17. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
It has been a week since Cedrick’s threat.
Every evening at dusk, the same ritual. I pick up Isaac’s keys from the bowl by the door. He pretends not to see me do it. We orbit each other through dinner like the keys aren’t sitting on the counter between us, ticking.
Tonight, I hold them out before the sun finishes setting.
“It’s getting dark.”
“I know what time it is.” He doesn’t take them. He just looks at me over the dish towel, jaw set. “One more night of this, Chantal, and I’m going to lose my mind. You know that, right?”
“If they photograph your truck in my driveway, we’re writing his case for him.
” My voice comes out flat and rehearsed because it is rehearsed - I say it to myself every night around this time.
“Every night you stay over is another bullet for his lawyer. Caroline stood in that driveway and promised to say whatever it takes. Why would I hand her ammunition?”
“Then let them photograph it.” Quiet. Firm. He sets down the towel. “I’m not a secret, Chantal. I’m not something you did wrong.”
The keys shake, just slightly, in my hand.
“You think I want to send you home?” It comes out cracked. “I lie there listening to this house creak and I hate it. I hate every single minute of it. But if I lose her because I couldn’t sleep alone for a few goddamn months-”
“Hey. Hey.” He crosses the kitchen and closes both hands around mine, around the keys.
“You won’t lose her. No judge on earth is taking a baby from her mother because a man who loves her slept over.
But it’s your call. It’s always your call.
I’ll drive home every night until she’s in college if that’s what you need. ”
I look down at our hands. At the keys.
I drop them back in the bowl.
“Stay.”
It starts the way it always does now - his hands working the tension out of my lower back, where the baby’s weight has been staging a protest for weeks.
But his thumbs hit a spot that makes me gasp, and suddenly I’m turning in his arms, and his mouth is on mine, and we’re falling into each other the way we’ve been falling for weeks.
Slow. Deep. Unhurried.
His truck is in the driveway. Someone will photograph it. Someone will tell Cedrick’s lawyer, and his lawyer will write it down, and someday a judge will read a sentence about this exact moment-
Isaac’s mouth closes over my pulse and the sentence dissolves.
We shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. We-
“Stay with me,” he whispers, like he can hear the war in my head.
“I’m here.” I pull him down. “I’m right here.”
His name on my lips. His hands laced with mine against the headboard. The heat building between us until I’m shaking, until I’m-
The cramp hits without warning.
Sharp. Blinding. My gasp of pleasure becomes a scream, and Isaac is off me in an instant, his face white with panic.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t-” Another cramp, tightening across my belly like a fist. “I don’t know-”
“We’re going to the hospital. Now.”
“It might be nothing-”
“Chantal. Pants. Now.” He’s already throwing clothes at me, grabbing the go-bag from the closet - the go-bag he packed three weeks ago, because of course he did. “Nothing is a thing doctors get to tell us. Not you. Not tonight.”
He drives ninety miles an hour the whole way, one hand on the wheel and one crushing mine, talking nonstop.
“Okay. Breathing. There was a chapter about breathing. Chapter nine. Why can’t I remember chapter nine-”
“Isaac. Red light.”
“It was yellow.”
“It was a suggestion, apparently-”
“Everything’s going to be fine. You’re fine. She’s fine.” His knuckles are white on the wheel. “If I sent you into labor three weeks early I will never forgive myself. I want that on the record. I will never-”
“If you apologize one more time, I’m having this baby out of spite.”
“Noted.” A beat. “I’m still sorry.”
“ISAAC.”
False alarm.
Braxton Hicks contractions, the doctor explains, with the dry patience of a woman who has delivered this exact speech four times tonight. Completely normal at thirty-six weeks. Nothing to worry about.
“So it wasn’t-” Isaac’s ears are going red. “We didn’t - what we were doing before, it didn’t-”
“Sir.” The doctor doesn’t even look up from the chart. “You’d be amazed what doesn’t cause labor. And no - whatever you were doing before the contractions started didn’t cause them. She’s fine. The baby’s fine. Go home and get some rest.”
Isaac has never looked more mortified in his life. A nurse in the corner is very carefully not smiling.
“I thought-” he tries. “I was afraid-”
“I know.” The doctor pats his arm on her way out. “You’re all afraid. It’s very sweet and it changes nothing. Goodnight.”
In the parking lot, under the sodium lights, I finally let myself fall apart.
“What if something goes wrong?” The words come tumbling out, all of it, everything I’ve been holding in a fist for weeks. “Tonight it was nothing, but what if next time it’s not? What if I’m a terrible mother? What if she comes and I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m alone and I can’t-”
“Whoa, whoa. First of all-” Isaac cups my face in his hands, forcing me to meet his eyes. “You’re not alone. You have me. That’s not a variable anymore, that’s a constant. Second - you’re going to be incredible. That kid is the luckiest baby in the world.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’ve known you for five years. I know exactly who you are.
” His thumbs brush the tears off my cheeks.
“You want evidence? Fine. Exhibit A: you spent a month smiling at a man you wanted to bury, and you never cracked. Not once. Exhibit B: you nuked your marriage at a dinner party and walked out looking like a queen. You think a seven-pound insomniac is going to be the thing that breaks you?”
A wet, horrible laugh escapes me. “She might.”
“Then we’ll be broken together.” He presses his forehead to mine. “That’s the whole deal. That’s the entire arrangement.”
“Stay tonight,” I whisper into the space between us. “Please.”
“I wasn’t going to offer to leave.”
We fall asleep tangled together, his body curved around mine, his hand splayed over my belly like a promise.
The shouting pulls me out of sleep before the sun has fully risen.
“I know he’s in there! MY BABY! You’re keeping me from my own daughter!”
Cedrick. On my porch. Pounding on the door hard enough to rattle the frame.
Isaac is already out of bed, yanking on jeans. “Stay here.”
“Isaac-”
But he’s already gone.
I make it as far as the front hallway, and through the barely cracked door I can hear everything.
“You need to go home, Cedrick.”
“Don’t tell me what I need.” His voice is soaked in whiskey and self-pity. “Fifteen years, man. Fifteen years, and you moved into my house-”
“It’s not your house. It was never your house. You’ve never even seen this house sober.”
“You know what I mean!” Something slams - his palm against the railing, maybe. “You were supposed to be my friend. My best friend. And the whole time - the whole goddamn time - you were waiting. Circling. Like a vulture.”
“No.” Isaac’s voice stays level, and somehow that’s the loudest thing on the porch. “A vulture waits for something to die. I watched you kill it yourself, for eighteen months, and I kept your secret longer than I should have. That’s on me. Everything else is on you.”
Silence. Then Cedrick laughs - an ugly, broken sound.
“You know what? Keep him!” His voice rises, pitching past the porch, toward the window where he must know I’m listening. “Keep him! Hazel took me back - she told me last night it’s a boy! When she has my son, you’ll see - I don’t even need your baby! I’ll have a family that actually wants me!”
A boy. She told him it’s a boy.
The cold that goes through me has nothing to do with the morning air.
“Listen to yourself,” Isaac says quietly. “‘Your baby.’ ‘My son.’ They’re not poker chips, man.”
“Don’t you - don’t you dare-”
Cedrick swings at him.
I see it through the gap in the door - the punch is wild, drunken, pathetic. Isaac sidesteps easily, and Cedrick stumbles through the space where he was standing and nearly pitches off the porch entirely, catching the railing at the last second.
“Go home,” Isaac says, cold and clear. “Sleep it off. And don’t come back here again.”
Cedrick hangs on the railing, swaying, breathing hard. For a moment, I think we’re about to do the flowers-on-the-porch thing all over again.
“She was my wife first,” he slurs.
“First.” Isaac’s voice doesn’t rise at all. “You keep score like that, and you’ll never figure out why you lost. Go home, Cedrick.”
Cedrick stares at him. Then he turns and staggers back to his car, and we listen to him over-rev the engine and lurch away down the street.
When Isaac comes back inside, his hands are shaking.
“He said Hazel’s pregnant.” He shuts the door and leans his back against it. “That she’s having a boy.”
“I heard. All of it.”
“It’s a lie.” His jaw is tight. “She’s still building that fantasy, and he’s desperate enough to believe it. A boy, Chantal. She gave the imaginary baby a gender.”
“Why would she keep lying? She got what she wanted. He already took her back.”
“Because she has to keep paying for him.” He pushes off the door and starts to pace.
“Think about it. She needs to give him something you’re not giving him.
A son instead of a daughter. A family that ‘wants’ him.
It’s the only currency she has left, so she keeps printing more of it.
” He stops. “She’s going to keep escalating until someone forces her to prove it. ”
I think about Hazel in that parking lot. The way she couldn’t produce a single ultrasound photo. The flicker of pure animal panic when I asked for a due date.
“Then we make her prove it,” I say. “At the custody hearing. Under oath.”
Isaac nods slowly. “Your lawyer can subpoena medical records. If she’s really pregnant, there’ll be proof. If she’s not…”
“If she’s not, Cedrick loses his last excuse. The whole fantasy - the son, the family that wants him - it all burns down in front of a judge.”
“Jesus.” He rubs his face with both hands. “Listen to us. Six months ago I was helping him move a couch.”
I cross the hallway and take his hands. They’re still trembling, and it occurs to me - for the first time in this whole ugly war - that I’m not the only one grieving somebody who never really existed.
“Hey. Look at me.” I wait until he does. “You did everything right out there.”
“He used to be my best friend.” It comes out quiet and wrecked. “Fifteen years, Chantal. And I watched him swing at me on your porch just now, and all I could think was - I don’t know that guy. Maybe I never did.”
“Maybe neither of us did,” I say. “We fell for the same performance. Front row seats, both of us.”
He laughs - barely a laugh at all - and pulls me in, and we stand there in the hallway holding each other up while the sun comes through the blinds in stripes.
The baby kicks against my palm, strong and steady, right on schedule.
“Four more weeks,” I murmur. “Just hold on a little longer.”