit. But just as I’m getting ready to tell him it’s okay, and I didn’t intend to pry, he gives me something that might resemble a smile if he didn’t look so sad when he gave it.
“It was two days after we…” he says, trying to find an appropriate word, I suppose.
God, that night. I remember it vividly. We’d finished the mock trial we’d been working on for months, and, on a whim, decided to hit the town in celebration. I can’t even blame it on the alcohol because I’d only had one beer, and I don’t think Navin had anything other than water.
When he drove me back to my apartment, he insisted on walking me to my door because it was late. Once there, I asked if he wanted to come inside. We both knew what I was asking, after almost a year of heated glances in our study group, and several not-so-accidental touches as we prepared for the mock trial, there was no doubt what would happen.
“Slept together,” I tell him. No use calling it something else.
He gives a curt nod. “Two days later, I’d been out jogging and had returned to my apartment,” he says. “Probably around seven in the morning.”
I definitely remembered him jogging. At the time, I was living in an apartment near campus, but even better, near a popular jogging trail. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’d make sure I was up at six so I could watch a shirtless Navin jog under my window at six fifteen and again on his way back at six forty-five.
“You always hear about the middle of the night phone call,” he continues, and I force the image of him shirtless out of my head. “No one ever warns you about the seven am phone call.”
My heart clenches because telling this is hard for him, even now, years later.
“My parents had another child shortly after I started at Harvard. A surprise baby.” He gives a little snort, almost a half laugh. “For years after I was born, they tried to have another child, and it never happened. They’d long given up when Mom went to her doctor, concerned about why she was going through menopause early only to find out it wasn’t that at all. She was pregnant.”
I can’t help but smile. It’s such a sweet story.
“They were overjoyed, of course.” It’s clear from the look on his face, they weren’t the only ones. “It was a difficult pregnancy, and Mom was put on bedrest at the end. When she went into labor at thirty-two weeks, they didn’t try to stop it. My little sister, Kyra, was tiny, but healthy. I fell in love with her the second I saw her. She was sweet and beautiful, full of life. We all called her Sunshine, because that’s what she was.” He shakes his head, and I know something horrible is getting ready to come out of his mouth because he’s talking about her in the past tense. But I don’t stop him from continuing. “The phone call at seven that day was from my father. Sunshine was only eighteen months old. At her well child checkup some of her labs came back abnormal. It turned out to be leukemia.”
My hand flies to cover my mouth. “Navin,” I said. “Oh, no. How horrible.”
He only nods. “She needed a bone marrow transplant. As a sibling, I was her best hope for a match. They called to see if I’d be tested. As it turns out I was a match. When I left Harvard to be tested, I thought I’d come back. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t. But the bone marrow surgery took a lot out of Sunshine, Mom and Dad were having a hard