6. Libby
Libby
Still, Libby was happy with her life. She had a sweet husband who was also hot and who didn’t mind living out of a suitcase.
She got to fly business class and stay in five-star hotels in far-flung locations and eat in the best restaurants in the world.
It was not a life she could have imagined for herself, growing up watching her mom and dad, who still lived in the same town they’d grown up in, still partied with their friends from high school who had also never left, who never even stepped foot on a plane.
And yet… Libby now held a little ticking bomb in her hand as she walked out of the bathroom.
It was a pregnancy test that very definitely confirmed what she’d suspected—beautiful, because her biological clock had started making itself known rather insistently last year, and the overwhelming desire to have a baby had consumed her.
But also a bomb, because how did a baby fit into their jet-setting life?
She walked into the bungalow’s bedroom. The suite was built out of light wooden planks and decorated with thundu kunaa—handwoven mats of dyed reeds in beautiful, intricate patterns—and lacquered vases and framed art made of seashells.
Jacob sat propped up in their four-poster bed, working on some of the footage they’d shot while scuba diving today.
“Honey?” Libby said.
“Sorry, gimme one sec.” Jacob dragged his finger slowly over the trackpad of his computer, barely a millimeter at a time. Libby recognized the movement from the thousands of times she had edited videos, trying to trim the clip at precisely the right tenth of a second.
“Okay, sorry; I’m done now,” he said, looking up at her. “What’s up?”
But the last bit was truncated, because Jacob’s jaw dropped when he saw the pregnancy test in her hand. “Is it…?”
Libby bit her lip and nodded.
“Oh my god!” Jacob jumped out of bed, nearly knocking his laptop onto the floor as he rushed over and cocooned her in a hug. “Really?”
Libby held him tight. “Really. Really! We’re having a baby.”
“We’re having a baby!” Jacob echoed. The ability to articulate anything more eluded them in the immensity of the moment.
Instead, they held each other and bounced up and down. Jacob had to wipe away the tears trickling down his face that were beginning to soak Libby’s hair.
After they’d collected themselves, he picked up the phone and dialed room service. “Champagne, please. We’re celebrating! Oh, hold on—no, not champagne.” He laughed at himself. “Something nonalcoholic.”
“And something chocolate,” Libby said, leaning into the phone.
Order placed, Jacob hung up and threw his arms around Libby again, bringing them both down together flat onto the bed.
He pressed his forehead against hers, one of her favorite things in the world.
Maybe it was because her parents had been absent so much in her youth that now, Libby wanted no personal space at all.
But whatever the reason, Jacob loved being close to her, too, and that’s why they were so good together.
Not every couple could spend all day, every day, working in such proximity to each other and then spending their little downtime together as well.
“I love you,” Jacob said. Then he moved down to kiss her belly. “I also love you, little bean. And the world is going to love you, too.”
Libby froze. Because there it was again. This baby was a gift but also the thing that would blow up their lives.
“Jacob…”
“Hmm?” He was still nuzzled against her stomach.
“What if I don’t want the world to know about our baby?”
He looked up at her, frowning. “I guess we can hide it for a while? But at some point, you’ll start to show—”
“But what if I don’t want to document the process of you and me becoming three?”
Jacob nodded. “I get it. It’s a personal journey for us. Of course, honey. We can strategically shoot videos of you without showing your stomach later on in the pregnancy. Plenty of celebrities do that and then announce the baby after they’re born. Not that we’re celebrities, but you know.”
“It’s not only that,” Libby said. “I’m not sure I want us to be a content-creating family. I mean, I know it works for some people. The Globetrotter Duo became the Globetrotter Trio and then the Globetrotter Quartet, and now their kids have even more sponsorships than the parents do. But…”
“But what?”
She thought again about how she’d held that pregnancy test like it was a tiny bomb. “What about the privacy rights of our baby girl?”
Jacob’s eyes lit up. “A girl? We’re having a little girl?”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling.” Libby took his hands in hers.
“But what I’m worried about is, what if our daughter grows up and resents that we put her online from the very start?
We didn’t have to worry about this when we were kids, because the internet didn’t exist like this yet.
But if we post photos and videos of the baby, she will never have gotten a choice.
Kids these days don’t get to consent. They just become props in their parents’ lives. ”
“Whoa, back up.” Jacob pulled his hands out of Libby’s.
“I promise we’ll never treat our baby like a prop.
If we put her online, that just makes us normal, proud parents.
And we have the opportunity to show our child the entire planet.
We are so lucky in this career we’ve built, and we can give that to her.
But if you’re saying what I think you’re saying—that you want to quit all this—then… what have we been working so hard for?”
Libby buried her face in a pillow. She didn’t know.
This is what she’d been privately wrestling with while hoping to get pregnant.
Would she really throw away what she and Jacob had made?
Their audience of hundreds of millions had taken years to grow, and it’s because of them that Jacob and Libby got paid.
Without their little media empire, who would they even be?
“I don’t…” Jacob murmured beside her. “What would we do for a living? Our only marketable skills are being ourselves on camera.”
Someone knocked on the bungalow door. “Room service!”
Jacob let out a long exhale before showing him in. The waiter set up an ice bucket with a bottle of sparkling mango juice and presented them with a decadent chocolate cake, sprinkled with deep-red pomegranate seeds.
“Congratulations on your celebration,” the waiter said, before exiting with a smile.
Libby and Jacob stared at the cake, not sure what to say next.
So much for paradise-perfect celebrations.