28. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
A few weeks into planning my brother’s wedding, happiness had a strange side effect: it made me superstitious.
The bracing of that first month had loosened, notch by notch, every morning Kevin turned out to be the same man he’d been the morning before.
This was quieter and stupider, the sense that a life this good was a clerical error the universe would eventually notice and correct, because the last time my life was this good the floor had come out from under me on a staircase and never fully gone back.
Happiness, I’d learned the hard way, was the thing that got you when you weren’t watching.
So I still watched. I couldn’t help it. Even now, even here, some animal part of me stayed crouched and ready to run.
I’d been run-down lately, too, which didn’t help my nerves.
Tired in a bone-deep way, queasy at odd hours, wrung out by the wedding planning and the clinic and the sheer effort of letting myself be happy.
I chalked it up to stress. There was always a cause to chalk it up to.
That was the trouble with a body that had already betrayed you once: every ordinary ache started to sound like a countdown in my head.
So I smiled through the cake tastings and the seating charts and told myself the tiredness was nothing.
Kevin knew I was off, the way he knew everything now, watching me the way he’d taught himself to watch me.
He kept asking if I was sleeping enough, if I’d eaten.
He just hadn’t pushed. He was so careful with me these days it sometimes made me want to scream, and other times made me want to lie down inside it and never come out.
We were at the clinic when it happened. My clinic, with my name in gold over the door, a week out from Harry and Hugo’s wedding.
I was in the new reception area arguing happily with a delivery man about where the waiting-room chairs should go, and Kevin was down the hall on a call, and everything was, for once, uncomplicated.
Then Gina called, and the first word out of her mouth was my name in a voice I hadn’t heard since the divorce.
“Steph. Okay. I need you to hear this from me and not from one of those harpies at the yacht club.”
The floor of my stomach dropped an inch. “What.”
“There’s a rumor going around. It’s ugly and it’s probably nothing, but it’s everywhere, and you’re going to hear it today.” She pulled in a breath. “They’re saying Jennifer Nathaniels is pregnant. And they’re saying it’s Kevin’s.”
The delivery man was still talking. The second chair, the window, the afternoon light.
His mouth kept moving and no sound reached me, because all the sound in the world had funneled down to that one word, pregnant, ricocheting around my skull, the one word in the language I was least equipped to hear.
“That’s not true,” I heard myself say. My voice came from very far away, flat and reasonable, a stranger’s voice. “He hasn’t. He wouldn’t. He told me he’s never touched her.”
“I know, honey. I know he did.” A pause, the careful kind. “I’m just telling you because someone said she’s telling people the timeline lines up with that whole stretch you two were apart. And I didn’t want it hitting you cold in a checkout line.”
The timeline lines up. That was the phrase that did it.
The lie itself I could dismiss. The machinery of it was harder, the way someone had sat down and built it to be believable, dated it, made it fit into the three-year hole where I hadn’t been watching.
It was so specific. It was so much like the truth.
I don’t remember hanging up. I remember the delivery man’s face going concerned, and me telling him to put the chairs wherever, it didn’t matter, and walking down the hall toward the sound of Kevin’s voice with my ears ringing and cold spreading through my chest.
He was just finishing his call, laughing, easy and golden in the light from the new windows, this man who’d built me a garden and a stone and put my name over a door.
And I looked at him and the ugliest three years of my life rose up all at once, every voicemail that had gone to nothing, every dinner that had mattered more than me, and a voice I thought I’d put in the ground said, quiet and vicious: you already know how this ends. You were there for the ending.
“Hey.” His smile faded the second he saw my face. “Steph? What’s wrong?”
“Is there something you need to tell me?” I said.
He went still. “About what?”
“Jennifer.”
A shadow crossed his face then, and my first read on it was guilt, because I was looking for guilt, because I’d spent three years becoming an expert at finding the worst thing in any expression a man made.
It wasn’t guilt. I understood that later.
It was the specific dread of a man who has heard a name he hoped never to hear in the same sentence as his own again.
“What about her?” he said carefully.
“People are saying she’s pregnant.” My voice was rising now, cracking down the middle. “People are saying it’s yours. That the timeline lines up. That while I was a hundred miles away crying into a phone you were-”
“Stephanie.”
“-that you and she-”
“Stephanie.” He crossed the room, and I stepped back, and I watched it hit him, the small distance opening between us.
I hadn’t stepped away from him in a month.
I’d stopped flinching weeks ago and I hadn’t even noticed I’d stopped until I did it again, right then, backward into the reception desk with my name carved into the front of it.
He stopped where he was. Didn’t chase. Put his hands up, palms out, the way you’d gentle a spooked horse.
“It’s not true,” he said. “It’s not mine.
It’s not anything. I haven’t touched that woman, not three years ago, not ever, not once in thirteen years of it only ever being you.
” His voice was steady, but I could see his pulse going in his throat, that vein I’d watched in a locked exam room a month ago.
“She’s doing this because I cut her loose and put your name on a building instead of taking her money.
This is what she has. A rumor. She has a rumor, Steph, and she aimed it at the one place she knew it’d land. ”
And that was the terrible part. It’d land.
It was landing. I could feel it landing, sinking through every layer of the month I’d spent letting my hand come loose from around my own heart, and I hated her for knowing exactly where the soft place was.
She’d aimed a pregnancy at a woman who’d lost one.
She couldn’t have known how good her aim was.
Or maybe she could. Maybe that was the whole horrible art of it.
“How do I know?” I whispered. “How do I know you’re not-”
“Do you trust me?”
The question stopped the room.
He said it quietly, without the wounded pride and how dare you the old Kevin would have reached for. He just stood there with his hands open and asked it, plain, his whole self laid on a table and his hands stepped back from it.
“I already told you the truth,” he said.
“A month ago, in that room, when you asked me if there was ever anything with her, I told you the truth. There has never been anyone but you. I’m not going to keep proving it in pieces every time someone hands you a knife and points it at me.
At some point-” His voice caught, and he let it.
“At some point you either believe me or you don’t.
And if you don’t, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to earn it anyway, because I’ve got nowhere else I’m going.
But I’m asking you, Steph. Right now. Do you trust me? ”
And there it was. The thing I’d been circling for a month, for three years, my whole life probably, since long before Kevin Coleman ever walked into my mother’s kitchen.
The choice I’d never actually had to make, because I’d always had the safety of my own suspicion to hide behind.
It was so much easier to expect the worst. If you expected the worst, the worst couldn’t take you by surprise.
The worst had taken me by surprise exactly once, on a staircase, and I had built my entire self since then out of never letting it happen again.
The word pregnant was still going off in me like an alarm, dragging the whole staircase back up with it, the blood and the empty house and the phone ringing out into nothing.
And I understood, standing there against the desk, that I was about to do to him exactly what I’d spent three years never forgiving him for.
I was about to decide, alone, in a panic, that hope was too dangerous to risk.
I was about to walk out on the strength of a rumor the way he’d once let a phone ring out on the strength of a dinner.
I was about to be the one who didn’t show up.
“I’m scared,” I said, and it came out cracked and small and true.
“I’m so scared, Kevin. You’ve got no idea.
The last time I let myself believe things were safe, I lost everything on a staircase while you were at dinner.
And the second someone says the word pregnant to me, I’m right back there.
I’m right back on the floor, calling a phone that won’t pick up. ”
“I know,” he said, and his own eyes had gone wet. “I know, baby. I put you on that floor. I’ll hate that until the day I die.”
“So how do I do this. How do I just… trust you. When trusting you is the thing that-”
“Because I’m standing here,” he said simply.
“That’s the only difference I can offer you.
Three years ago you called eleven times and I wasn’t there.
Right now there’s a rumor built to make you run, and I’m not running, and I’m not letting it run me either.
I’m just here. I’m going to keep being here.
Whatever you decide, I’m going to be standing in this exact spot being yours. ”
I looked at him. Really looked, the way I’d taught myself not to for three years because it hurt too much.
He wasn’t reaching for his phone, or managing me, or fixing it, or throwing money or gestures at it.
He was just standing in the wreck of the moment with his hands open, letting me be terrified at him, not going anywhere.
It was, I realized, the single most Kevin thing he had never once done when we were married.
He’d always had somewhere else to be. Now the somewhere else was me.
The panic didn’t vanish. I want to be honest about that, because it’d be a prettier story if it did.
The fear didn’t lift like fog. It just stopped being bigger than the other thing.
The other thing being: I knew this man. I knew him at twenty and I knew him now.
I knew the exact sound of him lying, because I’d heard it, years of it, I’m fine and it went well and it was just a work thing, and this wasn’t that sound.
This was the sound of the truth, which I’d nearly forgotten he was capable of, standing in a room refusing to abandon me even while I was in the middle of abandoning him.
“Yes,” I said.
He blinked. “Yes?”
“I trust you.” I said it again to feel the shape of it, because I’d never once said it and meant it since I came back, not really, not with the whole weight of me behind it.
“It’s a lie. Jennifer’s lie. I know it’s a lie.
I knew it the second Gina said it, and then I let it in anyway because letting it in was easier than…
than this. Than choosing you on purpose and having it be real and having it be mine to lose. ”
I crossed the room to him. Me, this time. I closed the distance I’d opened, and I took his open hands and put them on my face myself, because for once I wanted to be the one who reached.
“I choose you,” I said. “On purpose. Knowing exactly what it costs. Rumor and all. Staircase and all. I’m choosing you.”
He made a sound I’d never heard him make, a breaking-open sound, and folded down over me, his forehead against mine, both of us shaking.
“I’ll never make you regret it,” he said against my mouth. “I swear it on my life. On Alex. I’ll never-”
“I know.” And I did. That was the strangest part, the part that would take me weeks to get used to. I actually did.
We stood there a long time in the reception area of the clinic that bore my name, until my heartbeat came down out of my ears and the delivery man very awkwardly wheeled the last of the chairs past us and pretended not to look.
Later, in the car, Kevin was quiet for a while. Then he said, not taking his eyes off the road, “I’ll have my lawyer send Jennifer something with teeth. Defamation. She can’t say that about you, about us, and walk around clean.”
“Do it,” I said. Then, after a moment: “Actually, don’t.”
He glanced over.
“Don’t give her the fight,” I said. “She wants us rattled. She wants to be the thing we talk about. The best thing we can do is be so boringly, obviously happy that the rumor dies of neglect.” I looked out at the harbor going by.
“My name’s on a building, Kevin. Hers is on a rumor nobody’s going to remember by Christmas. I win that one just by living.”
He reached across the console and took my hand and brought it to his mouth, and pressed a kiss to my knuckles, and didn’t let go for the rest of the drive.
I’d spent three years believing that the safest thing a person could do was expect the worst. That love was just the run-up to loss, and hope was the tax you paid for it.
But I’d learned this much in that reception area, standing with my back against my own name in gold: that if the floor ever came out from under us again, this time there’d be a hand.
This time I wouldn’t be on the stairs alone.
And that, it turned out, was the only thing I’d ever actually needed to know before I could let myself stop bracing and simply be happy.
I just hadn’t known I’d have to nearly throw it all away to finally believe it.