5. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
Christmas Day arrived wrapped in snow.
I woke to find the world transformed outside our window, everything blanketed in white, the gardens and the lawn and the old stone walls all softened by a fresh layer of powder that sparkled in the early morning light.
It was beautiful. The kind of morning that made you believe in magic and second chances and all the things that Christmas was supposed to represent.
I lay in bed for a few minutes, just looking at the snow, trying to hold on to the peace that came with it. Today was the day. After thirteen days of watching and waiting and driving myself slowly insane with suspicion, today was the day I would tell Heath about the baby.
He had been away for the last few days on business. Some meeting in New York that couldn’t wait, he had said, firm business that needed his attention. I had let him go without argument, too tired to fight, too uncertain to demand explanations that would only make things worse.
But he was coming back today. He would be here in time for the Fairchild Christmas Gala tonight, in the ballroom of the Bellcliff Club, where it had been held every December for forty years.
It was not my event. It had never been my event.
It was the family’s oldest and most self-congratulatory tradition, and I had spent four months organizing it anyway, because that was what Fairchild wives did.
We would dress up and smile for the cameras and play the part of the happy Fairchild couple one more time.
And then, after everyone left, after the house was quiet and we were finally alone, I would give him the gift that might change everything.
I want to be honest about what I felt when I thought that sentence, because I’ve spent a great deal of time since then trying to make myself sound better than I was.
What I felt was relief. And underneath the relief, humiliatingly, was the other thing.
A hundred and five days. My husband had been away for four of them and was coming home tonight, and some appalling animal in the base of my spine had already worked out that after the gala there would be a car, and after the car there would be a staircase, and at the top of the staircase there was a room with a door that locked.
And it did not care that I had spent three weeks watching him for evidence.
It did not care about the text on his phone.
It had put the whole thing on a shelf and gone shopping for underwear.
That’s what nobody tells you about being the wife who suspects.
They tell you about the crying. They do not tell you that you’ll be standing in your own kitchen at eleven in the morning, eight weeks pregnant, wondering whether the man you might be divorcing will put his hands on you tonight, and that you’ll want him to, and that wanting him to will feel like a diagnosis.
I got out of bed and pulled on my robe, moving quietly through the house. Montana and Kendall would still be sleeping at this hour. Neither of them saw any reason to be awake before ten, and I had come to treasure these early morning hours as the only time I had the house to myself.
I made my way down to the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood there in the quiet, listening to the house tick. I grabbed a piece of toast from the bread box and ate it standing up, not because I was hungry but because the baby needed food whether my stomach wanted it or not.
The gift was in my bedroom closet, a gold box with a white ribbon.
I had bought it last week, a tiny pair of knitted booties in soft yellow, gender neutral, impossibly small.
Underneath them, folded in tissue, both tests.
I had thought about throwing the tests away a dozen times.
I never did. I wanted him to hold them. Not a retelling, not a photograph.
The proof itself, the same two sticks I had gripped on a cold bathroom floor while I believed my marriage was already over.
The sight of them in the store had made me cry, which had earned me concerned looks from the saleswoman and a hasty explanation about hormones that wasn’t entirely a lie.
Tonight, I kept telling myself. Tonight you’ll give them to him. Tonight everything will change.
Maybe he would be happy. Maybe the baby would be what finally brought the wall down between us. Maybe we could start again, build new rooms on the foundation of what we used to have.
Or maybe it was already too late. Maybe he had already decided, already made his plans, already chosen a future that didn’t include me. Maybe the baby would just make everything more complicated, more painful, more impossible to untangle.
I didn’t know. That was the hell of it. After thirteen days of watching, of paying attention to every glance and every whisper, I still didn’t know what my husband was planning.
He had been quieter since his mother and Kendall arrived.
More withdrawn. But he hadn’t done anything I could point to and call evidence.
No secret meetings. No whispered phone calls.
No texts that I could see, though I had stopped checking his phone after that first night. I couldn’t bring myself to do it again.
Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe the text I found had been about business, about the European expansion the firm was supposedly planning. Maybe “building something great together” was about offices and infrastructure, not romance.
Maybe I was driving myself crazy over nothing.
I finished my toast and went upstairs to shower and dress. The house was slowly coming to life around me. I could hear voices in the hallway, footsteps on the stairs, the distant sound of Montana giving orders on matters that did not need her input.
I ignored it all. I had learned, over the past three weeks, to tune out the constant background noise of my mother-in-law’s presence. It was the only way to stay sane.
***
By mid-afternoon the club had sent through the walkthrough photographs.
White flowers cascading from every surface.
Silver candles on every table. A tree that touched the ballroom ceiling, hung with ornaments that had outlived five Fairchild brides and were insured for more than my parents’ house.
It looked beautiful. Magazine beautiful.
The kind of beautiful that made you forget what was rotting underneath.
I scrolled through them twice and approved the lot and felt absolutely nothing.
I was in the kitchen, wrapping the last of the personal gifts I needed to finish before the party.
One for Blair Beaumont, my closest friend in Newport, who had become a lifeline over the past few months.
One for Blythe Chadwick, who always knew how to make me laugh.
Small tokens, carefully chosen, nothing that would attract attention or require explanation.
And there, in the middle of the table, the gold box. Open. The lid beside it. The booties sitting on their square of tissue and the two tests laid out next to them, side by side, both windows showing the same two lines. Heath’s gift. Our future, whatever that turned out to be.
The kitchen door swung open.
I looked up with my hands still in the box. I was expecting my husband, home early. I was expecting anyone but the person standing in the doorway.
It was Montana.
She was dressed for the gala already, hours early, in a silver gown that probably cost more than most people’s cars, because she liked to be at the club before the flowers were signed off so that she could tell someone the flowers were wrong.
Her hair was perfect. Her makeup was flawless.
And her eyes, when they landed on me, held a coldness that made my blood freeze in my veins.
She did not say anything at first. She did not have to.
I watched her eyes go down to the table, to the open box, to the two white sticks lying in the middle of it in a puddle of afternoon light, and I watched her understand.
It took her less than a second. It was the fastest I had ever seen that woman think.
I closed the lid. Too late, and too fast, and we both knew it.
“I thought I might find you here,” she said. “Hiding in the kitchen like a servant.”
I set down the ribbon I had been holding. My hands were not steady. “I’m not hiding. I’m wrapping gifts.”
“Of course you are.” Montana stepped into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut behind her. “Always so busy, aren’t you, Delphine? Always fluttering around, pretending to be useful, pretending you belong here.”
I should have walked away. I should have gathered my gifts and left the room and refused to engage with whatever game she was playing. But a note in her voice made me stay. A note that sounded almost like triumph.
“What do you want, Montana?”
She smiled. That thin, satisfied smile I had come to dread.
“I want you to understand your position.” She moved closer, her heels clicking against the kitchen tiles. “I want you to finally see the truth that everyone else in this family has known for years.”
“And what truth is that?”
“That you were never supposed to be here.” Montana’s voice had gone cold and precise, each word a carefully aimed weapon. “You were a mistake. A temporary lapse in judgment that my son has finally begun to correct.”
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the counter to hide it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.” She stopped a few feet away from me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, expensive and floral and enough to make my stomach turn.
“I think you’ve known for months now. You’ve seen the way he looks at you.
Or rather, the way he doesn’t. You’ve noticed how he can’t wait to leave every room you’re in.
You’ve felt the distance growing, haven’t you?
The silence that gets longer every day?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because everything she was saying was true, and we both knew it.