4. Eloise
— ? —
Eloise
I wake up to an empty bed and a room that’s already daylight.
Oliver’s side is cold. Not recently vacated cold, not the impression-still-warm kind I used to press my palm into before making the bed. This is hours-gone cold. Pillow untouched, sheets pulled tight, the water glass on his nightstand already cleared.
He’s been doing this since the gala, leaving before I surface, and I’ve stopped setting my alarm earlier to catch him because the third time I came downstairs to find his coffee already made and his car already gone, I understood the message.
The tie routine is over. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it belongs to a version of us that existed before the night he gave me a gardenia pendant and said I wanted to and then came home from the gala without saying goodbye.
I sit up. The room tilts.
A slow, sickening lean, the walls shifting a quarter inch to the left and my stomach following. I press my hand flat against the mattress and close my eyes and wait for it to settle.
This has been happening.
Four mornings this week, maybe five. A wave of dizziness that arrives when I stand too fast, a heaviness in my body that I don’t recognize, a tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix.
I’ve been blaming the work. Drake and I have been meeting almost daily now, reshaping the old pitch deck into a real business plan, scouting locations, running projections.
I’ve been up past midnight most nights, hunched over my laptop at the desk in the study, Oliver’s study, in the corner I carved out next to the window.
The dizziness passes. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand, and for about three seconds I think I’m fine.
Then the nausea hits.
It comes from nowhere, a full-body revolt that starts in my stomach and surges upward so fast I don’t have time to breathe.
I’m across the bedroom and through the bathroom door and on my knees in front of the toilet before my brain has registered what my body is doing.
My hands grip the porcelain. My hair falls forward.
Everything I ate last night, which wasn’t much because food has been tasting wrong for days, exits with a violence that leaves me shaking.
When it’s over, I sit back on my heels and press my forehead against the cool tile and breathe through my nose until my stomach stops clenching.
This is new. The dizziness has been building, but the vomiting is a first.
I pull myself up at the sink and look in the mirror.
The woman looking back at me has circles under her eyes and a pallor that no amount of cold water will fix.
Oliver’s shirt, the navy one, hangs off my shoulder.
I haven’t stopped wearing them. He hasn’t stopped leaving them out, which is the one thing about his behavior that hasn’t changed since the gala, and I hold onto that detail the way you hold onto a rope in the dark, not knowing if it leads somewhere or just keeps your hands busy.
I splash water on my face, rinse my mouth, pull my hair back.
“You’re overworking,” I tell the mirror. “Eat more. Sleep earlier. Stop sitting at that desk until two in the morning.”
The mirror doesn’t argue. She rarely does.
A knock at the bedroom door.
“Ma’am?” Edna’s voice, muffled through the wood. “The electrician is here about the upstairs outlet. And the dry cleaning arrived, do you want it hung in the usual place?”
“Yes, thank you. I’ll be down in ten.”
I hear her footsteps retreat and I stand in the bathroom a moment longer, gripping the edge of the sink, waiting for the room to fully commit to being still.
***
The day moves and I move with it. Emails for the foundation board, a call with Drake about the lease terms on a property we’ve been eyeing, forty minutes reorganizing the folder that used to be a coffee-stained pitch deck and is now a sixty-page business proposal with financial projections and a timeline.
The work is good. The work is the best thing in my life right now because it’s mine, fully mine, and no one gave it to me and no one can take it away.
I haven’t told Oliver.
The thought surfaces every few days and I push it back down every time, because telling Oliver about the business means opening a conversation, and opening a conversation means breaking the silence that’s hardened between us since the gala, and I don’t know how to break it when I don’t know what caused it. He gave me a necklace.
He said I wanted to. The car ride was warm, his hand under mine on the console.
And then the gala ended and he was gone, and when he came home he was someone else, and I’ve been living with this stranger for a week and a half and every morning I wake up in his shirt in his bed in his empty room and I can’t figure out what I did.
Lunch arrives and I don’t eat it. I sit at the kitchen counter with a salad Edna prepared and take one bite and my mouth fills with a metallic taste that makes my throat close. I push the plate away and press the back of my hand to my lips.
Edna is at the sink. She doesn’t turn around but I can feel her attention shift.
“Ma’am.”
“I’m fine. The dressing tastes off.”
“It’s the same dressing you’ve had every week.”
I don’t answer. She dries her hands on the towel and turns, and the look she gives me is careful, measured, the look of a woman who has worked in houses long enough to know when to speak and when to wait.
“How late are you?” she asks.
The question is so quiet it barely displaces the air.
I stare at her. “What?”
“Forgive me if I’m overstepping. But the mornings, the food, the tiredness.” She pauses. “How late, ma’am?”
My mouth opens. Closes. The kitchen is very still.
I count. The last period was before Oliver’s trip. Before the night he left, the night we shared the bed properly, his arm finding my waist in the dark the way it does when neither of us is awake enough to maintain the distance. That was over four weeks ago. Maybe five.
The number sits in my chest and I can’t breathe around it.
“I have to go out,” I say, and I’m off the stool and grabbing my keys from the counter before Edna can say another word. She watches me go, leather notebook in hand, and says nothing.
***
The pharmacy is too bright and I stand in the aisle for two full minutes before I pick up the box. The cashier is a teenager who doesn’t look at me twice, which is good because my hands are not steady and my face is doing things I can’t control.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. I count every one.
The bathroom. The test. The wait, which is two minutes and contains every second I’ve ever lived compressed into a window I can’t see through.
Positive.
I sit on the edge of the tub and hold the white stick in both hands and stare at the two lines until they blur, and then I press my fingers to my eyes and breathe, and what comes out isn’t a sob.
It’s a sound I don’t have a name for, half laugh, half prayer, the noise a woman makes when she’s been invisible for three years and suddenly holds proof that she wasn’t always.
The night before he left. Our bed. His arm across my waist. The only night in recent memory where the distance closed without anyone deciding it should, where his body found mine in the dark and stayed, and the warmth of it carried me through the morning and the tie and the forehead kiss and the goodbye.
We made this. In that bed, on that night, while the navy shirt was still on the bathroom floor and the gardenias were still in every room and the marriage was still the only word for what we had.
My hand moves to my stomach. Flat, unchanged, no evidence yet of the thing that just rearranged my entire life. But it’s there. Proof of the one night Oliver Ellington wasn’t distant, wasn’t cold, wasn’t three steps ahead of his own body.
Proof that underneath the arrangement, we were real.
I sit on the edge of the tub for a long time and let the hope build. It fills me from the bottom up, warm, and I let it because I haven’t felt it in weeks and I’m tired of being careful with myself.
This could be the bridge. The thing that closes the gap he’s carved between us since the gala.
Whatever went wrong that night, whatever shifted in him that I can’t locate or fix, this is bigger than both of us.
This is a child. His child. Our child.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s the thing that finally makes him look at me and see me.
I think about my mother. How she’d sit at the kitchen table with her tea and tell me about the day she found out she was pregnant with me, the way her hands shook, the way my father cried and pretended he didn’t.
She told that story every birthday, same words, same smile, and I’d groan and say “Mom, I know,” and she’d say “You don’t know, you’ll know when it’s your turn.”
It’s my turn.
And the person I want to tell first, the only person who matters, is a man who hasn’t looked at me in ten days.
But I’m going to tell him anyway, because this baby was made on a night when he reached for me in the dark and I reached back, and that has to count for more than the silence that came after.
***
The next day, I buy a gift.
It takes me an hour in a shop I’ve never been to, turning over options, discarding everything too expensive or too impersonal or too much.
I settle on a small thing, nothing grand.
A pair of knitted booties, cream colored, small enough to fit in one palm.
The kind of thing that makes the abstract real, that turns a number on a test into a person who will need shoes.
I wrap them myself at the kitchen table while Edna pretends not to watch.
She hasn’t said another word about it since the kitchen, but there’s a softness in her movements today, a gentleness in the way she sets my tea down, that tells me she knows what I’m about to do and is holding her breath alongside me.
I put on the gardenia pendant, touch it at my throat. The gold is warm from my skin, a habit now, my fingers finding the petals the way they find the collar of his shirts.