4. Heidi
HEIDI
Beau attends my final prenatal appointment because I ask him to put the time in his calendar and treat it as immovable.
Three days have passed since I saw Celeste's post. He has apologized for lying. He has not called what happened an affair. I have not decided what to do with the space between those two facts.
At County Memorial, the obstetrician confirms that our daughter is low, healthy, and welcome to arrive whenever she chooses. My blood pressure is normal. Beau asks sensible questions and keeps his hand around mine.
For forty minutes, I can imagine the scan and the lunch have frightened him back into our marriage.
He suggests tea in the hospital café before we go home.
Celeste is already there.
She sits near the window in a camel coat, her stomach seven weeks behind mine. Surprise touches her face with poor conviction.
My hand tightens around Beau's before I make myself release it.
He does not look surprised enough either.
“You knew she was coming?” I ask.
“No.”
Celeste smiles at him as though my question is an inconvenience they can politely wait out.
“I told you I might try the class,” she says.
Beau looks at me. “She mentioned it weeks ago.”
Weeks. I am still discovering how far back every harmless sentence goes.
My hips ache, and the baby is pressing against my bladder. I want tea and ten quiet minutes with the man who just listened to our daughter's heartbeat. Instead, I am calculating whether leaving will look like defeat.
Beau pulls out a chair before I decide whether I want to sit.
I sit because I refuse to surrender the hospital café to Celeste.
“Beau. Heidi. I was nearby.”
“For what?” I ask.
“A class.” She touches her cup. “I nearly canceled. You know how I get.”
Celeste turns to Beau. “Thank you again for coming to the scan.”
She smiles at him. “You’ve always been the steady one.”
Then she says, “It was probably just catastrophic weather in a teacup, but I was frightened.”
My fingers stop against the warm cup.
Beau and I invented that ridiculous phrase years ago for minor disasters. It belonged to us, and I have never heard anyone else use it.
He gave her our private joke.
“He has always been good in a crisis,” I say.
Celeste lifts her cup. “Some people are.”
Beau asks about the class. Celeste tells him she made it through County Memorial's maternity entrance and had to leave when they demonstrated the monitors. She had hoped practicing here would make Saint Catherine's easier. He knows which monitor she means. He asks whether April stayed.
I listen to them assemble a conversation from pieces I have never seen.
“We should go,” I say.
Beau touches my wrist. “You wanted tea.”
“I wanted tea with you.”
Celeste looks down, but not before I see the satisfaction move across her face.
A hospital cashier approaches with a receipt. “Your partner left this at the counter,” she tells Beau, nodding toward Celeste.
Celeste smiles down at her tea.
“I'm helping an old friend,” Beau says.
He does not say wife. He does not point to me.
“I'm his wife,” I tell the cashier. “This is his former fiancée.”
The woman's face reddens. “I'm so sorry.”
“So am I.”
I stand. Beau follows me out, leaving Celeste at the table.
“You didn't have to do that,” he says in the corridor.
“Correct her?”
“Humiliate Celeste.”
I stop walking. “You let a stranger mistake you for the father of her child while I stood beside you nine months pregnant.”
“I said I was helping a friend.”
“You protected her from embarrassment by making me announce my place in my own marriage.”
His mouth opens, then closes.
People move around us with appointment folders and paper cups. A heavily pregnant woman pauses near the lift while her partner adjusts the strap of her bag. I cannot stop seeing what we must look like from the outside.
“Did you hear her correct the cashier?” I ask.
“She froze.”
“You spoke. You found words to defend her.”
“I was trying to stop a scene.”
“You stopped the wrong scene.”
The lift arrives. I step inside. Beau follows, and for four floors we stand beside each other without touching.
At the ground floor, he reaches for my hand. I move it to the rail before he can take it.
“She didn't cause the woman's mistake.”
“She enjoyed it.”
“You don't know that.”
I go home in a taxi.
That evening, a contraction grips me in the bathroom while I am getting out of the shower. Pain closes around my back and stomach. I catch the basin, suddenly dizzy.
“Beau.”
No answer.
I call louder.
He arrives from the bedroom with his phone in his hand. He takes my arm and lowers me onto the closed toilet seat. He sets the phone on the floor beside the bath, then brings a towel, water, and the blood-pressure cuff we bought after the first-trimester scare.
The contraction passes. My vision clears. There is no bleeding, no fluid, and no regular pattern. Beau calls the maternity line while I stay on the closed toilet seat.
My skin is cold despite the steam still clouding the mirror. Beau wraps the towel around me and rubs my arms while we wait for the maternity nurse to answer.
I want his hands. I resent that they help.
The nurse asks me to describe the pain, whether the baby is moving, whether I can speak normally now. Beau answers the second question before I can.
“Let me answer,” I say.
He goes quiet at once.
I press my palm to the hard curve of my stomach and wait. A heel slides beneath my hand.
“She's moving.”
Relief makes Beau sag against the bath. I feel it too, sharp enough to leave me weak.
After ten minutes, the nurse agrees it sounds like a strong practice contraction. We are to monitor and come in if anything changes.
When the nurse tells us what to watch for, Beau repeats every instruction. I know he will remember them. I also know his phone is still on the floor, holding another message from Celeste.
Beau kneels in front of me.
“I was answering Celeste,” he says.
I look at the phone on the floor beside his knee.
“She wanted to apologize for the café.”
“Did she apologize to me?”
He says nothing.
“She is inside our marriage, Beau.”
His face loses color.
“Nothing physical has happened.”
“I didn't say it had.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“That I cannot have a contraction on the bathroom floor without discovering you were talking to her again.”
“She was apologizing.”
“No. She was reaching for you after humiliating me, and you answered.”
I hear my own voice shake. I pull the towel tighter around myself.
“I need you to understand that I am frightened,” I say. “Not jealous. Not dramatic. Frightened.”
He reaches for my hand and stops before touching it.
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
He does not answer quickly enough.
“I didn't know it felt that way,” he says.
“She uses our language. She knows our appointments. She can arrange a coincidence because you told her when I would be there. She knows you will protect her embarrassment at my expense.”
“I didn't invite her.”
“You gave her access.”
He sits back on his heels.
“If she calls while I am in labor, will you stay with me?” I ask.
“Of course.”
“Answer it as if she is frightened. Answer it as if she says it is urgent.”
“I will stay.” He takes my hand. “Heidi, I promise.”
“Even if she says the baby is coming?”
“Yes.”
“Even if April cannot get there?”
“Yes.”
“Even if she says she cannot walk through the doors without you?”
His answer takes one breath too long.
“I will stay with you.”
I search his face. He looks certain now, and I need the certainty badly enough to accept that I had to build the exact emergency for him before he could promise against it.
“Put the phone away,” I say.
He picks it up from the floor and turns it off in front of me.
Then he helps me stand, wraps the robe around my body, and walks beside me to the bedroom. His palm remains at my back.
I lie down facing away from him. After a moment, the mattress dips.
“May I stay here?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He does not touch me until I reach behind and take his hand. I bring it around my stomach and hold it there.
Our daughter moves once beneath his palm.
“I mean it,” he whispers.
I close my eyes.
“You have to.”
I believe him because I cannot imagine a marriage surviving if I do not.