My Husband Doesn’t Think Our Baby Is His (Her Marriage in Crisis #103)

1. Adrian

— ? —

Adrian

The ceiling fan turned lazy circles in the dark, and I’d been awake long enough to memorize every shadow it cast.

Beside me, Nina slept with her back curved toward the windows, her breathing slow and even, one hand tucked beneath her cheek the way it had been for ten years.

The silk of my old dress shirt - the one she claimed years ago and never gave back - had ridden up past her hip.

The moonlight was thinning toward gray, and I wanted to reach for her.

I didn’t.

On the dresser, where Nina had left it the night before, sat a shoebox of photographs.

She’d hauled it down from the attic three days ago - “Cole is going to die when he sees these” - and I’d watched her sort them at the kitchen table with a smile I didn’t recognize, laughing at pictures she didn’t turn around to show me.

At some black hour of the morning, I’d given up on sleep and gone through the box myself, standing at the dresser like a thief in my own bedroom.

Nina at twenty-two on a fire escape, hair longer, laughing so hard her eyes had disappeared. Nina in a paper crown, mid-shout, joy blurring the frame. Nina asleep on a couch I’d never seen, her feet in the lap of a boy who was watching her instead of the camera.

Cole Reeves was in almost every photograph. And in the ones he wasn’t, he was behind the lens - which meant she’d been laughing like that at him.

I’d put the box back exactly the way I found it. Gotten back into bed beside my wife like a man returning from a crime. And then I’d lain there in the dark, counting down the hours until the doorbell would ring and eight years of distance would walk back into my house wearing an easy grin.

He’s her oldest friend, I told myself, the way I’d been telling myself for three days. You’ve met him a dozen times. You played golf with him. You like him.

The gulls started up outside. The dark went from black to iron to ash. Beside me, Nina slept on, one hand beneath her cheek, peaceful as a woman with nothing in the world to dread.

Today was the day.

***

The dahlias were on the sideboard when I walked in.

By the time I’d hung up my coat, they were on the dining table. When I came back through with a glass of water, they were on the sideboard again, and Nina stood three feet away from them with her head tilted and one hand on her hip, glaring at the arrangement like it owed her money.

I leaned against the doorframe and watched her pick the vase up a fourth time.

“You’ve moved that vase three times,” I said.

“Four.” She set it down another inch to the left, stepped back, and frowned at it. “The table felt crowded. Now the sideboard feels bare. Does the room feel welcoming to you? Be honest.”

“It felt welcoming an hour ago. Before the flowers started commuting.”

“Adrian.”

“It looks beautiful. You look beautiful.” I caught her hand as she reached for the vase a fifth time and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “It’s Cole, not the Pope.”

“It’s Cole after eight years.” She squeezed my fingers - and she was glowing, actually glowing, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet the way she does at airport arrivals and on Christmas morning.

She hadn’t stopped moving since breakfast. “Do we still have that scotch? The good one? He converted to scotch, apparently - he wrote me a whole email about a distillery in Edinburgh. Oh - and I told the caterer no cilantro. Cole thinks cilantro tastes like soap. Did I tell you that? He once sent back a taco in front of God and everyone-”

“You told me.”

“-and I need to check if the guest bathroom has hand towels, because Cole notices things like hand towels, he’s weird about it-”

“Nina.” I turned her by the shoulders to face me. “Breathe.”

She breathed. Laughed at herself, a little embarrassed, and smoothed her palms down the front of my shirt in that absent way she does, like I’m a wall she’s always leaning on.

“I’m being insane,” she said.

“You’re being a hurricane. It’s charming. Mostly.”

“He’s my oldest friend, and the last time I saw him in person I had a different haircut and no idea what a capital gains tax was.

” She rose up on her toes and kissed me - quick, warm, tasting like the sauce she’d been testing all afternoon.

“Thank you for this. I know dinner parties rank somewhere below dental work for you.”

“For you, I’d host a dental party.”

“That’s disgusting. I love you.”

She disappeared toward the guest bathroom, narrating hand towel philosophy to herself, and I stood in my over-welcoming dining room doing something I wasn’t proud of.

Counting.

That was the fourteenth sentence today that started with Cole’s name.

I knew because some small, petty accountant in the back of my skull had opened a file around lunchtime without asking my permission.

Cole converted to scotch. Cole hates cilantro.

Cole notices hand towels. Fourteen entries, each one delivered with that lit-from-inside look, that nervous energy she was burning off on flowers and towels.

She’d hosted senators in this house. My mother, which is harder. She’d never once fussed like this.

Hostess nerves, I told myself. Eight years. Her oldest friend. Of course she wants it perfect.

I told myself that, and I mostly believed it, and I went to find the scotch.

By early evening, the dining room glowed with candlelight and the promise of an easy evening.

“You’re going to break that.” Nina hip-checked me away from the stove, reaching past to adjust the flame under the reduction.

Her shoulder brushed my chest, and I caught the scent of her shampoo - jasmine, the expensive kind I buy her every Christmas.

“Did you even go to the same cooking class I did?”

“I went to the class.” I caught her wrist before she could escape, pulled her back against me, felt her melt into the familiar shape of my body. “I was distracted by the instructor.”

“The instructor was a sixty-year-old man named Bernard.” She twisted in my arms, tilting her face up to mine with that teasing smile that still makes my chest tight after a decade.

“Bernard had excellent technique.”

She laughed - the normal laugh, the one I know, the one that sounds like home - and I pressed a kiss to her forehead, breathing her in.

“Cole’s going to be here in twenty minutes.” She poked my chest, her finger warm through my shirt. “And you still haven’t opened the wine.”

“Cole can drink water.”

“Adrian.” She drew out my name the way she does when I’m being difficult, half-exasperated, half-amused.

“What? I’m serious. The man shows up after eight years, he can hydrate like the rest of us.” I tightened my arms around her, not ready to let go. “I don’t want to share you tonight.”

“You’re not sharing me. You’re hosting a dinner party.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s really not.” She pulled back enough to meet my eyes, and something in her expression softened. Her hand came up to cup my jaw, thumb brushing my cheekbone. “Hey. It’s just Cole. You like Cole.”

It’s just Cole. Three words, and somehow the wrong three. Nobody says it’s just about a person who’s just a person.

“I tolerate Cole. There’s a difference.”

“You played golf with him for three hours last time he visited.”

“That was strategic. I was gathering intelligence.”

“On what?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

She laughed again, shaking her head, and kissed me - quick and warm and tasting like the wine she’d been sampling while cooking. “Open the wine. Be nice. Pretend you’re a functional human being who enjoys company.”

“I enjoy your company.” I caught her hand before she could pull away, pressed my lips to her palm. “Other company is overrated.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You married impossible.”

“Don’t remind me.” But she was smiling as she said it, and when she finally slipped out of my arms to check on the appetizers, she looked back at me over her shoulder with an expression that made my heart stutter.

I filed that look away without knowing I’d need it later. Without knowing I’d spend the rest of the night comparing it to other looks, searching for differences I’d been too stupid to see.

Cole Reeves arrived with a bottle of wine I couldn’t have afforded in my twenties and a handshake that turned into one of those backslapping embraces men do when they’ve known each other through women they both love.

“The prodigal returns.” I stepped back and took him in - California tan, easy grin, the kind of loose-shouldered confidence you can’t buy, only inherit from a life without ancestors. I straightened my own posture before I caught myself doing it.

“Someone had to keep you honest.” He grinned, but the expression didn’t quite reach his eyes. There were new lines there, I noticed. New shadows. “You’re looking very... Newport.”

“Is that an insult?”

“It’s an observation.” He glanced around the foyer - the original moldings, the chandelier that had hung there since 1892, the portrait of my great-grandfather glowering down at us. “You’ve got that old-money posture now. Very upright. Very ‘my ancestors came over on the Mayflower.’”

“They came over on a cargo ship in 1920, but sure.”

“Close enough.”

His tone was light. His eyes weren’t. I was still deciding which one to answer when Nina appeared in the doorway - and everything else fell away.

I watched Cole’s face when he saw her. The smirk went first. Then the looseness - all that California ease pulling taut in half a second, his hand rising to his own chest like something in there had moved without permission. He looked at my wife the way starving men look through restaurant windows.

I told myself I was imagining it.

I’ve gotten very good, lately, at telling myself things.

He crossed the foyer in three strides and wrapped her in a hug that lasted too long. His eyes closed. His arms tightened. His whole body seemed to sag with relief, like he’d been holding his breath for eight years and could finally exhale.