Chapter 8
I’M PREPPING SHRIMP for a Saturday wedding reception when it finally lands.
It’s a Thursday night, late, past ten. Dom and I are in the kitchen with the radio on low, working through the mise en place for a two-hundred-person event that starts in fourteen hours.
He’s building grain salad in bulk, portioning farro into hotel pans while I devein five pounds of shrimp and lay them in rows on sheet trays for morning marination.
The work is mechanical. Grab, slice, pull, rinse, and lay flat.
My hands know the sequence, so my brain is free to wander, and tonight it keeps circling back to the sonogram on the refrigerator in Wynn’s apartment.
I saw it two weeks ago. I’ve been trying not to think about it, which means I’ve been thinking about it constantly, which means every quiet moment fills with the image of that black-and-white printout pinned under a pizza parlor magnet on a refrigerator I’ve never opened.
“He’s having a baby,” I say.
My voice is too loud for the kitchen. My throat closes. Pressure drops into my chest, a weight I haven’t let myself feel during weeks of documentation and legal strategy. Dom stops portioning. He looks up from the farro.
“Ellora has to be six months along. He’s having a baby with the woman who made my mother comfortable while she died.”
Dom sets down the measuring cup. He doesn’t say anything for a while, and I’m grateful for that, because the options are limited.
He can tell me he’s sorry, which I already know.
He can tell me Wynn is a terrible person, which I’ve already established.
He can try to reframe it, or he can sit with me in the cruelty of this particular detail and not pretend there’s a version of it that hurts less.
“The baby didn’t choose any of this,” he says.
“I know.”
“I know you know. I just needed to say it.”
I go back to the shrimp. Grab, slice, pull, and rinse. The rhythm helps.
“I’m not angry at the baby,” I say. “I’m angry at every conversation we had about timing.”
The apartment, the promotion, and the shift logs are evidence. This is different. This is the four years of careful, measured, perfectly reasonable conversations where Wynn sat across from me at our kitchen table and explained why we couldn’t have children yet.
I’ve been over the facts already. I catalogued them in Felicia’s office, compiled them into a timeline, and photographed a crib in an apartment I didn’t know existed. I’ve been efficient about the information. Clinical, even.
I haven’t sat with what the information means.
The conversation I keep replaying happened six months after Holly died.
Wynn and I were at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, coffee between us, the newspaper he still subscribed to spread out next to his plate.
I’d been thinking about it for weeks. Holly’s death had scraped me raw, a realization that the future isn’t guaranteed, that the people you love can disappear in eight months, and waiting for the perfect moment is a luxury the universe doesn’t always extend.
“I want to talk about kids,” I said.
Wynn set down his coffee. He didn’t look surprised. He looked prepared. “I’ve been thinking about it too,” he’d said.
My heart had lifted. For one second, I thought he was about to say yes.
“I just don’t think now is the right time, Nat. We’re both still processing Holly. You’re barely sleeping. The business is in flux. I don’t want to add a baby to a situation that’s already overwhelming.”
“We’ve been married for almost five years. When is the right time?”
“Soon. I promise. Let’s get through this year. Let me get the travel under control, and let’s give ourselves some space to breathe. A baby deserves parents who aren’t running on empty.”
He reached across the table and held my hand.
His thumb traced slow circles across the back of my wrist, and his face was open, concerned, entirely focused on me.
He was being a good husband. He was saying responsible things.
He was holding my hand while he told me no in a voice that sounded like not yet.
I said okay. I cleared the coffee cups, put the newspaper in the recycling bin, and I told myself he was right, that we needed time, and the delay was mutual.
He already had the apartment. He’d started paying for the apartment three months earlier. I was sitting across the breakfast table from a man who’d already built his exit, asking him for a future he’d decided against, and his answer was so gentle and so reasonable that I thanked him for it.
He said the same thing a year before Mom’s diagnosis. Different details, same gentle tone, same rational timeline. Our savings needed padding. Daycare costs in Nashville were brutal. Let’s wait one more year.
Every deferral bought him another six months of the parallel life he’d already built, in the apartment he’d already furnished, with the freedom he’d already chosen. The conversation was never a negotiation. It was a stall.
I could absorb the affair. People leave. Marriages end. Falling out of love and walking away is selfish, but at least it’s honest.
What I can’t absorb is that he let me believe the problem was timing.
He let me redesign my calendar, adjust my savings plan, and put my own desire for a family on hold because he told me the delay was temporary and mutual.
He let me carry the waiting as a shared sacrifice, when it was actually his unilateral decision, made years ago, to have children without me.
He’s having a baby. With the hospice nurse who attended my mother’s funeral.
“Holly wanted kids,” Dom says.
I stop peeling. He doesn’t talk about Holly often.
Not directly, not like this. Private wants, private plans, and the things she said.
He talks about the business she helped build, the clients she landed, and the systems she put in place.
He talks about her in terms of her work because work is the container that makes grief functional, and Dom runs on function.
He hasn’t really said her name in the context of what she wanted since the funeral.
“She wanted two,” he says. “She had names picked out. She wanted a boy named after her grandfather and a girl named Chastain because she’d read it in a novel once and never let it go.
” He’s still holding the measuring cup. He hasn’t put it down.
“We were going to start trying the year she was diagnosed. We’d done the math.
Paid off the car, put money into the business, and built the client base up to where we could afford for her to take six months off. We had a plan.”
“Dom.”
“The plan died with her. Everything after that is a different life.” He sets the cup down. “I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because I know what it feels like to lose a future you thought was yours. The circumstances are different, but the loss is the same feeling.”
I look at him across the prep counter. I’ve worked beside him for years.
He drove me to my husband’s apartment and waited in the car, answered the phone when Ellora called and handed it to me without advice, and told Lattimer Group our food was too good to let my divorce interfere with our contract.
He’s been standing next to me through the worst month of my life with the same steady, undemanding presence he’s brought to every day since Holly died, and I’ve accepted it without examination, the way you accept anything constant.
Present every day, never demanding attention, and never absent.
He’s looking at the farro. He’s staring at the farro. He just said something more personal than he’s said in two years, and he looks startled by it.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say.
He nods, picks up the measuring cup, and goes back to portioning. I go back to the shrimp, and we work side by side, same as every other night, except his elbow brushes mine when he reaches for the salt, and he doesn’t pull away. I don’t either.