Chapter Three
He didn’t say I can explain.
I’ll give him that. Most men would have. Elias walked around the car, crouched beside the open door so his face was level with mine, and said:
“I should have told you in November.”
“November.”
“The match came back November thirteenth.”
?
November thirteenth.
I knew that date. It was the day he came home late, and I made him feel the baby roll, and he put his hand on my stomach and said hi.
“You sat on the floor,” I said. “You talked to him.”
“I know.”
“You knew. When you did that. You already knew.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t look away. That was the worst part. He looked right at me and let me see it.
?
We went inside because it was cold and because I needed to sit somewhere that wasn’t his car.
He brought out a binder.
Of course there was a binder. Elias Hale doesn’t do anything without one. It was blue, three inches thick, labeled in his block capitals: MARCH.
“I planned it,” he said. “All of it. I need you to see that I didn’t just—”
“Open it.”
?
He had tabs.
Surgery. Four hours, laparoscopic, three small incisions. Home in two days. No lifting over ten pounds for six weeks.
Coverage. His mother flying in on March 10th. My sister Jess on call around the clock. A night nurse, already paid for, starting the day we came home with the baby.
Timing. A printed page of statistics. First babies arrive, on average, eight days after their due date.
“First babies come late,” he said quietly. “The odds are overwhelmingly that I’ll be home and recovering before you go into labor.”
“Overwhelmingly.”
“Ninety-one percent.”
?
Here’s what I’ll admit: for a moment, it worked.
He’d thought of everything. His mother. Jess. A night nurse. Percentages. Sitting there with the binder on my knees, I felt the old warm feeling—this man takes care of things—rising up in me like a tide.
Then I turned to the last tab.
It had two dividers inside it. One said WREN. The other said MARA.
They were the same thickness.
?
“Why is she in here?” I asked.
“She’s the recipient. Her recovery plan affects mine.”
“Why is she the same size as me?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
?
I wanted to be furious. I was furious. But under the fury was something worse, something I hadn’t felt since before we were married.
I felt like I was being compared.
?
That night I couldn’t sleep, and neither could he, and around two in the morning he said my name in the dark.
I didn’t answer. He didn’t touch me. He just lay there on his side of the bed, and I lay on mine, and the space between us was about eighteen inches wide.
It made me think of June.
?
June.
Thirty-six weeks before that night, give or take. The heat wave. The bedroom windows open, the fan pushing warm air across the sheets. We’d just had the call that the IVF transfer hadn’t worked, and we’d decided to stop trying for a while and simply be married.
Elias came home early. He found me in the shower, crying where he couldn’t hear, and he didn’t say anything. He just stepped in with his clothes on.
I laughed. He kissed me with the water running into both our mouths.
?
He peeled the wet shirt off himself and then his hands were on me, slow and certain, the way he does everything. He knelt on the tile. I braced a hand against the glass and he took his time, like there was nowhere else on earth he needed to be, until my knees gave and he caught me.
We didn’t make it to the bed properly. We made it to the edge of it.
I remember the fan. I remember his mouth against my shoulder and my name coming out of him like something breaking. I remember thinking, as he moved inside me, this is the only person I will ever want to be this known by.
Six weeks later, the test was positive.
We never found out for sure. But I have always believed it was that night.
?
Now.
Eighteen inches of mattress. Two in the morning.
“Wren,” he said again.
“Is there anything else?” I asked the ceiling. “Anything else you haven’t told me. Anything at all.”
“No.”
I have known Elias Hale for eleven years. I know every one of his silences.
That no came one second too late.