14. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
The doctor was still running through her instructions, checkups and rest and what to watch for. I nodded along, trying to absorb it all, but my mind kept drifting to the man standing beside my bed.
Heath hadn’t moved since he stood up. He was just standing there, his hand still wrapped around mine, his eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that made my skin warm.
“Before you go,” the doctor said, “I wanted to offer you the option of a more thorough check on the baby. An ultrasound. It’s not strictly necessary at this stage, but given the circumstances of your admission today, it might give you some peace of mind.”
I looked at Heath. He looked at me.
“Yes,” we said together.
The doctor smiled. “I’ll have the technician come in.”
She left, and we were alone again. The silence between us felt different now. Charged, somehow. Full of things neither of us knew how to say.
“Our first ultrasound,” Heath said quietly. “I didn’t think... I wasn’t sure I would ever get to...”
“I know.”
He sat down in the chair beside my bed, still holding my hand. I let him. It felt strange after weeks of distance, weeks of refusing to see him or speak to him. But strange wasn’t the same as wrong.
The technician arrived a few minutes later, a young woman with a cheerful smile and a cart full of equipment. She helped me adjust my position, asked me to lift my hospital gown, and then squeezed a cold gel onto my stomach that made me gasp.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “It warms up pretty quick.”
She pressed the ultrasound wand against my belly, moving it slowly, her eyes fixed on the monitor beside the bed. I couldn’t see the screen from my angle. I could only lie there, holding Heath’s hand, waiting.
“There we go,” the technician said softly. “There’s your baby.”
She turned the monitor so we could both see it. And there, in the middle of the grainy black and white image, was a small shape. Barely recognizable as human. More like a bean, really, with tiny buds that might someday be arms and legs.
“That’s...” Heath’s voice trailed off. He was staring at the screen with an expression of pure wonder.
“That’s your baby,” the technician confirmed. “Let me see if I can find the heartbeat.”
She adjusted a dial on the machine, pressed the wand a little deeper, and then a sound filled the room.
A heartbeat. Fast and steady and impossibly small, a rapid flutter that was somehow the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
Heath made a sound beside me. A choked, broken sound that I had never heard from him before. I turned to look at him and found tears streaming down his face, his hand pressed over his mouth, his whole body shaking.
“That’s our baby,” he whispered. “Del. That’s our baby.”
I was crying too. I hadn’t even realized it until I felt the tears sliding down my temples and into my hair. I reached for him, and he leaned forward, pressing his forehead against mine, our tears mingling.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
The technician quietly printed some images and slipped out of the room, leaving us alone with the sound of our baby’s heartbeat still echoing in my ears. Heath pulled back just enough to look at me, his face wet, his eyes red, but a light shining in them that I hadn’t seen in months.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for letting me be here for this.”
“You should have been here from the beginning.”
“I know.” He nodded, accepting the rebuke. “I should have been there for everything. I wasn’t. And I’m going to regret that for the rest of my life.”
I lifted my hand to his jaw, my fingers brushing against the tears on his cheek. It was such a familiar gesture, one I had made a thousand times during our marriage. But it felt different now. New, somehow. Fragile.
“We should get you discharged,” Heath said softly. “The doctor said you need rest. Real rest, not just sitting down for five minutes between tasks.”
“I know what the doctor said.”
“I know you know. I also know you’re terrible at following medical advice when you think there’s work to be done.”
I laughed despite myself. It felt strange, laughing with him. Strange and familiar and bittersweet.
The discharge process took another hour. Paperwork and prescriptions and a nurse who made me promise, twice, to follow every line of the discharge sheet. By the time we finally walked out of the hospital, the sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink.
I stopped in the parking lot, breathing in the cold evening air, trying to get my bearings.
“I don’t have a car here,” I said. “Blair drove me down. She’s still inside, she’ll be...”
“I already spoke to Blair.” Heath gestured toward a black sedan parked in the visitor’s lot.
“My assistant brought my car down. Blair is staying to run your gala, because she said if I let you get on a train in this state she would drown me in the harbor.” He shifted his weight.
“Let me drive you back to Boston. Please.”
“Heath...”
“Please.” He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. “Let me do this one thing. Let me take care of you, just for tonight.”
I looked up at him. He was so close. Close enough that I could see the shadow of stubble on his jaw, the way his breath fogged in the cold air. Close enough that if I leaned forward even slightly, our lips would touch.
His hand came up to my face.
He has enormous hands. I had somehow managed to forget the actual scale of them in three weeks, the way one of them could take the whole side of my jaw, the rough patch at the base of his fingers.
And everything below my ribs simply defected.
My mouth went dry. A low, stupid ache pulled tight and stayed tight, and I was standing in a hospital parking lot in January, eleven weeks pregnant, getting wet for a man I had a folder about.
My breath caught in my throat.
“There’s one thing I need you to know,” he said softly. “I’m thrilled about this baby. I’m terrified and overwhelmed and probably not ready, but I’m thrilled. And there’s no other woman in the world I would rather share this with.”
I felt myself melting. I hated it, hated that his words could still affect me this way after everything he had put me through.
But I couldn’t help it. He was standing there in the fading light, looking at me with all the love I had been afraid to believe in, and I wanted so badly to let myself fall back into his arms.
His thumb brushed across my cheek. He leaned in, his eyes dropping to my lips.
“Mrs. Fairchild!”
A nurse came running across the parking lot, waving a slip of paper over her head.
“Mrs. Fairchild, wait! The doctor forgot to give you this prescription. You need to start taking it immediately.”
I stepped back from Heath, my heart pounding, my face flushed. The nurse pressed the paper into my hand, apologized for interrupting, and hurried back toward the hospital entrance.
The moment was broken.
I looked at the prescription in my hand, then at Heath, who was watching me with an expression that was somehow both disappointed and hopeful.
“We should go,” I said. “It’s a long drive to Boston.”
“Yeah.” He took a breath, visibly composing himself. “Yeah, you’re right.”
A door had cracked open inside me during that almost moment. The same door I had slammed shut weeks ago, the one that led to all the feelings I had been trying to bury. I could feel those feelings now, pressing against the barrier I had built, demanding to be acknowledged.
I slammed the door shut again.
A cracked door was exactly how I had gotten hurt the first time. I had let myself believe in him, let myself trust him, and he had disappeared on me without a word. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Not until he proved he had earned it.
We walked to his car in silence. He opened the passenger door for me, helped me settle into the seat, made sure my seatbelt was fastened properly. Then he got behind the wheel and pulled out of the parking lot.
“The gala,” I said suddenly. “We’re missing the gala.”
“Blair and Blythe are covering.” Heath kept his eyes on the road.
“I put the word out that you were unwell and had to leave early, and for once in her life my mother is not going to argue with a story that gets you out of the room. Nobody is going to say a thing. And if anybody tries, they’ll have Winifred Ashcombe to answer to, and God help them. ”
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s the point.” He glanced at me.
“You already won. You did it yourself, in front of everyone, three hours from me, and the first I heard of it was somebody telling the story at the club like it was the best thing that had happened all winter.” A pause, and a look went across his face that I couldn’t read at seventy miles an hour.
“She won’t come at the charity again. She can’t.
You did that in the one room where she couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. She’ll find another angle.”
“No.” I shook my head, surprised by how touched I was. “No, that was... that was thoughtful.”
“I’m trying, Del.” His voice was quiet, earnest. “I know it doesn’t fix anything. I know I have a long way to go. But I’m trying.”
I didn’t answer. I just leaned my head against the window and watched the lights of the city slide past, thinking about everything that had happened today. The collapse. The hospital. The ultrasound. The almost kiss in the parking lot.
The three hour drive passed in a strange kind of companionable silence. We didn’t talk much, but the quiet didn’t feel hostile anymore. It felt gentler. A pause, maybe. A breath before whatever came next.
My parents’ house was dark when we pulled up to the curb. They had probably gone to bed early, the way they always did, trusting that I would let myself in.
Heath got out of the car and came around to open my door. He offered me his hand, and I took it, letting him help me out of the low seat. Then he walked me up the steps to the front door, his hand warm against the small of my back.
“Thank you,” I said, turning to face him. “For the drive. And for being there at the hospital.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” He was standing on the step below me, which put us almost at eye level. “That’s what husbands do.”
“Are we still that? Husband and wife?”
“I sent the papers back unsigned.” His eyes searched my face. “That should tell you plenty about what I want.”
“What you want and what I need aren’t the same thing.”
“I know.” He took a step back, giving me space. “Get some rest, Del. Take those supplements. And call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”
I nodded. I turned toward the door, my key already in my hand.
“Del?”
I looked back.
He was standing at the bottom of the steps, his hands shoved in his pockets, his breath fogging in the cold air. He looked lost. Hopeful. Terrified.
“Whatever it takes,” he said. “I meant that.”
“I know you did.”
I opened the door and stepped inside. The warmth of my parents’ house wrapped around me, familiar and safe. I turned to say goodbye, and through the narrowing gap I saw him standing there on the sidewalk, watching me, his face full of longing.
I closed the door.
Then I leaned against it and pressed my hand against my belly, against eleven weeks of a person nobody could see.
He had meant it. That was the trouble. He had absolutely meant it.
I wanted to take him at his word. God, how I wanted to.
But wanting and believing were two very different things.