24. Will
— ? —
Will
The call came in the middle of a meeting I didn’t care about.
I was sitting in a meeting, half listening to someone drone on about things that used to feel urgent, pretending to take notes while my mind wandered to Blair.
I’d been thinking about Blair constantly for weeks now, the way you think about oxygen or water, continuously and without effort.
She was moving back in next week. We’d found our rhythm again.
Every morning I woke up knowing I’d see her, talk to her, hold her hand across a restaurant table or watch her laugh at a joke I made.
Everything was falling into place.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Unknown number. I let it go to voicemail, trying to focus on whatever was on the screen at the front of the room. A topic that used to matter to me, before I understood what actually mattered.
It buzzed again.
I shifted in my chair. Probably a telemarketer. Probably nothing.
“Will, do you need to take that?” Someone across the table was looking at me with mild concern, pen paused over a notepad.
“It’s probably nothing.”
It buzzed a third time.
A cold weight settled in my stomach. A feeling I couldn’t name, couldn’t justify. Just a sudden certainty that everything was wrong.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
I stepped into the hallway, the glass door swinging shut behind me, muffling the sounds of the meeting. The corridor was empty, quiet, the afternoon sun streaming through the windows at the far end. I pulled out my phone and answered.
“Mr. Beaumont? This is Rhode Island Hospital. Your wife has been brought in by ambulance.”
The hallway tilted. I grabbed the wall to keep myself upright, my fingers pressing into the smooth surface, my legs suddenly unable to support my weight.
“What?”
“She had an accident at her gallery. A fall from a ladder. She’s being examined now, but I think you should come as soon as possible.”
“Is she… Is the baby…”
“I don’t have details on her condition, sir. The doctors are with her now. But she was conscious when she arrived, and she asked us to call you.”
Conscious. She was conscious. That was good. That had to be good.
“I’m on my way.”
I hung up. Stood there for a moment, staring at the phone in my hand, trying to make my brain work. Blair was in the hospital. Blair had fallen. Blair was pregnant, twenty-nine weeks pregnant, still too early, still so much that could go wrong.
I don’t remember telling anyone I was leaving. I don’t remember walking to my car or starting the engine or navigating the streets between my office and the hospital. The drive exists in my memory only as fragments, disconnected images that don’t quite form a coherent whole.
My hands shaking on the steering wheel. The way the leather felt slick under my palms.
A red light that seemed to last forever. The urge to run it, to drive through, to get there faster at any cost.
The prayer that kept running through my head, please please please, a desperate litany to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in, begging for a mercy I couldn’t quite articulate. Just please. Just let them be okay.
Blair. The baby. Twenty-nine weeks. The number kept circling in my brain, a number I’d memorized from the pregnancy books, a number that meant viability but also risk, survival but also complications.
Twenty-nine weeks was better than twenty-five.
It was worse than thirty-five. It was a gray zone where outcomes were uncertain and everything depended on factors no one could control.
I thought about the last time I’d seen her, just that morning.
She’d been excited about the gallery install, bouncing around Nan’s kitchen, talking about where she was going to hang the new pieces and how the lighting would look and whether she should serve wine at the preview next week.
I’d kissed her goodbye and told her to be careful, and she’d laughed and said she was always careful.
She wasn’t always careful. She was Blair. She climbed ladders and forgot to eat lunch and pushed herself too hard because the work mattered more than comfort. I loved that about her. I also worried about it, constantly, in a way I’d never fully admitted.
The hospital parking lot was a blur of cars and lines and signs I couldn’t read. I abandoned my car somewhere, probably illegally, and ran for the emergency entrance. My dress shoes slapped against the pavement. My tie was choking me. I loosened it as I ran, yanking at the knot, needing air.
The automatic doors slid open too slowly. I pushed through before they’d finished, stumbling into the bright fluorescent chaos of the ER. The smell hit me first, that particular hospital combination of disinfectant and anxiety that I’d never been able to stand.
“Blair Beaumont.” My voice came out wrong, too high, too desperate. I barely recognized it as my own. “My wife. She was brought in by ambulance. A fall. She’s pregnant.”
The woman behind the desk looked up, her expression professionally calm. “Sir, I need you to calm down.”
“I’m not going to calm down until someone tells me where my wife is.”
“What’s the patient’s name?”
“I just told you. Blair Beaumont. She’s pregnant. Twenty-nine weeks. She fell from a ladder at her gallery. Someone called me and said she was here, and I need to see her. I need to know she’s okay.”
“I’ll check the system. Please have a seat.”
“I’m not going to have a seat. I need to see my wife. I need to know if she’s okay. I need…”
I was making a scene. I could feel it happening, could see the other people in the waiting room turning to look, could see the security guard by the door shifting his weight. A mother pulled her child closer. An elderly man lowered his magazine to watch.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about any of them, about what they thought of me, about the impression I was making. The only thing that existed was the woman somewhere in this building, the baby inside her, the two people who constituted my entire world.
A resident walked past in blue scrubs, a clipboard in his hand, heading somewhere with purpose. I grabbed his sleeve before I knew what I was doing.
“Please.” My voice cracked on the word. “Please, my wife was brought in. Blair Beaumont. She’s pregnant. Someone has to tell me something. I’m begging you. Please.”
The resident looked at my face. Looked at my hand on his arm, gripping hard enough to wrinkle the fabric. His face softened, professionalism giving way to human compassion.
“Let me check for you. What’s the name again?”
“Blair Beaumont. She fell. She’s twenty-nine weeks pregnant.”
“Hold on.”
He disappeared through a set of double doors, and I was left standing in the middle of the ER, shaking, unable to move, unable to think.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, that steady irritating buzz that seemed to drill into my skull.
Someone’s baby was crying in the waiting area.
A man in scrubs walked past, talking on his phone, laughing at a joke.
How could anyone be laughing? How could the world keep turning when Blair might be dying, when our daughter might be dying, when everything might be ending right now in some sterile room I couldn’t get to?
I thought about the life we’d been rebuilding. The dates and the dinners and the slow careful work of learning to trust each other again. The morning on the boat, all that cheese, the way she’d laughed until she cried. The gallery opening, her paintings on the walls, her name on the door.
The vineyard, the one bed, waking up with her in my arms.
The letters I’d been writing to the baby. All those words I’d been too scared to say out loud, committed to paper in the middle of the night, a record of everything I felt and feared and hoped for.
If the worst happened now. If I lost them now, after everything, after coming so close to getting it right.
The doors swung open.
“Mr. Beaumont?”
A doctor. Short gray hair, calm eyes, scrubs with cartoon animals on them. Pediatric, probably. Or obstetric. She had a clipboard in her hand and an expression that was carefully neutral.
I focused on the clipboard because I couldn’t look at her face. Couldn’t bear to see bad news written there.
“Your wife had a fall at her gallery. A ladder. She experienced some dizziness and lost her balance.”
“The baby.” The words came out strangled.
“The baby’s heartbeat is strong. We’re monitoring both of them closely.
” She paused, consulting her notes. “She has some bruising, particularly on her hip and shoulder where she landed. We want to keep her overnight for observation, run some additional tests. But the initial assessments are positive.”
Positive. Strong heartbeat. Overnight observation.
The relief hit me so hard my legs gave out.
I didn’t fall, exactly. More of a controlled collapse, my back sliding down the wall until I was sitting on the cold hospital floor, my head between my knees, my whole body shaking with the force of the emotion I’d been holding back.
The resident from before appeared beside me. “Sir, are you okay? Maybe you should sit somewhere more comfortable.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t fine. I was the opposite of fine. But I was alive, and Blair was alive, and our daughter was alive, and that was the only thing that mattered.
“Can I see her?” I managed. “Please. I need to see her.”
“Of course. This way.”
He helped me up, and I followed him through the double doors, down a hallway lined with curtained bays. The sounds of the ER faded behind us, replaced by the quieter atmosphere of the observation ward. Monitors beeped. Voices murmured. The ordinary sounds of a hospital doing its job.
“Bay seven,” the resident said. “She’s been asking for you.”
I pushed through the curtain.