11. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
New Year’s Day arrived gray and cold, the sky heavy with clouds that promised snow but never delivered.
I stood at the window of my childhood bedroom and watched the bare trees sway in the wind. A new year. A new beginning. That was what everyone always said, wasn’t it? New year, new you.
I pressed my hand against my stomach. Nothing to feel. Nine weeks in and there was nothing there at all, not to my hand and not to anybody else’s eye, which was the strangest part of the whole business. The single largest fact of my life was completely invisible. New me. Right.
The morning sickness had gotten worse over the past week.
Every morning I woke up nauseous, dragging myself to the bathroom before anyone else was awake, trying to keep my retching quiet so my parents wouldn’t worry.
They knew I was struggling. They didn’t know about the baby.
I wasn’t ready to tell them. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.
But I couldn’t hide in this room forever. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life crying over a man who had broken me. At some point, I had to start building again.
So I opened my laptop and pulled up the email I had been avoiding for days.
It was from a former colleague, someone I had worked with in the months between my degree and my wedding, back when I still called myself an engineer out loud.
She had heard through the grapevine that I was back in Boston.
She had a project that needed an engineer, someone with my specific background in structural design. Was I interested?
I read the email three times, my heart pounding.
My own project. My own name on the work for the first time in nine years.
The thought terrified me. What if I had lost my edge?
What if I couldn’t do it anymore? What if I tried and failed and proved that Montana had been right all along, that I was nothing more than a middle-class girl playing dress up in a world I didn’t belong to?
The terror was better than the grief.
I typed a response before I could talk myself out of it. Yes, I was interested. Yes, I had availability. When could we meet to discuss the details?
I hit send and then sat there staring at the screen, my hands shaking. Choosing myself. That was what this was. Choosing the woman I used to be, the woman I still was underneath all the society polish and the broken heart.
It felt like jumping off a cliff. It felt like flying.
***
Around three in the afternoon, a knock came at the front door. I heard my mother answer it, heard voices I didn’t recognize, and then my mother was calling up the stairs.
“Delphine? You have visitors.”
I went down to find Blair and Blythe standing in the foyer, both of them bundled in winter coats and carrying bags that clinked when they moved.
“Happy New Year,” Blair said, pulling me into a hug.
She held on a beat longer than usual, and when she let go she squeezed my shoulder once, hard, and glanced past me down the hall to where my mother’s voice was coming from the kitchen.
Then she lifted the bag in her hand so only I could see inside it, and mouthed one word at me.
Cider.
I could have kissed her.
“Thank you,” I mouthed back.
“I know everything,” she said out loud, cheerfully, for the benefit of the room. “It’s my whole personality.”
Blythe stepped forward and hugged me too, her embrace warm and fierce, and I felt her tuck a second bottle into my hands as she did it. Cider as well. Blair had briefed her in the car, then. Of course she had.
“We’ve been worried about you. You stopped answering texts, and I was going to drive up here alone if Blair hadn’t offered to come with me.”
“You drove three hours to bring me dinner?”
“We drove three hours because you’re our friend,” Blythe said firmly. “And friends don’t let friends spend New Year’s Day alone with their parents. No offense, Mr. and Mrs. Roux.”
My father, who had appeared in the doorway to investigate the commotion, raised his hands. “None taken. We were just saying the house could use some younger energy.”
My mother was already reaching for the bags. “Let me help you with those. The kitchen is this way. Delphine, set the table. We’re having a party.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue. And honestly, I didn’t want to. The sight of these two women, these friends who had driven all this way just to make sure I wasn’t alone, loosened a knot in my chest.
Maybe I wasn’t as isolated as I felt. Maybe there were people who cared about me for myself, not for my husband’s name or my place in Newport society.
Dinner was louder and warmer than anything I had experienced in weeks.
Blair and Blythe filled the room with chatter and laughter, telling stories about the Christmas parties I had missed and the scandals that had erupted in my absence.
My parents relaxed into the chaos, my father actually laughing at Blythe’s story about a congressman and a Christmas tree.
I picked at my food, trying to keep down the crackers I had been surviving on all day. The nausea was constant now, a low-level misery that never quite went away. But I smiled and nodded and let the conversation wash over me, grateful for the distraction.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” Blythe said at one point, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand.
“I’ve been texting you since Christmas, and all I get are one word responses.
I had to hear about the fight at the gala from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from their housekeeper. ”
“I’m sorry.” And I was. Blythe had been checking on me constantly, sending care packages to my parents’ house, refusing to let me disappear into my grief. “I just... I didn’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. You just have to let us show up.” Blythe’s eyes were soft with understanding. “That’s what friends do, Del. We show up.”
My eyes stung and I looked hard at the ceiling until it passed. I had cried enough for one lifetime. No more tears. Not tonight.
After dinner, while Blair helped my mother with the dishes and my father took Blythe on a tour of his tiny backyard garden that was buried under snow, I slipped away to check my phone.
One new voicemail. Heath’s number.
I shouldn’t listen to it. I had promised myself I would stop listening to them, stop torturing myself with his voice, stop hoping for what was never going to happen.
But I was weak. I was so weak where he was concerned, and I hated myself for it.
I went to the upstairs bathroom, locked the door, and pressed play.
“Del.” His voice was steadier than the last message, but there was still an edge of desperation underneath. “I know you’re not taking my calls. I know you’re probably deleting these without listening. But I have to try. I have to keep trying, because giving up on you is not a skill I have.”
I sank down onto the edge of the bathtub, my legs suddenly unable to hold me.
“I talked to my mother. I threw her and Kendall out of the house. I should have done it months ago. I should have done it the day they arrived. I was an idiot, Del. I was so wrapped up in my own problems that I didn’t see what they were doing to you, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
Tears were sliding down my cheeks now. I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound.
“There’s more, and I hate that I have to be the one to tell you.” A pause. “The Fairchild charity gala is in two weeks. And my mother is telling people you’re unwell. That you can’t do it anymore. She’s trying to take the charity off you, Del, quietly, the way she does everything.”
I went very still.
“She wants you gone. She’s saying you’re unstable. She’s saying you assaulted a guest at a family party.” A long breath. “She’s telling everyone who’ll listen, and people are listening, because she’s Montana and you’re the girl I married.”
The phone was shaking against my ear.
“I’m fighting it. I want you to know that I’m fighting it and I’m going to keep fighting it.
But you built that thing out of nothing and I’ve watched you build it, and if you’re not standing in that room in two weeks with your name on that program, she wins.
Not against me. Against you.” A breath. “That’s the only reason I’m telling you.
It isn’t a trick to get you in a room with me. I would be saying this if I were dead.”
The message ended. I sat there on the bathtub, my phone clutched in my hand, crying so hard I could barely breathe.
Damn him. Damn her. Damn all of them.
The charity was mine. It was the only thing in nine years that had been mine.
I had built it out of nothing but a checkbook and a Rolodex I was not supposed to have access to, had spent years cultivating donors and organizing events and turning a tax shelter with a nice name into roofs over real families.
My engineering degree had not left its drawer since I was twenty-two.
That charity was the only place I had put anything of myself and had it stay put.
And Montana Fairchild was going to take it off me, quietly, at a lunch, the way you take a plate from a child who’s stopped paying attention.
Going back meant facing him. Going back meant walking into a room full of people who had watched me break a woman’s nose and had spent a week deciding what it meant. Going back meant standing in front of Montana’s three votes and giving them a reason.
Good. Let them look. They were going to look anyway.
I heard a knock on the bathroom door.
“Del?” Blair’s voice, concerned. “You okay in there?”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and stood up, my legs shaky but functional.
“Fine,” I called back. “Just needed a minute.”
I looked at myself in the mirror. Red eyes. Blotchy cheeks. The face of a woman who had been crying far too much over a man who didn’t deserve her tears.