He Chose Her Baby Over Our Daughter

1. Margot

Margot

My husband is lying on his back on the nursery floor with an Allen key in his teeth, and I've decided this is the best thing I've ever seen.

"You own a construction company," I say from the doorway.

"Mm."

"You have a whole lot of employees to choose from. Three of them specialize in woodworking, you know. One of them even built our deck."

I raise an eyebrow and give him a pointed look. He catches my eye and smiles, then takes the key out of his mouth. “But when my daughter asks who built her crib, I'm going to say Daddy did. Not Dev. Not Marco. Me, her Daddy.”

He says my daughter the way he's said it since the twenty-week scan, like a word he's been waiting his whole life to use.

I lean on the doorframe because at seven and a half months pregnant leaning is most of what I do.

My feet hurt. My back hurts in a specific place just above the left hip that I've started thinking of as Nora's spot, and my ribs ache every time she kicks me from within.

I finished a call with the city planning office ten minutes ago that should have ruined my afternoon, and instead I'm standing here watching Anders swear quietly at a slat. It’s amazing what baby hormone’s and a hot, handy hubby will do for my mood.

He gets the last piece in place, sits up and puts his hand flat on my stomach with a look of satisfaction on his face. His palm is warm through my shirt. He waits. She kicks, right under his thumb, as though she's been listening.

"There she is," he says to my belly. "Your mother thinks I can't build a crib. Tell her she’s wrong.”

"Your daughter is on my side,” I laugh. “She kinda has to be.”

"My daughter is on the side of whoever painted her nursery.”

He kisses the top of the bump and then stands and kisses me, quick, the way he does when he's in the middle of something and wants me to know he still sees me.

He tastes like coffee. His T-shirt has a smear of white paint on the shoulder from the trim he did on Saturday, and I'll be finding paint on his clothes for weeks, and I'm fine with it.

Our wedding photograph is propped against the wall by the dresser.

Six weeks and I still haven't hung it. Not because I don't like it.

I like it too much to put it anywhere ordinary.

In it I'm six months pregnant in ivory silk, and Anders is looking at me instead of the camera, and my mother says it's the only picture of me where I look surprised.

I twist the bracelet on my wrist. Thin gold chain. One flat link engraved with a date. I do this so often I don't notice anymore, but Anders notices, and he glances at it now and then back at the crib.

A couple of years ago we broke up. Not a fight. A relationship fizzle out. We’d had three years of amazing life together, but we just hit a bump and didn’t know which way we were supposed to go.

Six weeks apart, during which I ran my company at a level of efficiency that frightened my staff and went home every night to a house that was too big for one person. During those six weeks he slept with another woman, a whirlwind of seven nights.

He told me the night we got back together. I hadn't asked. We were on the porch and I'd just said I wanted to try again, and he'd said, before anything else, that there was something I needed to know first. Then he told me.

I’d cried, and had nothing to tell. I hadn’t slept with anybody else. I hadn’t even thought about it.

Then he took a small box out of his jacket and gave me this bracelet, he said he wanted me to have something from our first night back together… but that it had turned into the worst night. Instead of it being a celebration bracelet, it had become a declaration of his love and his honesty.

The date on the link is that night, the first night we got back together. I've worn it every day since.

Nora was conceived a few months later. He proposed when I was fourteen weeks along, shortly after we found out. I said yes because the man who could have lied to me and didn't was the man I wanted to be married to.

And because of the choice he’d made a short time later.

At twenty weeks I started bleeding. Just a bleed, and not a bad one, the OB said afterward, the kind that happens and means nothing. But I didn’t know that in the morning in the bathroom at my office, my phone in my hand and terror in my voice.

I had called him. He was on the Millbrook site with a concrete truck backed up to the forms and a crew of nine and a pour that had been scheduled for three weeks, and if you leave a situation like that, you don't get it back.

You get a bad seam and a crew standing around and a truck you're paying for by the minute.

He picked up on the first ring. I wailed, "I'm bleeding.”

"Where are you?”

“My office.”

“Hang on, I’m coming," he barked out, and that was it. No other questions asked.

I heard him yell something at Dev with the phone still at his mouth and then I heard the truck door.

He was in my office lobby in nineteen minutes with concrete on his boots and his hard hat still on.

Vanessa, my assistant, told me later that he came through the doors like the building was on fire.

He drove me to the OB and held my hand in the waiting room and didn't look at his phone once, and when the OB said everything was fine he put his face in his hands and stayed like that for a full minute.

The concrete was ruined. Dev told me that too. Ten thousand dollars and a seam they had to cut out and redo.

I asked Anders about it that night and he looked at me like I'd asked him what color the sky was.

"You called," he said. "I came. You and the baby are all that matter to me.”

I've thought about that more than the bracelet. The bracelet was him being honest. The concrete was him choosing. He’s a man who chooses me and our daughter, and a man who will be honest even when he could have lied and I never would have known.

"Do you want the rail up or down for now?" he asks.

"Up. For now. We can figure it out later.” I sniffle and wipe a tear off my cheek. “This is going to make me cry.”

"You're going to cry at the mobile,” he smiles and puts his arm around me. “It’s so cute, you’re going to love it.”

"I'm going to cry at basically everything from here on out,” I laugh.

My mother arrives at six with a bag of groceries she didn't need to bring and opinions she didn't need to bring either.

Anders takes both from her at the door and kisses her cheek, and she pretends to be put out about it.

Diane Reyes is sixty-three, has been a widow for eleven years, and has never once in my life said she trusted a man before he earned it.

She's fair to Anders. That's about as far as she goes.

He cooks. I sit at the island with my feet on the rung of the next stool, and my mother loads the dishwasher while he cooks, which he hates and she does anyway.

"Marriage isn't finding someone who never screws up," she says, over the sound of the rack sliding in. It's not clear who she's talking to. "It's finding someone you can still trust when they do."

"I trust him," I say.

Anders doesn't turn from the stove, but his shoulders do something.

"I know you do," my mother says. She closes the dishwasher. "I'm just saying that's the whole job."

We eat. She leaves at eight and hugs me at the door and puts her hand on the bump and says, "Soon.”

I say, "Not soon enough," and she laughs.

Afterward we go back up to the nursery because Anders wants to tighten the bolts a second time. I sit in the glider and watch, sliding back and forth, soothing my emotions and Nora’s movements.

He's on his knees with his back to me, and I'm thinking about nothing, about paint samples and whether the changing pad is the right size, when his phone buzzes on the windowsill.

He picks it up. He looks at the screen.

He goes quiet.

Not the quiet of a man reading a text from a foreman. I know that one. This is different. His whole body stops. The Allen key is still in his other hand.

"Who is it?" I ask.

He doesn't answer right away.

"Anders."

"Becca."

The name lands in the room like something dropped. He stands. He looks at me, and I can't read his face, and I've been able to read his face for two years.

"Give me a minute," he says.

He steps into the hallway and pulls the door most of the way closed, and I hear his voice go low on the other side of it.

I sit in the glider with my hand on Nora's spot.

In the two years I've known him, Anders has never taken a phone call away from me.

He takes calls from the site in the middle of dinner.

He took a call from his mother during our first date.

He talks to his accountant with the speaker on while I'm in the shower.

He's the least private man I've ever met.

The door is open two inches. I can hear the shape of what he's saying but not the words. Three times he says "okay." Once he says "when."

I look at the wedding photograph leaning against the wall, and I decide I'll hang it this weekend, and I don't know why that feels urgent all of a sudden.

He comes back in after four minutes. He puts the phone on the sill face down.

"Everything all right?"

"She wants to meet." He crouches back down by the crib and picks up the key. "Tomorrow, at the construction office."

"Why?"

He turns the key twice on a bolt that's already tight.

"She has a baby,” he says. "She thinks he might be mine."

My world goes cold.