Chapter 4 #2
She looked at him. His profile in the passing streetlight, the jaw, the dark hair, those green eyes fixed on the road. This man who loved her so completely and still, after all these years, couldn't see the difference between praising her taste and acknowledging her work.
"It landed fine," she said.
He nodded. His thumb resumed its slow circle. They drove the rest of the way home in a silence that was comfortable on the surface and something else underneath, something she didn't have the energy to excavate tonight.
She thought, briefly, of what Douglas would say if she told him about dinner. She could hear his voice so clearly. Iz, you just described a two-hundred-hour research project and your mother called it a hobby. And your husband called it an instinct. Do you see the common denominator?
She did see it. She wasn't ready to say so.
Inside, the house was dark and waiting. Xavier went to the kitchen for water. Isabelle went upstairs. She stood in the hallway outside the celadon room and pressed her palm flat against the closed door and breathed.
She'd planned to wait. Another week, maybe two. Until the next appointment confirmed what she already knew. Until the numbers came back strong enough to mean something, until she was far enough along that the word pregnant could be spoken aloud without summoning every loss that had come before.
But standing in the hallway, she realized she couldn't carry it alone anymore.
The secret had gotten too heavy. It was pressing against the inside of her ribs every hour of every day, and if she didn't say it soon it would come out sideways, in the wrong moment, and this baby deserved better than that. This baby deserved to arrive in joy.
She thought of the other night. Xavier reaching for her at two in the morning, his mouth at her throat, the urgency in his hands.
She'd given herself over to it gladly, because she loved him, because his body was the one place where he never held anything back.
But afterward, lying in the dark with his arm locked around her waist, she'd thought: He's holding on too tight.
And I don't know what he's holding onto.
Xavier came up the stairs. He was carrying two glasses of water, one for each of them, because he always did that. Every night. Without being asked. A small kindness no one else would notice, and so completely, so entirely him.
"Xavier."
He stopped at the top of the stairs. She was standing in the hallway with one hand on the door of the room she'd painted celadon green six months ago, and something in her voice made him set both glasses down on the hall table with care.
"What?" he said.
"Come here."
He came to her. He stood in front of her and she took both his hands and held them.
His eyes searched her face with an attention so total, so focused, and she remembered why she'd fallen in love with him.
There was no one in the world who looked at her the way Xavier looked at her.
Nobody came close. When he turned the full beam of his attention on her, everything else disappeared, and she existed entirely in the green of his eyes.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
His hands went rigid in hers. His whole body went still. She watched it happen: the word traveling through him, hitting every nerve, reaching the place where all the grief, hope and terror of the last several years had been compressed into something dense and unexamined.
"Say that again," he whispered.
"I'm pregnant. Six weeks. I've confirmed it twice."
His face broke open. There was no other word for it. Every wall he maintained, every composed surface, every layer of control and carefully managed charm simply cracked apart. Underneath was the raw, unguarded face of a man who wanted this more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.
His eyes filled. He blinked, the tears spilled and he didn't wipe them away. He sank to his knees in the hallway, right there on the hardwood, pressed his face against her stomach, wrapped his arms around her hips and held on. His shoulders shook.
Isabelle put her hands in his hair and let him cry. Something inside her chest released, finally, after days of carrying it alone. She was crying too.
"Bella," he said against her stomach. "Bella, Bella, Bella."
"I know."
"How long have you known?"
"Several days. I wanted to be sure."
He looked up at her. His eyes were red; he looked nothing like the man in the charcoal suit who checked his hair in the rearview mirror. He looked like someone who'd been given a thing he'd stopped believing he'd ever have.
"Why didn't you tell me right away?"
The question was soft. Almost wondering. But Isabelle heard something beneath it. A faint note, barely audible, like a single wrong key struck in a chord.
Why didn't you tell me right away?
He was smiling. He was crying, smiling and holding her, and the joy on his face was enormous. Real. The most beautiful thing she'd seen in years.
But that question. The tiny emphasis on me. As though the relevant fact wasn't that she'd needed time to feel safe. As though the relevant fact was that he'd been excluded.
"I was scared," she said. "After everything. I needed to sit with it before I could say it out loud."
"You could have sat with it with me. You don't have to carry things alone, Bella. That's what I'm here for."
He said it with such tenderness. Such absolute sincerity. She told herself it was love, and it was love. She put her hands on his face, kissed him and let the joy be bigger than the question.
But later, in bed, with Xavier's hand resting on her stomach and his breathing finally slow beside her, Isabelle lay in the dark and turned the moment over.
Why didn't you tell me right away?
Not: I'm so glad you told me when you were ready.
Not: You must have been so scared, carrying that alone.
Just: Why didn't you tell me?
As though her silence had been a withholding. As though every part of her experience, even the most private, even the most frightened, belonged to him by right.
Isabelle closed her eyes. She told herself the cold note was nothing. Exhaustion, hormones, the residue of her mother's voice still echoing in her bones.
She almost believed it.