16. Blair
— ? —
Blair
The waiting room at the OB’s office was exactly as I remembered it from last time. Couples everywhere. Hands intertwined. Nervous laughter and whispered conversations about nursery colors and baby names.
This time, Will was sitting beside me.
He’d arrived early. Earlier than me, which surprised me, because I’d planned to get here first, to establish some kind of control over the situation.
Instead, I’d walked in to find him already in a chair, flipping through a parenting magazine with the focus of a man who was trying very hard to look casual.
“That’s upside down,” I said.
He looked at the magazine. Looked at me. Back at the magazine.
“I knew that.”
“You didn’t.”
“I absolutely didn’t.” He turned it right side up. “In my defense, I’ve been here for twenty minutes and I’ve already memorized every poster on the wall. Did you know that folic acid is essential for neural tube development?”
“I did know that, actually.”
“Well, now I know it too.” He set down the magazine. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Tired. The usual.”
“Are you eating enough? You look thin.”
“Are you monitoring my eating habits now?”
“I’m concerned. That’s different from monitoring.”
“It’s really not.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. Smart man. He was learning.
The silence between us stretched, uncomfortable and charged.
Around us, the other couples murmured and laughed and existed in a world where pregnancy announcements weren’t followed by accusations of infidelity.
I tried not to look at them. Tried not to think about what we must look like, two people sitting side by side with a careful foot of space between them.
“I finished the parenting book,” Will said.
“Which one?”
“The one with the yellow cover. The one about what to expect.”
“You read the whole thing?”
“Twice.” He paused. “The chapter on the second trimester was very informative.”
I felt a crack open in my chest. A tiny fissure in the wall I’d been building. He was trying. Really trying, in his awkward, overeager way.
“The nurse is going to call us back soon,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “They’ll do an ultrasound. Check the heartbeat.”
“I know. I researched.”
“Of course you did.”
“I wanted to be prepared.”
“You’re always prepared.”
“Not always.” His voice dropped. “I wasn’t prepared for any of this.”
I looked at him then. Really looked, past the careful composure and the pressed shirt and the man he showed to the world.
He looked exhausted. Dark circles under his eyes, a tension in his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.
This was costing him too. The separation, the uncertainty, the not-knowing.
He was suffering alongside me, even if he’d brought it on himself.
“Mrs. Beaumont?”
The nurse’s voice cut through the moment. I stood, and Will stood with me, and we followed her down the hallway together, our shoulders almost touching but not quite.
The exam room was small and cold. I changed into the paper gown while Will studied the posters about fetal development with unnecessary intensity. When I was settled on the table, the technician came in, a young woman with kind eyes and a gentle smile.
“First ultrasound together?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“First for this pregnancy,” Will added. “We have a son. Henry. He’s seven.”
The technician smiled. “A big brother. How exciting.”
She squirted gel onto my stomach, and I flinched at the cold. Will’s hand moved toward mine, then stopped, uncertain.
I reached for him.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and familiar, and I told myself it was just comfort. Just the normal human need for connection during a medical procedure. It didn’t mean anything.
The wand pressed against my belly. The screen flickered to life.
And there it was.
A tiny bean-shaped blur, pulsing with light. Our baby. Our second chance at a life we’d almost destroyed.
“Strong heartbeat,” the technician said. “Right on track for ten weeks.”
The sound filled the room. Rapid and rhythmic, impossibly fast. A tiny drumbeat proving there was life inside me, a life Will and I had made together, holding on through every terrible thing we’d done to each other.
Will made a sound I’d never heard from him before.
A sob. Or close to it. His composure cracked and fell away, and suddenly he was crying, actually crying, tears streaming down his face as he stared at the screen.
“That’s our baby,” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Blair. That’s our baby.”
“I know.”
His forehead dropped to our joined hands. His shoulders shook. This man who had been raised to never show weakness, who had built walls around his emotions since childhood, was coming apart in a paper-curtained room with a technician pretending not to watch.
I held his hand tighter.
I should be angry. Should maintain the distance I’d been cultivating for weeks. But watching him break over the image of our child, watching him grieve what he’d almost lost, I couldn’t summon the coldness I wanted to feel.
“I’m sorry,” he said into our hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Will.”
“I almost destroyed this. I almost destroyed us. And I can never-”
“Not here.” My voice was gentle. “Not now.”
He nodded. Took a breath. Straightened up, wiping his face with the back of his free hand, trying to reassemble himself into someone presentable.
The technician printed photos with practiced efficiency, giving us a moment to collect ourselves. When she handed them over, Will took them reverently, studying each image as though it contained the secrets of the universe.
“Can I keep one?” he asked me.
“They’re for both of us.”
“I know. I just…” He looked at the photos, then at me. “I want to remember this day. Whatever happens with us. Whatever you decide. I want to remember this.”
I should have said no. Should have maintained boundaries, kept my distance, protected the fragile equilibrium we’d established.
“Keep whichever one you want.”
His face transformed. Gratitude and hope and a rawness that hurt to look at.
The parking lot was bright with afternoon sun. We walked to my car in silence, the ultrasound photos tucked carefully into Will’s jacket pocket, the sound of our baby’s heartbeat still echoing in my ears.
“Blair.”
I turned. He was standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“Yeah?”
“I miss you.”
The words settled into my chest and refused to leave.
“I know I don’t have the right to say that,” he continued. “I know I’m the one who caused this. Who broke us. But I miss you every second, and it’s making me insane.”
He wasn’t asking for anything. Wasn’t pushing for a response or demanding that I feel the same way. He was just telling me, open and honest, what it was costing him to be apart from me.
I miss you too, I thought. I miss you so much it feels like drowning.
I didn’t say it.
“I’ll see you at the next appointment,” I said instead, and got in my car, and drove away without looking back.
***
The Crow’s Nest column hit that afternoon, and I found out the way Newport wanted me to.
I was three steps from the gallery door, keys warm in my hand, when I heard my own name. Two women stood outside the boutique next door, shopping bags on their arms, one holding up her phone so the other could read. Neither of them saw me.
“It’s the Crow’s Nest,” the first one said, delighted.
“Listen. ‘The Beaumont separation is officially official, dear readers. One wonders what the wronged husband will do with that waterfront estate and all those empty rooms. And one wonders, too, what happens to a Cliff Walk wife when she no longer has a cliff to walk on.’”
The second woman laughed, bright and cruel. “A cliff to walk on. God, that’s vicious. Poor William. Everyone always said she married up.”
“Everyone always said a lot of things.”
They were still laughing when they turned and saw me.
I watched the color drain out of both their faces. I watched them reach for a greeting, an excuse, a retreat. I didn’t give them one. I stood there and looked at them until they looked away, and then I walked past them to my own door and let myself in and shut it behind me.
Wronged husband. Like Will was the one this had been done to. Like I was the villain who’d broken our vows, instead of the woman with a target painted on her back by a man she’d never done a single thing to.
The gallery was quiet. Empty walls, dusty floors, windows looking out on Thames Street and the whole world walking by, deciding who I was. I stood in the middle of it and breathed.
This was mine. Whatever Newport printed, whatever those women whispered on the sidewalk, this room was mine. My work. My art. My future.
“Mrs. Beaumont?”
I turned. Michael, the property manager, was standing in the doorway.
“Just Blair is fine.”
“Blair, then. I saw you come in. Is everything okay?”
“Fine. I just…” I looked around at the empty space. “Needed a moment.”
“Take all the time you need.” He paused. “We’re excited to have an artist in the building. It’s been vacant too long.”
“I’m excited to be here.”
He nodded and left, and I was alone again.
I walked the perimeter of the space, imagining my paintings on the walls.
The seascapes I’d been working on in secret for years.
The abstract pieces that Will had never understood but always displayed proudly anyway.
The portraits I’d done of Henry, charting his growth from infant to toddler to the seven-year-old hurricane he was now.
My work. My vision. My name on the door.
Blair Beaumont, artist.
Or maybe just Blair. Maybe that was enough.
***
That night, I lay in the narrow bed at Nan’s cottage and tried to sleep.
The house was quiet. Henry was at Will’s for the night. Nan had gone to bed hours ago, her soft snoring drifting through the thin walls. I should have been exhausted. The appointment, the column, the endless emotional whiplash of this day.
Instead, I was wide awake.
I kept thinking about the ultrasound. About Will’s face when he heard the heartbeat. About the way he’d cried, openly and without shame, over the image of our child.
About the way he’d said I miss you and meant it with his whole body.
I flattened my palm against the swell of my belly. Ten weeks. The baby was the size of a strawberry now, according to the books. Tiny and perfect and completely dependent on me keeping my life together.
I closed my eyes.
Will’s face appeared behind my lids. The way he’d looked at me in the parking lot. The hunger in his expression, carefully controlled but still visible. The wanting that radiated off him every time we were in the same room.
I missed him too.
I hated that I missed him. Hated that my body still craved his touch, still remembered the weight of him beside me in bed, still reached for him in the middle of the night and found empty space instead.
My hand drifted lower.
I shouldn’t. It was wrong somehow, wanting him while I was still this angry, and the wrongness only made the ache worse.
My body didn’t care about should or shouldn’t.
My body remembered ten years of being touched by this man, ten years of knowing exactly how to fall apart under his hands, and it had already decided.
I was wet before my fingers even got there. That was the part I hated most. Not the wanting, but how little say I had in it. One image of his face at the ultrasound, one memory of his mouth, and my thighs were slick and my hips were shifting against the mattress on their own.
I gave in.
I pushed two fingers into myself and pretended they were his, thought about his hands, the rough sailor’s calluses, the way he’d hold my hip down when I squirmed.
I thought about his mouth on my neck, his fingers threaded through my hair, his weight pinning me into our mattress.
I thought about the filthy things he used to say against my ear, take all of me, come on my cock, and I circled my clit faster and bit down on a sound I couldn’t fully swallow.
Will.
His name in my breath, in the small broken noises I couldn’t stop. My back arched off the narrow bed. I chased it with my own hand, hating myself for needing this, hating him for making me need it, hating the whole impossible situation, and none of it slowed the climb.
When I came it was sharp and hollow, my body clenching around fingers that weren’t enough, a release with nothing on the other side of it. I lay in the aftermath breathing hard, still wet, still wanting, my hand resting on my stomach, and I felt emptier than before.
I had wanted him. Even now, even after everything, my body had betrayed me and reached for him and taken what it could get.
That was the cruelest part. The anger couldn’t kill the wanting. The betrayal couldn’t erase ten years of loving him. I could be furious and heartbroken and still soak the sheets for him in the middle of the night.
The darkness pressed in around me. I listened to the old house settle, to Nan’s distant snoring, to the quiet of a life that had become unrecognizable.
Afterward, in the dark, I whispered his name one more time.
It tasted like grief.