12. Blair
— ? —
Blair
Nan Colby made coffee like she made judgments: strong, bitter, and impossible to ignore.
I was sitting at her kitchen table in the pale morning light, wearing clothes I’d grabbed blindly the night before and hadn’t bothered to change out of.
The kitchen was small and familiar, yellow walls that hadn’t been repainted since I was a child, the same floral curtains hanging in the windows, the same chipped ceramic rooster on the counter that Nan refused to throw away because my grandfather had bought it for her forty years ago.
“You look terrible,” she said, setting a mug in front of me with a decisive thunk.
“Thank you, Nan. That’s very supportive.”
“I’m not here to be supportive.” She settled into the chair across from me, her white hair pulled back in the same tight bun she’d worn for as long as I could remember. “I’m here to tell you the truth. You’re both being idiots.”
“He asked if the baby was his.”
“I know what he asked. It was a wicked thing to ask, and he’ll know it every day for the rest of his life.”
“I kept a secret from him. For Trip.”
“Keeping a friend’s secret is a decent thing to do.
” Nan’s voice was sharp, cutting through my excuses with surgical precision.
“Doubting a wife who has given you ten years and never once strayed is not. He chose his fear over his faith in you, and that’s his to answer for.
Not yours. But you’re hurt, and you’re proud, and if you let those two run the show you’ll sit in my kitchen until that baby is grown.
So you’re going to have to decide whether you’d rather be right or whether you’d rather be married. ”
I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup and stared at the dark liquid inside. The steam rose in wisps, curling toward the ceiling. Outside the window, I could hear birds singing in Nan’s garden, oblivious to the wreckage of my life.
“I told him the truth,” I finally said. “Last night. In the study, before I left. I told him everything about Trip.”
“And?”
“He laughed at me.”
Nan’s expression didn’t change. “Did he believe you?”
“No.”
“Then you have a decision to make.” Nan leaned forward, her hands folded on the table, her eyes sharp as ever.
“You can sit here feeling sorry for yourself, drinking my coffee and crying into my napkins. Or you can figure out what happens next. What do you want, Blair? Actually want, not what you think you should want.”
I thought about it. Really thought, the way I hadn’t allowed myself to in weeks. I’d been so focused on protecting Trip, on keeping the secret, on maintaining the facade of a happy marriage, that I’d forgotten to ask myself what I actually needed.
“I want my husband to trust me.”
“And if he can’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.” Nan’s eyes were fierce, the way they always were when she was pushing me toward a truth I didn’t want to face. “You’ve always known. You’ve just been too afraid to say it.”
I looked at my grandmother. At this woman who had raised me after my parents died, who had worked two jobs to keep a roof over our heads, who had never once complained about the hand life had dealt her.
She’d survived losing her daughter and son-in-law within a year of each other.
She’d taken in a grieving teenager and taught her how to stand up straight in a world that wanted to knock her down.
“I want to matter,” I said quietly. “To myself. I want to be more than Will Beaumont’s wife. More than Henry’s mother. I want to know who I am when all of that falls away.”
Nan nodded once, a sharp gesture that somehow conveyed both approval and challenge. “Good. Now you’re asking the right questions.”
The OB’s office was in a brick building downtown, tucked between a law firm and a bakery. The waiting room smelled like vanilla from next door, sweet and warm, at odds with the sterile medical posters on the walls.
I sat in one of the hard plastic chairs with my hands folded in my lap, trying not to look at the other patients.
Couples. Every single one of them. Hands intertwined, leaning into each other, sharing nervous laughter and whispered conversations about nursery colors and baby names.
Men who looked terrified and proud in equal measure, their free hands resting protectively on their partners’ knees.
Women who glowed the way only pregnant women glow, secure in the knowledge that they weren’t doing this alone.
I filled out my paperwork alone.
Emergency contact. I wrote Will’s name automatically, then stared at it, wondering if he still counted as my emergency contact when he was also the emergency I was running from.
I left it.
The nurse called my name, and I followed her down a hallway lined with posters about prenatal vitamins and developmental milestones. The exam room was small and clean, the examination table covered in paper that crinkled when I sat down.
“And your partner?” the nurse asked, her fingers poised over her computer keyboard. “Will he be joining us for future appointments?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
She glanced up, and whatever was on my face told her not to push. She just nodded and moved on to the next question.
The doctor was kind. Dr. Patel, according to her name tag, with warm eyes and a gentle voice that made me want to cry. She did the exam with practiced efficiency, checking my blood pressure, asking about symptoms, confirming what I already knew.
“Everything looks healthy,” she said. “About eight weeks along now. Would you like to hear the heartbeat?”
I nodded because I couldn’t speak.
She pressed the wand to my belly, and the room filled with sound. Rapid and rhythmic, impossibly fast. A tiny drumbeat that proved there was life growing inside me, life that Will and I had created together, life that existed despite everything that had happened between us.
My baby. Our baby. Mine and Will’s, no matter what he believed.
“Strong heartbeat,” Dr. Patel said. “Right on track.”
I managed a smile. Managed to ask the right questions about prenatal vitamins and appointments and what to expect in the coming weeks. Managed to schedule my next visit and pay my copay and walk out the front door acting normal.
I made it to my car before I broke.
The sobs came from somewhere deep, tearing through me with a force I couldn’t control.
I sat behind the wheel in the parking lot, crying so hard I couldn’t breathe, grieving for the appointment I should have had.
The one where Will held my hand and cried happy tears and we heard our baby’s heartbeat together.
Instead, I was alone. Alone in a parking lot, pregnant and separated and completely unsure of what came next.
The crying lasted a long time. Long enough that my face swelled and my chest hurt and I went through every tissue in my purse. Long enough that an elderly woman walking past my car stopped to peer through the window with concern, then decided not to get involved and hurried away.
When it finally stopped, I sat there for another few minutes, staring at nothing, feeling hollowed out.
Then I sat up straight. Wiped my eyes. Looked at myself in the rearview mirror.
“Enough,” I said out loud. “You don’t get to fall apart. Not now. Not with a baby counting on you.”
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts until I found the number I’d saved months ago. The gallery space on Thames Street. The one I’d walked past a hundred times, imagining my paintings on the walls, imagining a life where I was more than just someone’s wife.
I dialed before I could lose my nerve, and a man named Michael told me I could see the space tomorrow at two. I said I’d be there and hung up and sat with the phone in my hand, heart pounding, caught between fear and hope.
I was doing this. I was actually doing this.
The painting I’d shelved at twenty-four. The career I’d given up for marriage and motherhood. The dream I’d told myself could wait, could always wait, until someday turned into never.
No more waiting. No more someday.
If my marriage survived, I’d be a wife with a career, an identity beyond the Beaumont name. If it didn’t, I’d be a woman who could support herself and her children, who had a life of her own that no one could take away.
Either way, I’d be someone. Finally, after ten years of disappearing into the role of Mrs. William Beaumont, I’d be someone of my own.
***
Trip arrived at Nan’s cottage that evening with lobster rolls and guilt written all over his face.
The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink, and I was sitting on Nan’s porch when his car pulled up.
He got out carrying bags from the restaurant on Thames Street, the one we’d gone to a hundred times over the years, and walked up the path with the expression of a man who wasn’t sure he’d be welcome.
“I come bearing lobster rolls,” he said when I didn’t get up to greet him. “And apologies. Many, many apologies.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“I absolutely do.” He sat down on the porch step beside me, setting the bags between us. “All of this is my fault. The secrecy, the sneaking around, the way Will looks at you now. If I’d just been brave enough to come out years ago.”
“Trip.”
“Or if I’d just told Will myself. Gone to him at the beginning and explained everything instead of asking you to keep it secret.”
“Your father would have found out.”
“Maybe. Probably.” He dragged a hand through his hair, a gesture I’d seen a thousand times, usually when he was trying to figure out how to fix the unfixable. “But at least your marriage wouldn’t be in shambles.”
“My marriage isn’t your responsibility.”
“It became my responsibility when I asked you to lie to your husband for me.”
I reached into one of the bags and pulled out a paper cone of fries. I wasn’t hungry, but I needed my hands busy.
“Let me tell him,” Trip said. “Publicly. Tonight if you want. I’ll explain everything. I’ll prove that what you told him was true.”
“No.”
“Blair.”
“No.” I turned to face him, tucking one leg under me on the porch step. “If you come out because my marriage is falling apart, your father wins. He gets to control the narrative. He gets to point at me and say I ruined your life, that you were forced out of the closet because of the mess I made.”
“I don’t care about the narrative.”
“You should.” I took his hand, squeezed it.
“You’ve been planning this for months. The proposal, the coming out, all of it.
You have your date. You have your ring. You have Luca, waiting for you to finally choose him publicly.
You come out on your terms. I didn’t keep your secret this long to let Charles Vanderford take it from you in the end. ”
Trip’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Your marriage might not survive.”
“Maybe not.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
I thought about the gallery space. The phone call I’d made. The tiny heartbeat I’d heard that morning, proof that life went on even when everything else fell apart.
“I’m not okay,” I said. “But I’m choosing to survive anyway. I’m choosing to figure out who I am outside of being Will’s wife. I’m choosing to build something that’s mine, something no one can take away from me.”
“The gallery?”
“I’m viewing the space tomorrow.”
Trip’s face transformed. The guilt was still there, but a new thing was joining it now. Pride. Wonder. Hope, even.
“Blair Beaumont, artist.” He smiled, a real smile, the first one I’d seen from him all evening. “Has a ring to it.”
“Blair Colby,” I corrected.
Then I stopped.
Colby. My maiden name. The name I’d had before I became Mrs. William Beaumont, before I’d folded myself into his life and his family and his world.
“Maybe,” I said slowly, testing the idea. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I am anymore.”