Chapter 2
The fancy baby boutique in town is four minutes from his office. I try to avoid it like the plague generally, but not today. Today it’s my time to go in and browse with a big smile on my face. I have nothing in particular I want to buy, but I know I want to mark the occasion with something.
There’s a bin near the register, the impulse-buy bin, and in it there are socks the length of my thumb. Cream-colored. A little scalloped ruffle at the cuff, which is ridiculous, which is for a foot that does not exist yet.
I hold one on the flat of my palm.
Nine dollars. I pay in cash so it’s faster. The woman at the register puts them in a paper bag the size of an envelope and says, “Have a good one!”
I say, “You, too!”
In the car I practice what I’m going to say to him and how I’m going to say it. You only get one chance to tell your husband that a miracle has happened and he’s going to be a daddy. It has to be perfect.
“So, I went to the doctor.” No. That’s an opener for bad news. He’ll go white before I finish.
“Open your hand.” That’s better. “Close your eyes, open your hand.”
I say it out loud twice at a red light and catch a man in the next lane watching me and I don’t even care. Let him look. Let everyone look.
The lobby of Mason’s building smells like cold stone and floor polish. Rick at the desk lifts a hand, and I lift one back. I’ve been coming here for years, I’ve done the holiday party, I know which elevator is slow.
Sixth floor. The doors open on that end-of-day hush, half the desks dark, the light coming in long and orange across the carpet.
Macey from accounts is at the copier and she looks up and sees me and her face shifts.
It’s fast, and if I hadn’t been looking right at her, I would’ve missed.
It’s a small thing. Her chin comes up and her mouth opens like there’s a sentence loading, and then it doesn’t load, and she says, “Natalie. Hi. Do you… Did he know you were coming?”
“Surprise attack.” I’m still walking. I’m still smiling. I raise the little paper bag like a badge. “Two minutes, I promise, I’ll give him right back. I know he’s got that meeting tonight.”
She takes half a step. “Let me just buzz him.”
“Macey. It’s fine.” Warm. Breezy. Already past her.
His door is at the end. It’s open about a hand’s width.
I hear him first, low, that half-octave down, and I feel my mouth go flat because of course she’s here, of course she came by, and then I catch the sound of her voice and it’s wrong. It’s thick. She’s crying, or she’s been crying, and my second thought is that something’s happened.
My first thought, my very first, is that they’re arguing. That he’s finally saying something to her about being just a little too comfortable in his life.
I stop with my knuckles an inch off the door because I don’t want to walk into the middle of something hard. I’m being polite. I’m standing in the hallway of my husband’s office being considerate.
“—can’t keep doing it,” Mallory says. “Down the hall from you. Making toast with her in the morning. Do you know what that’s like? I have wanted you since I was nineteen years old and I have been so good, Mason, I have been so, so good… And now we’re… And she’s there…”
“Come here,” he says.
The door isn’t heavy. It swings.
There’s a stretched second where my brain refuses the image and starts hunting for another explanation, a comforting hug, a bad angle, something, and it can’t find one, because there is no innocent explanation for a man’s hand at the back of a woman’s thigh with her skirt already up over it.
Her shoe is on its side under the desk. His mouth is on her throat. Her fingers are in his hair, and she is holding the back of his head the way you hold something you own.
Mallory opens her eyes and sees me.
And she doesn’t move.
She looks at me over his shoulder, and she takes her time. Something comes up into her face that is not shame. It’s not fear. It’s not even guilt. Her chin lifts. She looks at me the way a woman looks when she’s just won.
Then she remembers to be horrified. She says, “Oh—” and pushes at his shoulder. She reaches down for the hem of her skirt about a full second after she should have.
Mason turns.
I watch the color go out of him from the top down. He steps back from her fast, too fast, and knocks a stack of files off the corner of the desk, and paper goes everywhere across the carpet.
“Natalie.” He puts a handout. “Natalie, wait. Wait. This isn’t… This isn’t what it looks like.”
And there is the oldest sentence in the world. He reaches for it as easily as he reached for her.
I look down at my hands.
The little paper bag has gone soft in my fist. I’ve crushed it without knowing.
And inside it are the socks with the scalloped cuffs that I bought less than fifteen minutes ago for a foot the size of my thumb, and I came here to say close your eyes, open your hand, and I practiced it while I sat in my car at a red light like a na?ve little girl.
He is going to be a father. He is standing in front of me with his shirt untucked and the heat from another woman’s mouth still on him and he is going to be a father, and he does not know it.
“Natalie.” He’s closer now, careful, hands up like I’m something fragile sitting too close to a ledge. He doesn’t touch me. Even now he reads me well enough to know not to. “Please. Let’s go somewhere. Let me explain it, just don’t… Don’t do anything yet, okay? Just come sit down, and let’s talk.”
Behind him Mallory is standing very straight, smoothing her skirt with both palms, watching me. Not crying now. Not even a little.
I take the bag with the tiny socks in it and put it in my purse. They’re not going to be in the same room as this. Not for one more second.
“How could you?” I ask.
My voice comes out level. Conversational, almost. It frightens me a little, how much it sounds like I’m asking something like what he might like to have for dinner.
“Natalie—”
“How could you do this to me? How long has this been happening?”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it.
He looks at the floor, at the spilled files, at anywhere, and his hand comes up to the back of his neck, and I understand that I already have my answer, because a man with something small to confess trips over himself to say once, he says one time, I swear, he can’t get it out fast enough.
You only go silent when the number is going to end things.
And then, from behind him, quietly, almost gently, she says, “Since I got back into town.”
Mason’s head comes up. “Mallory.”
“She asked,” Mallory says.
I stand here and let it go through me. All of it, at once.
The dinners since she took up residence in the guest bedroom.
The night out for our anniversary. The night when I couldn’t sleep and he sat up with me on the kitchen floor and told me I was the best thing that ever happened to him, and I believed him.
“Natalie,” Mason says, and his voice breaks in the middle of my name.
I turn around and walk out.
I go past the spilled paper and out the door and down the corridor past Macey, who is standing at the copier with both hands over her mouth, who tried, who actually tried to stop me, and I keep my chin level and my eyes forward and I do not run.
Behind me I hear him come out into the hall. “Natalie!” And then, further back, Mallory saying his name once, low.
He stops.
I hear it. The exact spot in the corridor where my husband’s footsteps stop because his best friend said his name.
The elevator is the slow one. Of course it is. I stand and watch the numbers, and he gets there just as the doors start to move. He puts his hand out, and his face is wrecked, absolutely wrecked, and he says, “Natalie, please, I love you.”
The doors close.
I make it to the third level of the parking garage before my body catches up with me.
I get in the car and shut the door and then everything that has been holding still lets go at once. My hands start. Then my jaw. I put both palms on the wheel and press down hard to make them stop, but they don’t stop.
My phone buzzes on the passenger seat. His name lights up the screen, but I watch it go dark without answering. It lights again. Dark. A text comes in, and I don’t read it. Another one comes shortly after.
I open my purse and take out the little paper bag and put the socks in my hand.
They’re so small. That’s all I can think. They’re so small, and an hour ago I was the happiest I have ever been in my life. I didn’t even know I was setting a record for how quickly it could all turn sour.
And what breaks my heart the most is if I went back up there right now and said the word, he would fall on it.
He’d cry. He’d hold onto my coat and say all the right things and mean every one of them, and Mallory would be standing behind him with her shoe back on, and this baby, my impossible, unlikely baby, would arrive in the world as the thing that fixed it.
The thing that made him stay.
No.
I put the socks back into my purse.
My hands are steady now. I notice that. They stopped shaking without me telling them to, and something has moved into the space where all that shaking was, and it’s quiet, and it’s cold, and it doesn’t feel anything like me.
He doesn’t get to know. Not tonight. Not while she’s still on him.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
“Just us,” I say. “For now, it’s just us.”