I dreamed of a front door so wide and welcoming that people would approach with as much excitement as Charlie at the chocolate factory. Once inside, I dreamed of a grand staircase right out of Gone with the Wind that flared into banistered overlooks on either side. I dreamed the house would have a room for every purpose—a chef’s kitchen for preparing gourmet meals, a lush lanai to entertain, a gym, a screening room, a master bedroom so luxurious it felt like a suite at the Ritz. All of this was at stake now. If we couldn’t keep the lid on this, I could lose it all.
Evan and I met in my private study that night. I had it decorated more like a hunting lodge than an office, with deep leather chairs and a plush bearskin rug. The walls were lined with my favorite books, which ranged from Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle to vintage Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. No one went in there but me, and Evan on the rare occasion we discussed business at my house.
“Am I going to go to jail for this?” I asked my lawyer as I examined the signatures of Holly and Savannah Kendrick. It felt strange having a legal document for an illegal act, but I trusted Evan had reasons for wanting it.
He seemed prepared for my absurd question. “No one has anything to gain by exposing your connection to this,” he replied. It was true, of course, but that was no guarantee that they wouldn’t. Our devil’s bargain was rancid, but just because we all swallowed it, didn’t mean we could all keep it down. Guilty feelings can be boxed up, but life has a way of jostling them free. For some they leak out slowly, seeping into the deep crevices of your conscience, haunting your dreams until you die. For others, they build up like steam in a pressure cooker, threatening to blow you wide open. This was not going to go away. The only unknown was who was going to slow rot, and who was going to explode.
“Think of your family,” Evan said, as if I needed to be reminded. This was, of course, all about my family.
My greatest sadness was that I only had one child. I had wanted more children. But pregnancy was hard for my wife. She had what they call hyperemesis gravidarum, which is Latin for I can’t stop vomiting, please kill me now. It was horribly, violently, heartbreakingly awful. Even high doses of Zofran, the medicine they give to cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, couldn’t quell her fits of nausea. For nearly nine months, Kate lived on the bathroom floor with her head by the toilet. There were days she literally wanted to die. Watching her suffer was like being handcuffed to a fire truck while your house burned down. It was the worst kind of torture. At one point she begged her doctor to put her in a medically induced coma and keep her there until the baby was born. When the doctor said no, they didn’t do that, I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
Most women with hyperemesis gravidarum start to feel better in their third trimester, but Kate was sick well into her ninth month. She desperately wanted to have a vaginal birth, but when the vomiting continued into her thirty-seventh week, I convinced her to have a C-section. I was going out of town for work, I didn’t want to leave with her sick like that, and—selfishly—I wanted to witness the birth of our child, especially since I suspected there might not be another one. She didn’t want to have a scheduled C-section, but she did it for me.
We were warned that babies who didn’t get the opportunity to travel through the birth canal could be born with fluid in their lungs, but we still panicked when our baby couldn’t breathe. Kate barely got to hold him before he was wrestled from her arms and tethered to a ventilator. He was in the NICU for thirteen days. Kate never left his side. When she wasn’t permitted to hold him, she’d sneak her fingers through the tiny window in the incubator, just to touch his foot with a desperate pinky finger. Taken too soon from her womb, he was still part of her, and she wouldn’t—couldn’t—let go.
Kate’s pregnancy was impossibly hard, but those two weeks after her baby was taken from her nearly broke her. There was no place to lie down in the neonatal intensive care unit, so she didn’t sleep. There was no food allowed, so she didn’t eat. She pumped every two hours to keep her milk up, enduring the prying eyes of whoever was in the NICU that day, because she refused to leave. And I abandoned her during the worst of it, because I was contractually obligated to go do a movie, and Hollywood couldn’t wait, not even for me.
Leaving her like that was hell. I vowed to never, ever, let anything hurt her again. This settlement, cover-up, bribe—whatever you wanted to call it—I wasn’t doing it for me. I could have handled the fallout. I was doing it for her. Because unbeknownst to her, she had a role in this, too.