13. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
My head was pounding, a dull throb behind my eyes that made the fluorescent hospital lights feel like tiny daggers. The doctor was still talking, her voice a steady stream of medical advice that I could barely process.
“The baby is healthy,” she was saying. “You’re eleven weeks along. But I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to maintain proper nutrition and hydration, especially in the first trimester. Morning sickness can make that difficult, I know, but you need to try.”
Eleven weeks. I had known, of course. I had been counting the days, the weeks, the small milestones that marked the baby’s growth inside me. But hearing it said out loud, in front of Heath, made it suddenly and terrifyingly real.
I risked a glance at my husband.
He was still sitting in the chair beside my bed, but he looked like a man who had been turned to stone. His face was pale, his eyes fixed on me with an expression I couldn’t read. Shock, certainly. And underneath it, what looked almost like grief.
“Mr. Fairchild?” The doctor was looking at him with concern. “Are you all right?”
“I...” He cleared his throat. “Yes. I’m... I need a moment.”
I watched him press his hands against his face, his shoulders shaking with what might have been a breath or might have been a sob. I had never seen Heath like this. Undone. Stripped of all his careful control.
“I’ll give you two some privacy,” the doctor said gently. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with the prescription for those supplements.”
She left, closing the door behind her, and then it was just the two of us in the small hospital room. The silence stretched out, heavy and suffocating.
Heath lowered his hands and looked at me. His eyes were red, wet with tears he wasn’t bothering to hide.
“You’re pregnant,” he said, his voice down to almost nothing.
“Yes.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since before Christmas.” I forced myself to hold his gaze, even though every instinct was screaming at me to look away.
“I found out the morning after I read that text on your phone. I took a test in a pharmacy bathroom and sat on the floor crying because I didn’t know how to tell my husband he was going to be a father when I wasn’t even sure he wanted to be my husband anymore. ”
Heath flinched. The tears that had been gathering in his eyes finally spilled over, tracking down his cheeks.
“Del...”
“I was going to tell you the night of the gala.” The words were pouring out of me now, all the hurt and anger I had been holding back for weeks.
“That gold box? The one Kendall took out of my hands? Booties. And both tests, because I wanted you to hold them. I was going to give them to you. I was going to tell you about the pregnancy and hope that maybe, just maybe, it could be a new beginning for us.”
“The gold box.” Heath’s voice cracked. “I saw it on the floor. I didn’t... I didn’t know what was inside.”
“No. You didn’t.” I could hear the bitterness in my own voice, sharp and ugly.
“She opened it and she looked at me and she said my baby was a bastard. She said I should open a farm. She said it into my ear, Heath, quietly, so that nobody else in that room heard a single syllable of it, because she’s clever and she wanted them all to see me hit her for nothing.
And it worked. A ballroom full of people watched your wife break a woman’s nose over a Christmas present.
” My voice broke. “And then you walked in and went straight to her. You held her while I stood there with my heart breaking.”
“I didn’t know.” He was crying openly now, tears streaming down his face, his voice raw with anguish. “God, Del, I didn’t know. I walked in and I saw blood and I just... I reacted. I didn’t think. I didn’t know what she had said to you.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“Of course it would have mattered!” He stood up abruptly, the chair scraping back against the floor. He paced to the window and back, running his hands through his hair. “Christ. I’m such a fool. Such a complete and utter fool.”
I watched him pace, watched him fall apart, and I felt a stitch in my chest give way. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But a start. A crack in the wall I had built around my heart.
He stopped pacing and turned to face me. Then, slowly, he sank down onto his knees beside my bed.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was barely a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Del. For all of it. For the distance and the silence and the way I let you believe the worst about me. For not being there when you needed me. For choosing work over you, over us, over everything that actually matters.”
“Heath...”
“Please.” He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. His fingers were trembling. “Please let me explain. Not because I think it excuses anything, but because you deserve to know the truth.”
“Then say it,” I said. “You’ve been standing in doorways with your mouth open since September. Say the thing.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, whatever had been holding his face shut had come loose.
“The firm is opening a European branch,” he said.
“Paris first. Then London. It’s the biggest expansion in our history and it was my father’s whole life and I inherited it along with everything else.
” He swallowed. “Somebody has to go and run it. Move there. Build it out of nothing. Five years, minimum. Probably longer.”
The floor moved under me.
“And it has to be you,” I said.
“It has to be me.”
“Since when?”
“September.”
September. The word landed like a dropped plate. Three months of a man across the dinner table looking at the wall. Three months of asking what’s wrong and being told nothing. Three months of a locked room in my own house, and this was what had been inside it. Not a woman. A city.
“You’ve known since September,” I said, “and you let me believe you were sleeping with your ex.”
“I didn’t know you believed that. I swear to God, Del, I didn’t know until you screamed it at me in a parking lot.”
“Why?” It came out as a wail. I hated it. “Why not just tell me? Why is that the hard version? Heath, you’ve told me worse things than Paris. You told me your father was dying in a hospital corridor. Why is a building the thing you couldn’t say?”
“Because I would have been asking you to give up your whole life. Again.” His voice cracked straight down the middle.
“You did it once. You were twenty-two years old and you were going to build bridges and instead you built me, and you never once made me pay for it, and I’ve watched you sit in that house for nine years with a degree in a drawer and a mother-in-law who tells you which fork to use.
And then the one thing you made for yourself out of all of it, the only thing with your fingerprints on it, is that charity.
And I was going to walk in and ask you to put it in a box and get on a plane. ”
He was crying now. He wasn’t bothering to stop.
“So I thought if I could just solve it first. If I could find a version where nobody had to lose anything, I could bring you the answer instead of the question. And then I could ask you and it wouldn’t cost you anything.
” He laughed, a wrecked sound. “Three months, Del. Three months of spreadsheets. There was never a version. There was only ever the question. And I was too much of a coward to hand it to you, so I sat in my study and I let my mother have you.”
The room was very quiet. Somewhere down the corridor a trolley went past, and someone laughed, and the world carried on being an ordinary Tuesday for everyone in it except us.
“I heard you,” I said. “Through the door. At my parents’ house. Every word.”
“You listened to them?”
“Late at night. When I couldn’t sleep and I was weak.
” I looked down at our joined hands, at his thumb tracing circles on my palm.
“You said there was a reason. You said it and then you didn’t say what it was, and you have no idea what that did to me, Heath.
Do you know what I filled it in with? Every night for three weeks?
I wanted to believe there was an explanation.
I wanted to believe the man I married wasn’t capable of what your mother said he was. ”
“But you couldn’t.”
“How could I?” I pulled my hand away, curling it against my chest. “You said it to a door, Heath. You couldn’t even say it to my face, you said it to two inches of wood because that was safe, because a door can’t look back at you.
And even if I believed every word, it doesn’t change what you did.
It doesn’t give me back three months of thinking I was losing my mind. ”
He nodded, his jaw tight. “I know.”
“I sat in that house every night wondering if you were going to come home. Wondering if you still wanted to be married to me. Wondering what I had done wrong to make you stop looking at me the way you used to.” The tears I had been fighting finally broke free, sliding down my cheeks.
“I’ve spent three months grieving a marriage that apparently wasn’t even dead yet.
Do you understand how that feels? Do you have any idea what that does to a person? ”
“No.” His voice was barely audible. “I don’t. And I’m not going to pretend I do.”
“I have to protect my heart, Heath. And I have to protect this baby.” My hand went flat against my stomach, where there was still nothing to feel and would not be for weeks.
“I can’t just forgive you because you showed up at a hospital and cried.
I can’t pretend the last three months didn’t happen. ”
And then it came up out of me, the thing I had been carrying under everything else for three weeks, and my voice did not sound like my voice at all.
“Your mother tried to hit me.”
He went absolutely still.
“What?”