My Billionaire Husband Asked If Our Baby Was His (Billionaire Vows in Crisis #3)

One. Two Pink Lines

The onesie was too small to fold properly, so I kept smoothing it against the dining table instead, the way you’d press a letter you were afraid to send.

White cotton. Snaps up the front. On the chest, in gray thread, a single line I’d paid a woman on the harbor road forty dollars to embroider that afternoon: WORTH THE WAIT.

Four years of waiting, if anyone was counting. I was. I could have given the number in months. In appointments. In the little paper cups of water they hand you at the clinic while you wait for bloodwork, as if thirst is the thing they can fix.

I’d cooked. That was the part Dominic would notice first, before the onesie, before the champagne flute of sparkling cider at my place setting instead of wine.

We had a chef, Marguerite, who came Tuesdays through Saturdays and left the refrigerator lined with labeled glass containers, and I had sent her home at four and burned the first batch of roast potatoes myself and been glad about it.

The kitchen still smelled of rosemary and scorched fat.

My mother used to say you could tell a woman’s news by whether she cooked it or catered it.

Big news you cook. You need your hands doing something or the words come out before their time.

I set the onesie in the center of his plate and covered it with the silver dome we never used, the one from the wedding registry that had sat in the butler’s pantry for nine years like a joke about the people we’d planned to become.

Then I waited.

Seven o’clock became eight. The candles I’d lit at six-thirty had burned down to the point where lighting new ones would look like what it was, so I let them gutter.

I texted him at eight-ten. On my way, he sent back, which from Dominic could mean the car was moving or could mean he intended, in a general sense, to come home eventually.

I didn’t mind. That’s the thing I keep returning to, now, when I take that evening out and turn it over.

I didn’t mind waiting. I had spent the afternoon in a state I can only call composed joy, the joy of a person who has rehearsed disappointment so many times that its opposite arrives wearing disappointment’s clothes, and I could have sat at that table until midnight.

I’d waited four years. Two more hours was nothing.

I sat with my hand flat on my stomach, which was ridiculous, there was nothing to feel, the test that morning had been the only proof in the world, and I sat there feeling it anyway.

While I waited, I let myself think about the last time we’d sat in Dr. Feld’s office, because I could finally afford to. Grief you can only visit once it’s over; while it’s running, you keep your eyes on the road.

November. The fourth round. We had agreed, driving there, that this would be the last one for a while, my body needed a year off from being a project, and we sat in the two chairs that faced Feld’s desk, the chairs I could have described with my eyes shut, tweed, oak arms, the left one with the wobble, and Feld went through the numbers with the gentleness of a man who has delivered this weather report a thousand times.

And I held it together through all of it, through follicle counts and next steps and the words spontaneous conception still entirely possible, which is medicine for a miracle would be required, and what broke me finally wasn’t anything Feld said.

It was Dominic’s thumb.

He had my hand in both of his, and while Feld talked, my husband stroked his thumb across my knuckles, back and forth, slow, the whole appointment, and I realized he wasn’t doing it for me.

It was unconscious. It was the thing his body did with its grief while his face stayed in the meeting.

And in the car afterward he didn’t start the engine for a while, and then he said, not looking at me, “I don’t need it, you know.

If it’s you and me in a house for forty years and nobody else ever comes, I haven’t lost anything.

I need you to actually believe that, because I think you think you’re failing at something.

You can’t fail at being the whole point. ”

He said that. In a parking garage in November. That man asked me the three words in June.

I have spent months now holding those two Dominics up against each other, and here is the conclusion I’ve come to, for whatever a wife’s forensics are worth: both were real.

That’s what nobody warns you about. The parking garage was not a performance and the dining room was not an impostor.

A person can carry both men inside him his whole life, and which one answers the door on a given night depends on who has been whispering to him in the meantime, and I didn’t know yet, smoothing that onesie in the candlelight, that someone had been whispering.

Two pink lines. I’d stood in the bathroom holding the test under the vanity light and then, not trusting the vanity light, carried it to the window and held it in the sun.

I hadn’t called Tansy. My sister has never kept a secret longer than a car ride.

I hadn’t called Prue, who would have cried, and then I would have cried, and I wanted my crying for one audience only.

I had spent the whole day carrying it alone on purpose, the way you’d carry the last full glass of water across a desert.

He would be the first to know. That mattered to me in a way I couldn’t have defended out loud.

After every month that had ended in the small private funeral of a single line, he would be the first to hear that this one hadn’t.

The morning had been ordinary until it wasn’t. That’s how the enormous things arrive; they use the servants’ entrance.

I was three days late, which meant nothing.

I had been three days late eleven times in four years, and eleven times I had bought the test and taken the test and sat on the cold edge of the tub watching a single line surface like a body, and I had learned to buy them in bulk and think of them as a tax on hope.

There was one left in the drawer under the sink, behind the spare soap, in the box with the corner Tansy’s dog had chewed the Christmas she stayed with us.

Dominic had left at five-forty for the gym and then the office.

I heard the car. I lay in the gray light doing the arithmetic I always did and telling myself what I always told myself, that I would wait until day five this time, that I would not do this to myself again on day three, and I held out until six o’clock, which is to say I held out for twenty minutes.

Three minutes is a long time. People say it and don’t mean it, but stand in a bathroom in your husband’s T-shirt at six in the morning with your entire future developing face-down on the marble and tell me about time.

I didn’t watch. I had trained myself years ago not to watch.

I cleaned the sink. I straightened the towels that were already straight.

I recited the alphabet backward, a trick from the clinic waiting room, and I got to G, and then I turned it over.

Two lines.

I remember I made a sound I have never made before or since, something between a word and a hinge, and I sat down on the floor of the bathroom, all the way down, tile cold through cotton, and I laughed and put both hands over my mouth to hold it in, because the house was empty and I held it in anyway.

Some joys you keep pressure on, like a wound in reverse.

I thought about calling him. I picked up the phone; his name was under my thumb.

Eight o’clock, he’d be between the gym and the first meeting, he would answer on the second ring the way he always answered me, and I put the phone face-down on the counter.

Not like this. Not into an earpiece in the back of a car on the expressway, not squeezed between a workout and the Halstrom call.

Four years deserved candles. Four years deserved his face where I could watch the news land on it.

I have replayed that decision more times than any other decision of my life.

If I had called him at eight in the morning, before the day did whatever the day did to him, before he decided to bring the envelope home instead of burning it.

If he had heard it in my voice with no table between us.

You can bleed to death on an if. I’ve stopped picking that one up.

I spent the day in a conspiracy of one. I drove to the harbor road and paid for the embroidery and watched the woman’s machine stitch WORTH THE WAIT in twelve minutes, and she asked was it a gift and I said yes and could not stop myself adding, for my husband, and she smiled the way women smile at that, a whole guild of understanding in it.

I bought the cider. I sent Marguerite home.

I burned the potatoes and made them again.

At four in the afternoon I stood in the doorway of the small south bedroom, the one we had never furnished, the one we had never discussed not furnishing, and I let myself look at it for the first time in two years, the way you test a healed bone.

Sun on the bare floor. Room for a crib under the window.

I closed the door gently, like there was already someone sleeping inside.

Tansy called at five, because Tansy calls at five the way tides come in.

“You sound weird,” my sister said, eleven seconds into a conversation about her landlord. “Why do you sound weird?”

“I don’t sound weird.”

“You sound like Christmas Eve. You sound like you did when you hid Mom’s diagnosis for a week, which, still not over that, by the way. What is it? Is it good or bad, blink once for good.”

“You can’t hear blinking, Tans.”

“Oh my God, it’s good.” A clatter on her end, something set down hard, her whole body arriving at the phone. “Maren. Maren Elisabeth. Tell me.”