4. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
I sat on the bathroom floor of that pharmacy for twenty minutes before I could make myself stand up.
Pregnant. The word kept circling through my mind, refusing to land anywhere solid. I was pregnant. There was a life growing inside me, a tiny collection of cells that would become a person, a baby, a child who would call me mother and look to me for everything.
The joy hit first, unexpected and overwhelming.
I had wanted this. For years, in the quiet spaces of my heart that I didn’t share with anyone, I had wanted this.
I had imagined it countless times. The moment I would tell Heath.
The way his face would light up. The nursery we would design together, arguing over paint colors and furniture placement the way we used to argue over everything, with passion and laughter and the absolute certainty that we would work it out.
Then the terror arrived, crashing over the joy like a wave over sand, washing it away until only the fear remained.
How do you hand a baby to a man who’s become a stranger? How do you build a family with someone who’s building a new life with another woman? How do you tell your husband that he’s going to be a father when you’re not even sure he wants to be your husband anymore?
I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, against the life I couldn’t feel yet but knew was there. Six weeks. Still so early. Still so fragile. Anything could happen.
Anything could happen with the pregnancy. Anything could happen with my marriage. The uncertainty stretched before me, vast and terrifying, and I didn’t know how to navigate any of it.
I made myself get up. I made myself wash my face in the pharmacy sink, look at my reflection in the spotted mirror, take deep breaths until my hands stopped shaking.
I needed a plan. I had always been good at plans. Give me a problem and I would break it down into steps, into manageable pieces, into a shape I could solve.
This was just another problem. A complicated one, certainly. A devastating one, possibly. But still just a problem, and I would find a way through it.
***
By the time I got back to Fairhaven, the house was awake.
I could hear voices in the kitchen, the clatter of dishes, Montana’s sharp laugh cutting through the morning quiet.
I slipped in through the side door and made my way upstairs without being seen, locking myself in the bathroom of the master suite to think.
Christmas. That was my answer.
Christmas morning was in thirteen days. Thirteen days to watch, to wait, to gather information about what Heath was really planning.
Thirteen days to figure out if my marriage could be saved, if the man I had loved for eleven years was still in there somewhere, buried under the silence and the secrets.
And then, on Christmas morning, I would tell him about the baby.
I could see it already. The gift wrapped in gold paper.
Booties, small and soft, and underneath them the two tests themselves, because he would want the proof and because I wanted him to hold the exact plastic sticks I had been holding on a pharmacy floor at six in the morning while I thought my marriage was over.
Heath opening it while the fire crackled and the tree glittered and the house smelled of pine and cinnamon.
His face changing as he understood. His eyes finding mine.
The moment stretching between us, filled with everything we had been too afraid to say.
It could be a reset. A new beginning. The thing that finally broke through the wall he had built between us and brought my husband back to me.
Or it could change nothing. It could be too late. He could look at that gift and feel trapped instead of blessed, could see the baby as a complication instead of a miracle, could resent me for tying him to a marriage he had already mentally left.
I pressed my hands over my face and took another deep breath.
I would give him a grace period. Thirteen days to show me who he really was now, to prove that the man I married was still in there. I would watch him. I would watch Kendall. I would pay attention to every glance and every whispered conversation and every mysterious text message.
And if what I found confirmed my worst fears, if Heath truly had decided to leave me for another woman, then at least I would know. At least I could stop wondering and start planning for a future that didn’t include him.
The thought made my chest ache so badly I could hardly breathe.
I walked out of the bathroom and sat down on the edge of our bed, the bed where Heath and I had slept together for nine years, where we had made love and whispered secrets and planned a life that now felt like a fiction I had invented.
I remembered the day we met.
It was October of my sophomore year. I was twenty.
He was twenty-four and three years into a doctorate, which meant he had no business being in the undergraduate lab at eleven at night, and had been finding excuses to be in it anyway.
I was in the engineering lab, hunched over a schematic that wasn’t working, trying to figure out why my calculations kept coming out wrong.
I had been there for hours. My coffee had gone cold.
My eyes were burning. I was seriously considering throwing my laptop across the room when a voice behind me said, “The coefficient on your third equation is off by a factor of ten.”
I turned around, ready to tell whoever it was to mind their own business, and found Heath Fairchild looking at my screen with an expression of mild academic interest.
I knew who he was, of course. Everyone in the engineering program knew who Heath Fairchild was.
Old money, brilliant mind, the department’s favorite son, the one the professors said would have the field by the throat inside a decade.
He was four years and one entire degree ahead of me.
He was also, at that particular moment, reading over my shoulder.
He had a pencil behind his ear and ink on the side of his hand and his sleeves were shoved to the elbow, and I remember thinking, with the crystalline stupidity of a twenty-year-old at eleven at night, oh no.
“Excuse me?” I said.
He pointed at my screen. “There. See it? You dropped a decimal point somewhere. That’s why nothing is adding up.”
I looked at where he was pointing. I looked at my calculations. I felt my face flush hot with embarrassment because he was right, the error was so obvious I couldn’t believe I had missed it, and this stranger had spotted it in about three seconds.
“Thanks,” I muttered, already turning back to my work.
“I’m Heath,” he said, as if I didn’t know. As if anyone in that lab didn’t know.
“I know who you are.”
“Do you?” He pulled out the chair next to me and sat down without being invited. “Then you have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know who you are.”
“Delphine.” I didn’t look up from my screen. “Delphine Roux.”
“Delphine.” He said my name slowly, like he was tasting it. “That’s pretty. French?”
“My grandmother was from Lyon.”
“Are you always this friendly, or am I just lucky?”
I finally looked at him then. Really looked.
He was handsome in that effortless way wealthy people often were, with good bones and expensive clothes and an easy confidence that came from never having had to worry about anything in his life.
But there was more there too. A light in his eyes that looked almost like genuine curiosity.
“I’m trying to work,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me.”
He should have left. Any normal person would have taken the hint and walked away. But Heath Fairchild just smiled, a slow grin that transformed his whole face from handsome to devastating, and said, “Let me buy you a coffee. To apologize for interrupting.”
“I have coffee.”
“That coffee has been sitting there for at least two hours. It’s practically a crime against caffeine. Let me buy you a fresh one.”
I should have said no. I had a project due in three days and a midterm to study for and absolutely no time for distractions. But the way he was looking at me, warm and interested and completely unexpected, made me want to say yes.
“Fine,” I said. “One coffee. Then you leave me alone.”
He didn’t leave me alone. That one coffee turned into another, and then dinner, and then long walks across campus talking about everything from structural engineering to the philosophy of beauty.
He was smarter than I had expected. Funnier.
More curious about the world and less convinced of his own importance.
We were friends for a year and a half before he kissed me. Eighteen months of late nights in the library, of study sessions that turned into debates, of learning each other’s minds before we ever touched each other’s bodies.
The night he kissed me was in the spring of my junior year. I was twenty-one. We were sitting on the steps outside the engineering building, watching the sunset paint the sky in shades of orange and pink, and he said, “I think I’m in love with you.”
I didn’t believe him. Rich boys didn’t fall in love with middle-class girls from Boston. Rich boys had fun with girls like me and then married girls like Kendall, girls who knew the right forks and the right families and the right way to navigate a world I had never belonged to.
But he was so earnest. So certain. He took my face in his hands and looked at me like I was the answer to a question he had been asking his whole life, and then he kissed me with a tenderness that made my heart crack open.
He proposed a year later, the week I turned twenty-two. We were married that autumn, in a ceremony that Montana tried to sabotage at every turn and that Heath defended with a ferocity I had never seen in him before.
“She’s my wife,” he had said to his mother, the night before the wedding, when Montana had made one final attempt to talk him out of it. “She’s going to be my wife, and you can either accept that or you can stay home tomorrow. Those are your only options.”
Montana had come to the wedding. She had smiled for the photographs and kissed my cheek and told everyone how happy she was for her son.
Then she had spent the next nine years making my life quietly miserable, and Heath had slowly stopped defending me, and somewhere along the way we had both forgotten who we used to be.
I sat on our bed and pressed my hands over my face, trying to hold in the grief that wanted to spill out.
We were so good once. That was what I couldn’t stop thinking. We were so good, and I didn’t know when we had started to become this.
I had given up so much for this marriage.
Not the work. The work I kept, and the work was good.
But the person I had thought I would become had been set down somewhere around my twenty-third birthday and never picked back up, and I had folded my whole life into building Heath’s and told myself the charity was the same thing, and it was not the same thing.
And I didn’t regret it, which was the worst part. Even now, even with everything crumbling around me, I didn’t regret loving him. I didn’t regret choosing him.
I just wished he had chosen me back.
Thirteen days. I had thirteen days to figure out if there was anything left worth saving. Thirteen days to watch my husband and his ex and the mother who had never wanted me in this family. Thirteen days to find the truth and decide what to do with it.
I stood up from the bed. I straightened my clothes. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a woman who looked tired and scared and completely unprepared for what was coming.
Too bad. That woman was all I had.
I went downstairs, following the sound of voices toward the kitchen. I needed to eat, even if my stomach rebelled against it. The baby needed nutrients, and needed me to be stronger than I felt.
Montana was in the kitchen when I got there, standing at the counter with a cup of tea, scrolling through her phone. She didn’t acknowledge my presence. She rarely did when we were alone.
I walked to the refrigerator, opened it, scanned the contents for anything my stomach might accept.
“You look absolutely dreadful, Delphine.”
I turned around slowly. Montana was watching me now, her eyes cold and knowing.
“Thank you,” I said. “You look rested.”
Montana smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.
“I do, don’t I. It’s remarkable what a clear conscience will do for the complexion.
” She set her phone face down on the counter.
“You, on the other hand, drift through this house like a ghost. Pale. Twitchy. Pretending everything is fine, pretending you don’t notice that your husband can barely stand to look at you. ”
The words landed like blows, each one carefully aimed at the places that hurt the most. I made myself hold her gaze, made myself keep my voice steady.
“I know you’ve never liked me, Montana. You don’t need to pretend otherwise when we’re alone. But I’m still your son’s wife, and this is still my home, and you don’t get to speak to me that way.”
Her smile widened. “For now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Montana set down her teacup with a delicate clink. “It means that you should enjoy it while it lasts, dear. Because nothing lasts forever. Especially not the things we think we deserve.”
She picked up her phone and walked out of the kitchen, leaving me standing by the open refrigerator, my hand pressed against my stomach where a new life was growing, my heart pounding with a fear I couldn’t name.
For now.
The words echoed in my head as I closed the refrigerator door.
Thirteen days. I had thirteen days to find out what she meant.
And I was starting to think I wasn’t going to like the answer.