He Rejected Me For His Best Friend (A Wife's Retribution #9)

Chapter 1

The phone goes off at eleven-forty, and I know who it is before he reaches for it.

Mason doesn’t check the screen. That’s the part. A man who has to check is a man being surprised. He just puts his thumb on it, swings his legs out of bed, and takes it into the hall in one motion he’s done enough times that it doesn’t require thought.

“Hey,” he says, out there. “Hey. No, no, you’re fine.”

I lie in the dark and listen to a conversation I can’t hear all the words of.

I don’t really need the words. It’s the pitch I know.

He drops half an octave for her. It’s warmer than the voice he uses for his mother and softer than the one he uses for me, and it has a little laugh threaded through it, low, private, for something I wasn’t in the room for.

I turn onto my side and smooth the sheet down flat with the edge of my hand. Then I smooth it again.

He’s out there twenty minutes while I’m lying here pretending like I’m trying to go to sleep. When he comes back he sits on the end of the bed instead of getting in. He rubs the back of his neck.

“That was Mallory.”

“I figured.”

“They cut her whole team. No warning, no severance worth the paper.” He exhales. “Her lease is up in three weeks. No way she can afford the rent or the expense of moving. She’s got nothing lined up. She was trying not to cry on the phone. I have never in my life heard her sound like that.”

“That’s awful,” I say.

“I told her she could come here.”

The ceiling doesn’t move. Neither do I.

“Here,” I say.

“The guest room’s just sitting there.” He turns, and I can see the shape of him against the window, the set of his shoulders that says he’s already decided and is now going to be very reasonable about it.

“A few weeks. A month, tops, until she finds something. She’s got no one else.

Her parents are gone, her sister’s a nightmare. I’m it.”

I’m it. He says it like it’s a burden, but it doesn’t land like one.

She’s his best friend, and I’ve never had an issue with that. They were friends before I ever even know Mason existed.

But she calls after eleven and he takes it in the hall.

There are jokes between them with no beginning I was ever present for.

Whole punchlines in three words. I’ve watched them wreck each other laughing over a thing that happened before I existed to him, and I’ve laughed, too, a beat behind, the way you laugh in a language you’re still learning.

At a party two summers ago, she put her hand flat on his chest to make a point, and left it there through the whole point, and then a little past it.

And at our rehearsal dinner she stood up with a glass in her hand and told a room of ninety people that she should have married him years ago, but she could never marry someone who woke up as early as he did on the weekends.

Everybody laughed. It was funny. It was, objectively, a funny toast. I laughed with my hand on my new husband’s back.

That’s it. That’s the whole case file. A phone habit, some jokes, a hand, a toast.

Hard as I’ve tried, I can never shake that little voice in the back of my head that says, “Watch that one.” But I can’t take that to anyone.

I can’t say it out loud without becoming a smaller woman in the saying.

I know exactly how it sounds, because I’ve rehearsed it in my head at two in the morning and heard how it sounds.

I don’t like how his friend looks at him.

There isn’t a version where I come out of that sentence looking good.

“Natalie.”

“Sorry. Thinking.”

“You don’t want her here.”

“I didn’t say that.” I didn’t say it, but it’s true.

“You didn’t have to.” Not unkind. That’s the worst of it, he isn’t being unkind, he’s being hurt.

I sit up. I put my hand on his back, over the knob of his spine, warm through his shirt.

My husband. The man who sat with me through the diagnosis appointment when I was twenty-two and squeezed my hand so hard my ring left a mark, who said you are what I want before I’d finished crying, and who has never once, not one time, made me feel like a body that didn’t work.

So, I do the thing. I make the choice. I decide to trust him.

“She can come here,” I say. “Obviously, she can come here. I’ll get the guest room ready.”

He turns around so fast. “Yeah?”

“She’s your person. She’s had a horrible month, and it sounds like she needs a place to land while she gets back on her feet.

” I hear myself doing the voice, the generous one, the one that sounds like a woman with no static in her at all.

“We’re not going to be the couple who have a spare room and says no to your best friend. ”

He kisses me. He’s grateful and a little sloppy with it, and he’s already telling me how easy it’ll be to get along with her while she’s here, already saying she’ll want to help with groceries, and I should let her, and he’s happy, he is so uncomplicatedly happy.

I hold onto that. Because he’d have to be a monster, wouldn’t he?

To be this happy about it in front of me if there was something more there than friendship.

Ten minutes later, he’s happily sound asleep, while I lie here and hope I made the right decision.

The exhaustion has been going on for weeks, and I’ve been very good about rationalizing what could be causing it.

It’s the hours. It’s the cortisol. It’s my body, which does this, which has always done this.

Polycystic ovary syndrome is a diagnosis but it’s also a filing cabinet.

Anything that goes wrong goes in the drawer.

Tired, in the drawer. Sick in the mornings, in the drawer.

Cycle doing nothing recognizable for two months, well, that’s not news, that’s just a normal autumn season.

I finally give up and decide to go see Dr. Ahn, who has been my primary care doctor since I moved here, and who lets me list symptoms for six minutes without once looking at her screen.

I want a blood panel and permission to feel better.

She orders both. Thyroid, iron, vitamin D, the hormone workup she runs on me every couple of years to see what my body is doing lately.

“Come back Thursday,” she says. “We’ll go through it together.”

She always says that. I don’t think anything of it.

Thursday’s waiting room has a woman in it, one hand riding the top of her pregnant belly the way you’d rest an arm along a fence. I read a laminated card about hydration over and over again so that I don’t have to look at her. I’m not exactly proud of it, but it is what it is.

Then Dr. Ahn calls me back, and she sits down and lets out a deep breath.

That’s the first wrong thing. Nobody sits down and breathes hard to tell you your iron is low.

“Your thyroid’s fine,” she says. “Your iron’s a little sad, we’ll deal with that, but we also ran a pregnancy test with the blood sample. That’s routine before I look at anything hormonal. I want you to know I wasn’t hunting for anything.”

“Okay.”

“It came back positive.”

I laugh. It comes out of me before I can stop it, one flat unhappy syllable, because this is a cruel thing to be wrong about and she is going to feel so terrible in a second.

“That’s a false positive,” I tell her. “I’m not being difficult. You know with my PCOS my hormones do all kinds of things. Three different specialists have told me this was extremely unlikely without help.”

“Unlikely doesn’t mean never.”

She doesn’t reach for the file. She doesn’t need the file.

“It wasn’t a borderline number that maybe is maybe isn’t,” she says. “In fact, I’d say you’re further along than a few weeks.”

“Further along?”

“Which is its own kind of good news. The early stretch is the fragile one, and you’ve come all the way through it without knowing.” She lets that sit. “I want you in with an obstetrician this week and they’ll date it properly. But you’re going to hear the plain version from me first.”

She waits until I look up.

“You’re pregnant, Natalie. You’re going to have a baby.”

Something goes through me that has no name and no manners. It takes my whole face.

I put both hands over my mouth. Dr. Ahn pushes the tissue box across without a word, and I take one. I don’t use it though. I just hold it and shake and make a sound I’ve never made in front of another person.

Because here’s what nobody understands about carrying a thing like this until you’re the one who has had to carry it.

You don’t grieve it once. You grieve it in the drugstore aisle when you’re buying tampons and have to see the pregnancy tests on the next shelf over.

You grieve it at baby showers, holding a gift you picked out yourself.

You grieve it every time someone asks you when you’re going to have a baby and you play it off like it’s your choice not to instead of admitting that you can’t and then that someone says oh, you’ll change your mind and you smile and say maybe.

You build a whole life at a slight angle to the thing you wanted, and you get good at it, you get so good at it that people tell you how well you’ve handled it.

And then a woman with a stethoscope around her neck tells you the impossible has happened and that angle straightens.

“Sorry,” I keep saying. “Sorry. I’m not sad. These are not sad tears.”

“Oh, trust me, I know.”

“I never thought I’d get this.”

“I know,” she says. “Congratulations.”

I sit in my car in the lot for a long time with the key in my hand and don’t start it.

Not a phone call. That’s the first decision and it’s easy. This is not a thing you hand somebody through a speaker while he’s in a parking garage or about to head to a meeting. I want his face. I want to be looking at him when it arrives.

And not on Sunday, when the whole family gathers including my brother Josh’s best friend Danny and the whole house will be loud and full of other people’s opinions. Not with Mallory living two doors down the hall making a joke I don’t have the beginning of.

Just him. Just us. Ours for a minute before it belongs to anybody else.

He’s got a meeting tonight that he can’t skip, and I can’t wait until he gets home. I glance at the clock. He should be in his office right now. Maybe I’ll go there and tell him in person, but I don’t want to go empty-handed. I have to make this special.

I look at myself in the rearview and my eyes are a disaster but I’m grinning like a lunatic.

“Mom,” I say out loud, to nobody, to see how it sounds.

It fits. It has always fit. I’ve just never been allowed to try it on.

Until now.