9. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
The rental house is a disaster.
Peeling paint. Weedy yard. A front porch that creaks ominously under any weight over a hundred pounds. The bathroom tiles are cracked, the kitchen cabinets are older than I am, and there’s a suspicious water stain on the ceiling that the landlord swears is “nothing to worry about.”
It’s mine. That’s what matters.
The lawyers froze the house the day I filed - nobody lives in it until a judge says so. Fine by me. I changed the locks for spite, not for keeps. I wasn’t going to raise her in a crime scene.
I’ve been here three days.
***
The shower has four knobs.
Not one. Not two. Four, arranged in a diamond, and none of them are labeled, and I have been standing in this tub in my underwear for six minutes turning them in various combinations while cold water hits me in the sternum.
The landlord said it’s got character.
I turn the top one. Nothing. I turn the left one.
The showerhead makes a sound like a man clearing his throat and produces nothing.
I turn them both, and the water goes from cold to scalding in the space of a breath, and I get out of the way of my own shower like it’s attacking me, one hand under my belly, and my foot slips on the tile and I catch myself on the towel bar and the towel bar comes out of the wall.
I sit down on the edge of the tub with a towel bar in my hand.
In my old bathroom the water came on at one temperature and it was the right one, because Cedrick had the fixtures replaced the year we moved in, and I never once thought about it.
I never thought about it. Somebody handed me a life where the water was always right and I said thank you and I stopped looking.
I’m still holding the towel bar.
“Okay,” I say out loud, to nobody, in someone else’s bathroom. “Okay.”
My daughter kicks, once, hard, right under my ribs.
“I know,” I tell her. “I’m working on it.”
My mother calls four times on Tuesday. I tell her I’m fine, which is a word I’ve started using the way other people use goodbye.
Isaac shows up Wednesday with a truck full of secondhand furniture and a toolbox.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I say from the doorway.
“I know.” He’s already hauling a dresser up the porch steps. “You going to help or just supervise?”
I grab the other end.
He doesn’t ask for permission or wait for invitations. He just appears.
Today it’s the dresser, which arrived in the truck bed as a rumor of a dresser and is now nine hundred pieces on the nursery floor.
“This instruction manual was written by a sadist,” Isaac mutters, squinting at a diagram that’s clearly been designed to cause suffering.
He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by wooden panels and mysterious hardware bags labeled A through J.
His hair is falling across his forehead.
His t-shirt is riding up slightly, revealing a strip of tan stomach.
Don’t look at his stomach.
I look away.
“I think the screws in bag C are supposed to go in after the screws in bag D.”
“That’s what it says, but look at this picture.” He holds up the manual, jabbing at an illustration. “That’s clearly wrong. They’ve got the support rail on the wrong side.”
“Maybe it’s a mirror image?”
“It’s an abomination is what it is.”
I laugh - actually laugh - and the sound surprises both of us. It feels strange. Foreign. Like I’m borrowing someone else’s joy.
“What?” Isaac asks, looking up at me.
“Nothing. It’s just-” I shake my head. “I didn’t think I’d be laughing this soon.”
“Why not?”
“My marriage ended a week ago. I’m supposed to be devastated.”
“Are you?”
I consider the question. Really consider it.
“I’m devastated about what I lost. The future I thought I was building. The partner I thought I had.” I lean against the doorframe, one hand resting on my belly. “But I’m not devastated about losing him. That’s the part I can’t figure out. I should miss him. I don’t.”
Isaac is quiet for a moment, turning a screw between his fingers.
“Maybe you already mourned him,” he says finally. “Maybe you’ve been mourning him for months, without knowing it. All those nights he didn’t come home. All those times he chose her over you. That’s not nothing. That’s a thousand small losses.”
The words hit somewhere deep.
“That’s… actually really insightful. Have you been reading self-help books or something?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think.” He doesn’t look at me. “About marriages. About loss. About what I’d do differently if I had the chance.”
The air between us shifts. Thickens.
I should change the subject. I should go downstairs and unpack another box. I should not be standing in this nursery, watching Isaac Wren build my daughter’s furniture, feeling things I have absolutely no business feeling.
“I should let you work,” I say, but I don’t move.
“You could help.”
“I don’t know anything about furniture assembly.”
“Neither do I. That’s why it’s taking so long.” He pats the floor beside him. “Come be confused with me.”
Don’t sit next to him. Don’t get close. You know what happens when you get close.
I sit next to him.
We’re shoulder to shoulder now, both studying the instruction manual like it contains the secrets of the universe. I can feel the heat radiating off his body. I can smell him - the workshop smell, and underneath it that darker one I’ve been trying not to think about for weeks.
“Hand me the Phillips head,” he says.
I don’t know which one is the Phillips head, but I pick up a screwdriver at random and hold it out. Our fingers brush during the exchange.
My breath catches.
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
“That’s a flathead.”
“Sorry.”
I hand him the other one.
This time when our fingers touch, neither of us pulls away immediately. Just a beat too long. Just enough to notice.
Isaac clears his throat and focuses on the dresser with sudden intensity.
Ten minutes later, he leans past me to grab a drawer panel, and his chest brushes my shoulder.
Neither of us moves, and the not-moving goes on long enough to become a decision.
He’s close enough that I can feel the heat of him through his shirt, close enough that his breathing has gone shallow and uneven in a way I can hear, and if I turned my head even slightly my mouth would land somewhere along his jaw, and both of us know it, and neither of us is doing anything about it.
“Sorry,” he says, and doesn’t move away.
“It’s fine.” I don’t move either. “You’re fine. It’s a small room. It’s a very small room, actually, whoever designed this house did not anticipate two adults and a dresser.”
“I could move.”
“You could.”
“I’m not going to.”
“I noticed that.”
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there, and every part of me goes hot at once.
We shouldn’t. He’s Cedrick’s best friend. It’s been a week. I’m eight months pregnant with another man’s child and there is a screwdriver on the floor between us and I am doing this in my daughter’s nursery.
Pull away. Right now. Pull away.
But his breath is warm against my cheek and he is looking at me like the dresser stopped existing an hour ago, and I have been lonely for so long that I’ve stopped being able to tell the difference between lonely and normal-
He pulls back first, dragging a hand down his face like he’s wiping something off it.
“I should finish this,” he says, and his voice comes out wrecked enough that we both pretend not to hear it.
“Right. Yes. The dresser. That’s the thing we’re doing.”
“That’s the thing we’re doing.”
“Because it’s a dresser and it needs assembling and that’s a completely normal reason for a man to be in a house at four in the afternoon.”
“Chantal.”
“I’m going to go get us some water,” I announce, to nobody, and leave.
In the kitchen I grip the counter with both hands and stand there breathing like I’ve come up from somewhere deep, and I run the arithmetic that women have been running in kitchens since kitchens were invented.
Nothing happened. That’s true. Nothing did. He leaned past me for a drawer panel and his chest touched my shoulder and neither of us moved and then he went back to work, and if I described it out loud to my mother she’d ask me what the problem was.
His eyes went to my mouth. Also true. Both things are true, which is the entire problem, because I have spent four years being a woman who did not notice things, and I have exactly one piece of evidence that I’m no longer that woman, and it’s this: I know exactly what I wanted him to do, and I know exactly how long I waited to see if he’d do it.
I press my forehead against the cabinet door and let the cool of it work.
I wanted him to kiss me.
Eight months pregnant with my cheating husband’s baby, living in a rental with a water stain shaped like Ohio, and I stood in my daughter’s nursery and waited for Isaac Wren to kiss me, and when he didn’t I was disappointed. Not relieved. Disappointed.
***
I don’t sleep that night. I lie on the air mattress and watch the ceiling and take an inventory of everything I’ve lost, which turns out to be mostly a list of things I thought I had: the future I’d planned down to the paint color, the family I was assembling like furniture, the woman I was at the center of it - happy wife, soon-to-be mother, someone whose life was proceeding according to schedule.
That woman is dead. I killed her at the dinner party, on purpose, in front of witnesses.
The woman who’s left… I don’t know her yet.
The knock comes when the night is at its darkest and I’m off the air mattress before I’ve finished being asleep, one hand flat on my belly, running the only math available: Cedrick found the house. Cedrick found the house and he’s been drinking and he’s on my porch.
I get to the window beside the door and put one eye to the gap in the blind.
Isaac. Pillow under one arm, sleeping bag over his shoulder, standing on my porch at three in the morning like a man reporting for a shift.
I open the door about six inches.
“What are you doing here?”
“The frame’s weak.” He says it the way you’d say morning.
“The bolts are fine, I put them in, they’re not the problem.
But the frame’s original and the strike plate’s going into forty-year-old pine, and anybody who wanted in would be in.
So I bought longer screws. They’re in the truck.
I’ll do it at a decent hour, I’m not going to run a drill at three. ”
“Isaac.”
“The screws are three inches. The ones in there now are three quarters. It’s not a lock problem, it’s a-”
“Isaac. It’s three in the morning.”
He stops. He looks at the pillow under his arm like he’s just now noticing it’s there, and the whole story falls out of him at once.
“Cedrick knows where you live.” He says it quieter.
“He got your address from his mother, and he’s been drinking since the hearing, and I’ve been lying in my bed for two hours doing the math on how long it takes me to get here from my house.
Twenty-two minutes. That’s the number. I could not make that number smaller no matter how I ran it, so I got in the truck. ”
The porch light does something to his face that I’d rather it didn’t.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he says. “You won’t know I’m here. I’ll be gone before you’re up.”
I should say no.
I should say I’m fine, that I’ve handled worse than Cedrick, that I did not survive four years of that marriage and one dinner party to start needing a man posted outside my bedroom like a dog.
I should absolutely not let Isaac Wren into this house at three in the morning while I’m wearing a nightgown you could read a newspaper through and I’ve been lying awake for four hours thinking about the exact second his eyes went to my mouth.
“There’s no floor space in there,” I hear myself say. “The boxes are still up. You’d be sleeping in a hallway, basically.”
“I’ve slept in worse.”
“That’s not a recommendation, that’s a diagnosis.”
“Chantal.” He shifts the sleeping bag on his shoulder. “It’s a hallway. I’m not asking for the bed.”
And there it is - he’s given me the out, the polite fiction, the version where this is about the door frame. All I have to do is take it.
I open the door the rest of the way and step aside.
An hour later, I’m still awake.
Isaac’s breathing has evened out into the slow rhythm of sleep, and in the darkness, I can just make out the shape of him - a large, solid presence taking up half my bedroom floor.
He came here to protect me. In the middle of the night. Without being asked.
Cedrick would never.
I stare at the ceiling and try not to think about the man on my floor. Try not to imagine what it would feel like to climb down from this air mattress and curl up against his chest. Try not to wonder if his skin would be warm, if his arms would wrap around me, if he’d wake up and pull me closer-
Stop. Just stop.
“I should have told you sooner.”
His voice makes me jump. I thought he was asleep.
“Told me what?”
“In Melissa’s kitchen. I gave you the year, and the hotel, and the part where I believed him.” A pause, rustling in the darkness. “I left out the part where I was relieved. He said it was over and I let myself believe it, because believing him meant I got to keep sitting at your table.”
I stare at the ceiling, processing this.
“And now?”
“Now I realize I was a coward.” His voice is rough, raw. “I was trying to protect myself, not you. And I’m sorry.”
The silence stretches between us like a living thing.
Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I reach down from the air mattress and find his hand in the dark.
His fingers close around mine. Warm. Certain. Real.
My heart is pounding. This feels like a line we’re crossing. This feels like something we can’t take back.
You shouldn’t be holding his hand in the dark.
You shouldn’t want this as much as you do.
Neither of us speaks.
His thumb traces a slow circle on my palm.
I close my eyes and feel the touch everywhere - down my arm, across my collarbone, pooling low in my belly.
This is dangerous.
I don’t let go.
My phone lights the ceiling suddenly - the glow harsh and unwelcome.
CEDRICK: I know he’s there. My mother is right. You planned this. You and Isaac. I’m going to prove it.
Isaac’s hand tightens on mine.
And I realize, with a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature, that whatever this is between us - this wanting, this gravitational pull - it’s going to be used against me.
But lying here in the dark, feeling his thumb trace slow circles on my skin, I can’t bring myself to care.