Chapter Eight
Casey
SEVEN WEEKS. THAT’S what the OB tells me, smiling as though the news is uncomplicated, which it might be for women whose husbands aren’t Sterling Hollingsford, whose mothers-in-law aren’t Gretchen Hollingsford, and whose marriages aren’t six months old with a fault line running through the middle that neither party has agreed to discuss.
We haven’t even discussed having kids yet.
I want them, and so does he, but not yet.
I wanted to wait until we’d figured out the shape of this marriage, got through the holidays, survived his mother, and done all the things you’re supposed to do before you build a person.
Seven weeks means we miscalculated somewhere.
The OB office is on the fourth floor of a building I’ve parked outside a hundred times on the way to my own shifts and never gone into.
The waiting room has magazines from three months ago, a fish tank with a filter that needs cleaning, and two other women who are farther along than me and look calmer about it.
I fill out forms. I check the boxes. Medical history, family history, and last menstrual period.
I write Sterling Hollingsford in the partner field, and his name looks strange in my handwriting on a medical form.
The OB is a woman named Dr. Lucero, who has kind eyes with efficient hands and who tells me the number, seven weeks, with a confidence that makes it real.
She prints the ultrasound, which looks like nothing except a small gray comma on a black screen.
I look at it and think that it’s early, it’s mine, I didn’t plan it, and none of that changes anything.
I sit in my car in the parking deck. I check the clock when I sit down.
I check it again eight minutes later when I start the engine, and between those two checks, I try to name what I’m feeling, which I’m usually good at.
I diagnose feelings quickly, accurately, and without drama.
This one takes a long time because the answer surprises me.
I want it. The wanting hits me low in the belly, physical and immediate, with a certainty that has nothing to do with planning and everything to do with the image that arrived fully formed the second the OB said the number.
A small person, already mine, who can’t exist outside my body yet and already has my full attention.
I don’t buy anything on the way home. No onesie from Target, tiny socks, or book of names I’ll pretend to skim casually while Sterling makes dinner. I’m not that person. I’m the person who drives home with both hands on the wheel, the printout in her purse, and a plan forming sentence by sentence.
The version I settle on is simple. I’m pregnant. It’s early. I want to keep it.
Three sentences, direct, without hedging. I’ve delivered worse news to families in hospital waiting rooms, and I’ve done it clearly, with compassion and without apology. I can tell my own husband we’re having a baby.
I practice it at stoplights. I practice the part where he asks whether we’re ready, which I don’t have a good answer for, because we aren’t ready.
I don’t care. The not-caring is the thing I can’t explain in a sentence.
I care about schedules, finances, and that his mother still calls our marriage an arrangement.
I care about all of it, but I want this baby more than I care about any of it.
The equation doesn’t balance. I don’t need it to.
I never get to say any of it. The room is wrong before I’m all the way through the door.
Sterling is standing near the mantel, and standing is wrong because he usually sits when he’s home, always in the leather chair by the window with his laptop open and a glass of something on the side table.
Standing means company, and his face has the expression he wears when a deal has gone sideways but he hasn’t decided yet how to fix it.
Gretchen is in the wing chair. The good one, closest to the fireplace, the one she claimed at dinner two weeks ago when Sterling invited her to the penthouse for the first time since the wedding.
She sat in it then with the ease of a woman who has been choosing the best chair in every room for fifty years.
She’s in it now with the stillness of a woman who has arranged the room before anyone else arrived.
There’s no fake warmth in her now. She’s wearing something dark and simple. Her posture is perfect, and her face is expressionless. That’s when Gretchen is most dangerous.
Brittany is on the sofa. She’s staring at her own lap, locked in place, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else.
“Casey.” Sterling looks at me. “Sit down.”
I don’t sit down. My bag is still on my shoulder. I’m still wearing the coat I drove home in. The sentence I’ve been rehearsing for thirty-five minutes, I’m pregnant, it’s early, and I want to keep it, is ready to go, but the room is wrong. I don’t sit down or say anything.
A cold weight drops through my stomach. It isn’t nausea. Flatter, heavier, like swallowing a coin.
“What’s going on?”
Brittany goes first. I don’t expect that. She speaks to the coffee table, not to me. Her voice is thin and rehearsed, as though she memorized the lines an hour ago and hasn’t fully committed to them.
“I saw you outside the hospital.” She swallows. “Two weeks ago. Tuesday night, around eleven.”
“Okay.”
“You were with a man.” Her voice becomes even thinner. “Outside the entrance, by the parking structure.”
I sound calm though every nerve is on red alert. “I work at a hospital, Brittany. I’m outside the entrance with men and women every night. You’ll have to be more specific.”
Brittany’s gaze darts to Gretchen. A quick, panicked glance, the kind a child gives a parent before reciting something in front of company. Gretchen doesn’t move. She doesn’t nod, blink, or signal. She sits in her chair and waits, and the waiting is its own instruction.
“You were close together,” Brittany says. “He had his arm around you. You were...” She stops. She picks at the seam of her jeans. “You were kissing him.”
The word kissing comes out of her mouth sideways, almost apologetically, as though the accusation is embarrassing her more than it’s convincing anyone.
She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the coffee table, at her own knees, at her mother. At no point in the entire accusation does she look at the person she’s accusing.
I open my mouth.
Gretchen is faster. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.” Her voice is warm, sorry, and perfectly controlled. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
That’s all she says. There’s no photograph. There are no text messages. There’s no evidence of any kind, but Gretchen doesn’t need any, because she knows Sterling, and his face is already closed.
I look at my husband. He’s standing six feet away from me, arms at his sides. Confusion crosses his face, or pain, or the beginning of a question he might actually ask. Then it’s gone. His face settles into certainty. He decided before I walked in the door.
“Ask me,” I say. My voice comes out steadily, which almost surprises me.
He doesn’t. “I know,” he says, and the word know comes out of him like a door closing.
I’ve heard Sterling say I know a hundred times. He said it when I told him I loved him. He said it on our wedding night when I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. Every time, it carried careful distance, as though knowing and believing were two different acts.
This “I know” is different. This one has teeth.
“You aren’t even going to ask me?”
“Casey—”
“You’re standing in our living room while your mother tells you I cheated on you, and you aren’t going to ask me whether it’s true?”
He doesn’t ask. He looks at me with those gray eyes that watched me suture his arm, sat beside me after Delphine, and studied me across a diner booth on Independence Boulevard. He doesn’t ask me a single question.
He looks at me as though I’m exactly what he expected, and the expectation is worse than the accusation, because it means he’s been carrying this version of me, the version who would do this, since before we were married. He kept it ready. He kept it loaded. Gretchen just pulled the trigger.
“I didn’t do this,” I say harshly, glaring at Gretchen then at him.
Gretchen doesn’t say another word. She doesn’t need to. She sits in her chair with her hands folded, and her silence is louder than anything she could have added, because the silence says she didn’t have to convince him. He’s already convinced. She just had to get him in the room.
Sterling doesn’t move. His face doesn’t change.
I understand he decided before I walked in the door.
He anticipated I would betray him well before Brittany opened her mouth, or Gretchen sat down in that chair.
He decided the day he married me, somewhere underneath the vows, the courthouse, and the rings, in the place where his father left and where everyone who was supposed to stay didn’t.
He was always going to believe this. He was waiting for it.
“Get out,” he says. His voice is level and cold. It’s the voice that closed acquisitions, the voice I’ve heard him use to tell Martin Yoon to handle things. He’s using it on me, while his mother sits in that chair, witnessing my humiliation.
My legs feel strange. Not weak. I’ve never gone weak in my life, but strange, as though the floor has shifted under me, and my body is finding where the ground is.
“Ask me,” I say again. “Sterling, look at me and ask me.”
He doesn’t.
I have an ultrasound printout in my purse.
It’s in the inside pocket, in the zippered compartment, next to the OB receipt and a pamphlet about prenatal vitamins I took from the rack on my way out.
I could pull it out right now. I could put it on the coffee table and watch Gretchen’s face, watch Brittany’s face, watch Sterling work out what it means.
I don’t. He should have asked. He didn’t. Giving him proof I shouldn’t have to provide would mean accepting that proof was required, and I won’t audition for the right to be believed in front of his mother.
“If I leave here,” I say, “It won’t be alone.”
Sterling’s face changes. A reaction moves behind his eyes, fast and ugly.
I know in that second that he heard something I didn’t say.
He heard another man. He heard me confirming the accusation in the one sentence I meant as the truth.
Gretchen is already leaning forward in her chair. The damage is done.
“Then don’t come back,” he says.
I go upstairs. I pack one bag and walk past Gretchen without looking at her.
Brittany is crying on the sofa. When I come back down with the bag, she looks at me for the first time all night, her eyes red, wet, and terrified.
I walk past her. There’s nothing to say to a person who lit a match and is upset about the fire.
Sterling is in the foyer. He doesn’t speak.
I walk past him, close enough to smell his cologne, which is the same cologne, a detail that shouldn’t matter, and I open the door myself.
I step into the November air with a bag on my shoulder, a pregnancy I never announced, and a marriage that ended in the time it takes to walk from a parking deck to a living room.
I get in the car and put the bag on the passenger seat. I don’t start the engine.
The house glows behind me. Warm light through every window, the kind you’d pass on the road and assume someone happy lives there. Gretchen is inside. Brittany is inside. Sterling is inside. The wing chair, the coffee table, the room where I stood, told the truth, and wasn’t believed.
I sit there for a full minute. The ultrasound printout is still in my purse. The gray comma on the black screen, seven weeks old, the size of a blueberry, with a heartbeat I heard on a monitor forty minutes ago in a room where everything was still possible.
I put my hand on my stomach, which is flat and unchanged and contains, right now, the only person in the world I’m sure of.
“Okay,” I say, out loud, to nobody.
I start the car and pull out of the driveway.
The hedges close behind me in the rearview mirror.
I pass through the gate, then the street.
Then I’m on the road. Charlotte is around me.
I’m twenty-nine, pregnant, and alone. The sentence I rehearsed the whole way home, I’m pregnant, it’s early, and I want to keep it, is still unsaid, and it’ll stay that way.
He Threw us away, so I have no obligation to tell him.
I drive past the exit to the apartment I gave up just two weeks ago. Then I drive past the hospital and even past the turnoff to Marnie’s. I don’t know where I’m going, but Charlotte no longer feels welcoming.