2. Odette
— ? —
Odette
Forty Minutes Later
I wake up moving.
Someone is carrying me, arms under my knees and behind my back, and the ceiling above me is industrial and gray, nothing like the crystal chandeliers of the ballroom.
A service corridor. Harsh fluorescent lights.
The distant clatter of dishes and the muffled chaos of what sounds like a whole crowd talking at once.
“Stay with me, Odette. Stay with me.”
I know that voice. It takes me a moment to place it because I’m still swimming up from somewhere dark and thick, but I know it. Elliott. Laurence’s younger brother. The quiet one. The one who always sat at the far end of the table at family dinners, asking questions no one else bothered to ask.
“Elliott?” My voice comes out cracked and strange. “What are you... where are we?”
“Service exit. I’m getting you out of here before the vultures descend.” His jaw is tight, his eyes fixed straight ahead. “Can you walk? My car is close, but I need to know if you can walk.”
I try to nod, but the movement sends a wave of nausea crashing through me so violent that I grab the front of his shirt with both hands.
“Bag,” I gasp. “I need a bag.”
“What?”
“A bag, Elliott, now, I’m going to be sick.”
He swears under his breath and looks around frantically.
We’re passing a catering station, trays of half-eaten appetizers, bottles of sparkling water, and there, crumpled beside a stack of napkins, a brown paper grocery bag.
He lunges for it without putting me down, snatching it off the shelf and shoving it into my hands just as my stomach heaves.
I’m sick in the bag while Elliott holds me. There’s no dignity in it. No grace. Just my body rejecting everything that’s happened in the last hour, purging it all into a crumpled paper sack while Laurence’s brother keeps his arms around me and his hand on my hair, holding it back from my face.
“I didn’t know,” he says, his voice rough. “Odette, I swear to God, I didn’t know. I had no idea he was... I’d never have let you walk out there if I’d known, I’d have stopped it, I’d have done something.”
I gag again, spit into the bag, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My eyes are watering. My throat burns.
“Don’t say his name to me right now.” It comes out harsher than I mean it to. Harder. “I don’t want to hear his name. I don’t want to think about him. I just want to get out of here.”
“Okay.” Elliott adjusts his grip on me, pulling me closer to his chest. “Okay. I won’t. Let’s just get to the car.”
The rest of the escape is a blur. A back door. A loading dock. The sharp October air hitting my face like a slap. Elliott’s car is a black sedan parked illegally by a service entrance, and he settles me into the passenger seat with a gentleness that makes something in my chest crack.
I’m still holding the bag. Folded now, pressed flat between my hands. I don’t know why I’m keeping it. Evidence, maybe. Proof that this night really happened, that I really threw up in a service corridor while a room full of people watched my husband betray me on a screen the size of a billboard.
Elliott slides into the driver’s seat and pulls out of the alley fast, tires squealing.
“I’m taking you to a clinic,” he says. “You fainted. You need to get checked out.”
“I’m fine.”
“You aren’t fine. You collapsed in front of a ballroom full of people.”
“I’m fine.” The word tastes like a lie in my mouth. “I just want to go home.”
“Odette.” He glances at me, just for a second, but the concern in his eyes makes me stop arguing. Real concern, not the performed kind I’ve gotten used to. “Please. Just let someone look at you. For my peace of mind, if nothing else.”
I slump back against the seat and close my eyes. The nausea is fading but not gone, lurking at the edges like a threat. I’ve felt like this for weeks now. Tired. Sick. Off in some way I keep failing to explain.
“Fine,” I say. “But somewhere discreet. The last thing I need is this showing up in Page Six.”
“I know a place. Walk-in clinic on Lexington. Very quiet. Very private.”
I don’t ask how he knows about a quiet, private clinic. Elliott has always been the family mystery, the second son everyone forgot to look at, moving through life in his brother’s shadow. For all I know, he has any number of secrets tucked away in the corners of his careful, quiet existence.
The clinic is exactly what he promised. Small. Clean. No one looks up when we walk in, Elliott with his hand on my elbow, me clutching my folded paper bag like a talisman. The receptionist takes my name without recognition and leads me to an exam room painted the color of weak tea.
“I’ll wait outside,” Elliott says.
“No.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “Stay. Please.”
He hesitates. Something flickers across his face, surprise or worry or something else entirely, but then he nods and settles into the plastic chair in the corner, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together.
The doctor is a woman in her fifties with kind eyes and a no-nonsense manner. She checks my vitals, asks me questions, frowns at my answers. Yes, I’ve been nauseous. Yes, I’ve been tired. No, I haven’t been eating much. Stress, I tell her. My marriage is complicated.
She orders blood work. I sit on the exam table in my midnight blue dress with my anniversary pearls still digging into my throat and wait.
The minutes stretch out like taffy. Elliott doesn’t speak, but his presence fills the room, steady and solid.
I find myself watching him when I think he isn’t looking.
The way he sits, coiled and alert. The way his jaw tightens every few seconds, like he’s biting back words he knows better than to say.
He looks like Laurence, but not. The same dark hair, the same sharp jaw, but softer somehow. Kinder. Like a sketch of the same face drawn by a gentler hand.
The doctor comes back. She’s holding a piece of paper and her expression has changed, become careful in a way that makes my stomach drop.
“Mrs. Fairbanks,” she says, “when was your last menstrual period?”
The question lands like a blow. I blink at her, trying to remember. Weeks ago. Months? Time has become strange lately, slippery and unreliable.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I’ve never been regular. And with everything going on, I lost track.”
The doctor nods, like this is the answer she expected. “Your blood work came back. I need to tell you that you’re pregnant. Just past four months.”
The room goes very still.
I hear the words, but they don’t make sense.
They’re just sounds, syllables arranged in an order that should mean something but doesn’t.
I’m forty years old. I’ve been trying to have a baby for most of my marriage.
Fertility treatments, specialists, years of disappointment and negative tests.
Laurence stopped caring a long time ago. I stopped hoping almost as long.
“That isn’t possible,” I say.
“I understand this is unexpected.” The doctor’s voice is gentle. “But the test is quite definitive. You’re pregnant. Just past four months.”
Four months.
I do the math. Once. Twice. Three times, because the answer keeps coming out the same and I need it to be wrong.
Four months ago was our anniversary. Not the one with the pearls.
The other one, the real one, the night Laurence came home late and smelling like whiskey and climbed into bed beside me without a word.
I lay there in the dark and listened to him breathe and thought about how long it had been since he touched me, really touched me, like he wanted to and not like he was checking a box.
He reached for me that night. I don’t know why. I didn’t ask. I just let him, because I was desperate and lonely and stupid enough to think that maybe, finally, something would change.
It was cold. Mechanical. Over in minutes. He rolled off me and checked his phone and fell asleep without saying a word, and I lay there staring at the ceiling and wondering when exactly my marriage had died.
“Four months,” I say out loud. My voice sounds far away. “That was... that was the last time we...”
I can’t finish the sentence. Not with the doctor watching me. Not with Elliott in the corner, still as stone, his eyes fixed on the floor.
But he hears. I know he hears, because his hands tighten on his knees and his jaw goes rigid and he doesn’t look up, doesn’t look at me, doesn’t move at all.
He’s the only living soul who knows.
The doctor says more things. Prenatal vitamins.
An OB referral. Follow-up appointments. I nod in the right places and sign the papers she puts in front of me and take the pamphlets she hands me, but I’m not really here.
I’m somewhere far away, floating above my own body, watching a woman in a blue dress learn that she’s going to have a baby by a man who just humiliated her in front of everyone she knows.
Elliott drives me home. Neither of us speaks. The city slides past the windows, lights blurring into streaks of color, and I press my forehead against the cool glass and try to breathe.
I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant with my husband’s baby.
I’m pregnant with the baby of a man who has another woman, who let a whole ballroom watch him fuck her on a screen behind my head, who couldn’t even bother to show up to his own vow renewal.
The paper bag is still in my lap. I haven’t let go of it all night. I fold it smaller, pressing the creases flat with my thumb, and tuck it into my clutch.
“Odette.” Elliott’s voice is quiet. Careful. “What do you need? What can I do?”
I look at him. Really look at him, for maybe the first time in all the years I’ve known him.
He isn’t handsome the way Laurence is handsome, not polished and perfect and made for cameras.
But there’s something in his face, a steadiness, a solidity, that makes me want to lean into him and never stop.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything except that my life just fell apart in front of everyone I know and I’m going to have a baby and I’m completely, totally, utterly alone.”
“You aren’t alone.” He says it simply, like it’s a fact. Like it’s obvious. “I’m here.”
“Why?”
“Because someone should be.”
It’s such a small thing, that answer. Such a simple thing.
But it cracks something open in my chest, something I’ve been holding shut for a very long time, and suddenly I’m crying.
Not the delicate tears of a society wife, pretty and photogenic.
Ugly crying. Heaving, gasping sobs that shake my whole body and make my face red and blotchy and leave mascara tracks down my cheeks.
Elliott pulls over. I don’t know where we are. Some side street, dark and quiet, away from the lights and the traffic. He turns off the engine and sits there, not touching me, not speaking, just present.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp between sobs. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually, I never...”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice is firm. “You have nothing to apologize for. Just let it out.”
So I do. I cry until my throat is raw and my eyes are swollen and there’s nothing left inside me but a hollow, echoing emptiness.
And when I’m done, when I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Elliott Fairbanks’s car with my ruined makeup and my anniversary pearls and my paper bag and my secret baby, I look at him and say the only thing I can think to say.
“What the fuck am I going to do?”