10. Heidi
HEIDI
Four days after Ivy's birth, Beau places a printed call log and an exported message thread on Mom's dining table.
Dash stays in the kitchen with Ivy. I sit on a cushion because my body is still healing. Beau begins by pointing out that there are no sexual messages.
I read dates instead.
The first page begins in February.
Celeste called the morning after a fertility appointment. Beau spoke to her for thirty-seven minutes while I was at work. That evening, he made soup and sat beside me while I complained about the cost of another test.
The dates make the two lives touch.
March: nine calls. April: twelve. In May, the week we heard Ivy's heartbeat, he spoke to Celeste four times.
“What did she need that week?” I ask.
Beau shifts in the dining chair. “Her mother had another scan.”
“That required four calls?”
“We talked about other things too.”
“I know.”
That is why we are here.
Eight months of calls. Some last four minutes. Some last more than an hour. Three came while I was at prenatal appointments. One arrived the night I had a fever and Beau said a client needed him. The log proves timing and frequency, not what they said.
The written messages prove enough. Private jokes. Celeste asking what I think about names and Beau answering before we had told family. My work schedule. Our appointment times. Lunches concealed as meetings. Beau writing that Celeste understands the pressure of being needed better than anyone.
I stop at one sent at 11:43 at night.
Is she asleep?
Finally. Rough day.
Then I can borrow you for five minutes.
The call log shows fifty-two.
“I was having trouble sleeping then,” I say.
“You were exhausted.”
“I was awake when you came back to bed.”
He remembers. I see it.
“You told me you were checking a concrete order.”
“Yes.”
I turn the page. Another message contains the photograph of the first yellow sleeper I bought for Ivy. I sent it to Beau from the shop because I was afraid purchasing anything before the anatomy scan would tempt fate.
He forwarded it to Celeste thirteen minutes later.
“You gave her this?”
“She asked whether we had started buying things.”
“I hadn't shown my mother.”
He looks at the little yellow shape on the page.
“I didn't understand it was private.”
“It was ours.”
“You told her when I slept,” I say.
“She asked when it was safe to call.”
“You created safe hours inside our marriage.”
I continue reading.
Celeste learns when I bathe because Beau tells her that is usually a quiet half hour. She learns Thursdays are difficult at the school clinic because parents collect medication before the weekend. She learns I go to bed early after prenatal appointments.
The details are not confessions. They are worse in a quieter way. Beau built her a map of my absence.
“Did you ever tell her not to call?”
“If we were doing something.”
“Something important?”
“Dinner. An appointment. If you needed me.”
“She decided whether to interrupt us because you told her what counted.”
He rubs both hands over his face.
“I thought I was setting boundaries.”
“You were scheduling the breach.”
He returns to the defense he prepared. “I never said I wanted her. I never touched her.”
I turn to a message sent while I was at the school clinic. Celeste asks whether I still make everything into a practical problem. Beau answers with a laughing symbol and says I keep him steady.
The exchange continues beneath the line about my practicality.
Celeste writes, She worries because she loves you.
I know. Sometimes I wish love came with an off switch for the lists.
There is a laughing symbol after it.
I remember the day. The clinic had a stomach virus moving through two classrooms. I came home late and found Beau cooking pasta. I apologized for sending him three reminders about the pharmacy.
He kissed my forehead and said he liked my lists because they kept us alive.
Then he laughed about them with her.
“Was I unbearable that day?” I ask.
“No.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“No.”
“You let her comfort you for a burden you did not have.”
His face tightens.
“I was venting.”
“You were auditioning me for the role of difficult wife.”
I flatten my palm over the page. “You gave her my faults and my virtues. You let her study the place I occupied.”
He pushes the pages away, then draws them back as if even that movement could look like refusal.
“Heidi, I was not planning to leave you.”
“I believe you.”
Relief flashes across his face.
“That does not help,” I say.
It disappears.
“You wanted our marriage. You also wanted this.” I touch the stack. “You wanted her to need you privately. You lied so you could keep both.”
“I didn't love her.”
“This is an emotional affair.”
He recoils from the phrase.
“I never told her that.”
“You did not have to name it for it to exist.”
My voice shakes. I flatten one hand against the paper so he cannot see it.
“I told you in the bathroom that she was inside our marriage. These pages are the answer.”
“That isn't what I thought I was doing.”
“The pages do not change because of what you called it.”
I stop reading when Ivy cries in the next room. Beau reaches for the stack as if he can organize the damage.
The sound releases me from the table.
I stand too quickly. Pain pulls low through my abdomen, and I catch the chair.
Beau rises.
“Don't touch me.”
He stops with both hands open.
Dash appears in the kitchen doorway holding Ivy. Her face is red, her mouth open around another cry.
“She needs you,” he says.
I take her and smell milk, warm skin, the clean cotton of her sleeper. The simple urgency of her body steadies me.
Behind us, Beau gathers no pages. He sits where I left him, surrounded by eight months he thought would prove his innocence.