7. Margot
Margot
My assistant sends me the post.
It's Anders. He's on a couch I don't recognize, low and beige with a crocheted throw over the back. Milo is on his lap, both fists in the air, laughing. Anders is looking at Milo the way he looks at my stomach.
The caption: Finally where he belongs. A red heart.
Two hundred and eleven likes. I don't know Becca's friends, so I don't know who they are, but I read the comments anyway, because I'm apparently a person who does that now.
Omg he's so happy!!
About time. You deserve this girl.
Beautiful family.
Is that his dad?? He looks JUST like him.
Congratulations to you both.
Halfway down, a name I recognize. Dev Sinclair. Anders's site super. He's worked for Stenburg for nine years and been to my house for dinner four times.
He liked it.
I put the phone face down on the bathroom counter and finish brushing my teeth and go downstairs and hand it to Anders.
He reads it.
He goes gray. I'll give him that. He goes gray in about a second. He goes out to the deck with his phone and I watch him through the glass, pacing, one hand on the back of his neck, and I can't hear him but I can see him say take it down three separate times.
She takes it down. He comes back in.
"It's gone."
"Good."
"She didn't mean anything by it. She's just." He sits. "She's happy Milo has somebody."
"Dev liked it."
"What?"
"Your site super liked the post about your new family. So did two hundred and ten other people. Whoever they are."
"I'll talk to Dev."
"That's not the point."
"Then what's the point, Margot? I made her take it down. What else do you want?"
His phone rings. Becca. He looks at it. He looks at me. He answers.
I go upstairs. I can hear him through the floor for twenty minutes, low and patient, the voice from the bathroom door. I know. I know you didn't. It's okay. Hey. It's okay.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor because I can't lie down anymore without a wedge, and I listen to my husband comfort the woman who just told the internet he belongs to her.
He comes up after. He stands in the doorway.
"She's a mess," he says. "She's just really alone, Mar. She doesn't have anybody. I think she posted it because she wanted somebody to see that something good was happening to her for once."
"Something good."
"You know what I mean."
"I know what she means. I'm not sure you do."
He sits down next to me on the bed. Not touching. Close. He looks at his hands.
"I talked to Dev. He didn't know. He thought it was, I don't know, a cousin's kid. He felt terrible."
"Okay."
"I'm handling it."
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep meaning it."
He reaches over and puts his hand on my knee, and I look at it. Two weeks ago I'd have put mine over it. I sit there and look at his hand on my knee and I can feel Nora turning, and I can feel the exact distance between what he thinks is happening and what is, and it's about the width of this bed.
"I'm going to lie down," I say.
He takes his hand back. He goes downstairs. I hear the TV go on, low.
I don't lie down. I can't. I sit there with my feet on the floor until the TV goes off and then I sit there some more.
Monday I close the Harbor Street financing.
Eleven million dollars, eighteen months of work, a lender in Boston who needed to be talked off a ledge twice.
I do it from a conference room with my feet up on a second chair because my ankles have started disappearing by noon.
When the wire confirms, Vanessa brings me a cupcake with a candle in it and my whole team stands in the doorway and claps.
Twelve people. I built every one of those jobs.
I sit there with the cupcake and my ankles up and think about a woman on a beige couch telling the internet my husband has finally come home.
Nobody in that doorway knows. That's the strange part. I'm the same person I was in August. I can still close eleven million dollars before lunch. I just can't get my own husband to believe a bracelet was on my wrist and Becca just may have decided it was hers.
Vanessa lingers after they go.
"You okay?"
"Thirty-four weeks. Nobody's okay at thirty-four weeks."
"That's not what I."
"I know." I blow out the candle. "I know, Vanessa. Thank you, I’m okay.”
I have to be. There is no other option at this point.
She goes. I eat the cupcake. I think about the post for the rest of the afternoon, not the photo, the caption, the four words and the heart, and how certain they sounded.
My mother comes for lunch on Sunday.
She sees it in about four minutes. I don't tell her anything. She sits at the island and looks at the highchair and looks at the basket of toys and looks at me, and then Anders comes in from the garage on the phone, and he says "hang on, Becca," and goes back out.
My mother waits until the door closes.
"How long has that been going on?”
She gestures widely with her hand.
"It's not going on."
"Margot,” she says in her mom voice, the one I can never escape.
"She has a baby. He might be Anders’s, and he’s just trying to help."
She pours herself water. She doesn't drink it.
"He's so busy proving he's a father," she says, "that he's forgotten he's already a husband."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?”
"He's doing his best in a situation that isn't his fault. She's the one who waited eleven months before she told him. He didn't do anything except get informed that he had a son."
I hear it. I hear the whole speech coming out of my mouth and I hear how thin it is, like a coat in November, and my mother hears it too. She doesn't argue. That's the worst part. She just puts her hand over mine on the counter and squeezes once.
"When did you last sleep through the night?"
"I'm eight months pregnant, Mom."
"That's not what I asked."
The petty cash lives in the second drawer of the desk in my study. It's for contractors who don't take cards and delivery guys and the neighbor's kid who mows the strip along the fence. I keep eight hundred in it and I top it up on the first of the month.
On Sunday night after my mother leaves I open the drawer because I owe the kid forty dollars.
There's two hundred.
I count it three times. I sit down in the desk chair.
Three people know about this drawer. Me, because it's mine.
Anders, because I told him the week he moved in, in case he ever needed cash.
And Becca, because six days ago she stood in my study doorway while I was on the phone, and Milo was on her hip.
She asked what this room was, and Anders said it was my office.
He asked for cash to pay for pizza, I absentmindedly opened the drawer and handed it to him.
I'd looked up from the call and had seen Becca’s eyes widen at the contents of the drawer.
And now it was missing six hundred dollars.
I close the drawer. I don't lock it, because I don't have a key. I've never needed one in this house.
I hear Anders on the stairs. I hear him stop at the door of the nursery, where he goes every night now to check the crib for no reason.
I don't call out. I sit in my study with a drawer that's six hundred dollars light and a wrist with nothing on it and a husband down the hall who tells me to wait and see.
I'm done waiting.
I get out my laptop and I make a list. Dates. Amounts. Every cancelled appointment. Every transfer. The bracelet. The drawer. I put it in a file and I name the file with a word that means nothing and I save it.
My mother's right. I haven't slept through the night in a month.
I'm not going to tonight either.