6. Beatrice #2
The words hit me like a physical blow. I actually stagger back, one hand reaching for the table to steady myself.
“What?”
“Get out of my house.” His voice is ice again, all that pain locked back down. “Get out, and don’t come back.”
Celia’s hand closes around my wrist like a vice.
“We’re leaving.” Her voice is steady, furious, brooking no argument. “Bea. We’re leaving now.”
“Celia-”
“Don’t talk. Don’t look back. Just walk.”
She’s pulling me toward the foyer, past my mother who’s crying into her hands, past my father who looks like he wants to hit something, past Josephine who’s still standing by the table with her phone in her hand and something like triumph in her eyes.
“David.” Josephine’s voice floats after us. “Patricia. I’m so sorry you had to witness this. I know how difficult-”
“Don’t.” My father’s voice is louder than I’ve ever heard it. “Don’t you dare speak to us.”
I don’t hear what comes next. Celia is pushing me through the front door, out into the night air that hits my bare arms like a slap. I’m not wearing a coat. I don’t have my keys, my phone, my purse. I don’t have anything except my sister’s hand on my wrist, pulling me toward her car.
“Don’t look back,” Celia says again. “Don’t you dare look back.”
I look back anyway.
Through the window, I can see them. My parents still standing. Kenneth at the head of the table, head bowed, shoulders shaking with something - rage or grief, I can’t tell. Josephine moving toward him, one hand extended to comfort her son.
Celia opens the passenger door, guides me in like I’m fragile, like I might break. Maybe I’m already broken.
She gets in the driver’s seat. Starts the engine. Pulls out of the driveway without a word.
We’re three blocks away before I realize I’m still crying.
At a red light, Celia’s hand finds mine.
She doesn’t say anything. Just holds on, her grip so tight it hurts, the bones of my fingers pressing together under the force of her grasp.
The last person who held my hand like this was Kenneth.
Five years ago. A hospital room. His hand bleeding, my needle steady, his eyes locked on my face like I was the only solid thing in a world that had started spinning wrong.
“You’re going to feel some pressure,” I’d told him.
“I’m not worried.” His voice had been strained, but warm. “You’ve got steady hands.”
“I’m a doctor. It’s required.”
“No, it’s not.” He’d smiled through the pain. “You’ve got steady hands because you’re calm. You’re the calmest person I’ve ever met.”
I’d laughed. Tied off the first suture. “You’ve clearly never seen me before my morning coffee.”
“I’d like to.” The words had surprised both of us. “See you before your morning coffee, I mean. And after. And during.”
“Is this your idea of flirting? Because your technique needs work.”
“I’m a billionaire.” He’d grinned, and it had transformed his whole face, made him look younger and less guarded. “I’m told I don’t need technique.”
“Whoever told you that was lying.”
“Then teach me. Over dinner.”
I should have said no. Should have cited hospital policy, professional boundaries, the dozen reasons why doctors don’t date their patients.
Instead, I’d looked at his hand in mine - his blood on my gloves, his trust in my care - and I’d said yes.
The light turns green.
Celia drives. I cry.
At some point, I stop crying because there’s nothing left. I feel hollow, scraped clean, like someone has reached inside me and removed everything that makes me a person and left only this shell.
The baby, I think. My hand moves to my stomach.
I was going to tell him about the baby.
It was supposed to fix everything.
Celia’s apartment is small and warm and smells like the vanilla candles she’s been burning since college.
She guides me to the couch. Wraps a blanket around my shoulders. Presses a glass of water into my hands that I don’t remember asking for.
“Drink,” she says. “You need to drink something.”
I drink. The water is cold. It slides down my throat and settles in my stomach next to the knot of horror that’s taken up permanent residence there.
“Bea.” Celia sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. “Bea, look at me.”
I look at her. My little sister, who used to steal my clothes and read my diary and drive me absolutely insane. Who grew up to be fiercer than anyone expected, sharper, more protective.
“That footage,” she says carefully. “The party. Ralphie. I remember - you texted the group that you were hosting because Priya’s pipes burst.”
“Yes.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “Everyone was there. Priya, Morgan, Jenna. We were all there. It wasn’t - it wasn’t what they showed.”
“I know.” Celia’s jaw tightens. “I know, Bea. The footage was doctored. Or spliced. Something. Because I know you, and I know Ralphie, and that was bullshit.”
Ralphie. Oh god.
“Celia.” My voice cracks. “Kenneth doesn’t know. About Ralphie.”
“Know what?”
“That he’s-” I can’t finish the sentence. Can’t explain that my husband just accused me of sleeping with my gay best friend, that the evidence he believes is built on a foundation so absurd it would be funny if it weren’t destroying my life.
Celia stares at me. Understanding dawns.
“Oh my god.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “Oh my god, Bea. Ralphie is - and Kenneth thinks-”
“Kenneth doesn’t know. I never told him because it wasn’t my secret to tell, and then it just - it never came up-”
“Okay.” Celia grips my shoulders. “Okay. Tomorrow. First thing. We tell him. We show him. We fix this.”
“He told me to get out.” The words taste like ash. “He looked at me like I was a stranger. Like I was something dirty that got tracked into his perfect house.”
“He was wrong.” Celia’s voice is fierce. “He was wrong, and we’re going to prove it, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life apologizing.”
I want to believe her.
I press my hand to my stomach again. To the baby I haven’t told anyone about except my mother, who knows without knowing, who understood my hypotheticals and laughed and promised me everything would be wonderful.
The baby was supposed to fix things.
The baby was supposed to bring him back to me.
Instead, I announced the best news of my life and watched my husband call me a liar and a cheat. Watched him believe his mother’s edited footage over my desperate truth. Watched him look at me with his father’s eyes, his father’s bitterness, his father’s poisoned certainty that everyone betrays.
I was supposed to fix him.
“You fixed me,” he said, the night he proposed. The words are inscribed inside my ring, the ring I’m still wearing, the ring that feels like it’s burning a hole through my finger.
But some things don’t stay fixed.
I don’t sleep that night.
I lie on Celia’s couch, wrapped in her blanket, staring at the ceiling and replaying every moment. The joy on my mother’s face. The disgust on Kenneth’s. The way Josephine stood up at exactly the right moment, phone already in hand, like she’d been waiting for her cue.
Like she’d planned it.
The thought surfaces slowly, rising through the fog of shock.
Josephine has access to the cameras. Josephine has keys to the house. Josephine was conveniently in Boston the night of the party, checking the footage “while she was away.”
Josephine, who has never liked me. Who told me on our first meeting that Kenneth could do better. Who inspects my home like she owns it, who hired decorators without asking, who looks at me like I’m an intruder in a house I’m supposed to share with her son.
But even Josephine wouldn’t-
She couldn’t-
The baby moves. Or I imagine it does. Too early for movement, probably. Just gas or hope or desperation.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, the way I did in the bathroom when I first saw those two pink lines. The joy of that moment feels like it happened to someone else, in another life, before everything shattered.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to the darkness. “It’s going to be okay.”
I don’t know if I’m talking to the baby or to myself.
I don’t know if it’s true.
But I say it anyway, over and over, until the words lose meaning and the sun starts to rise and another day begins in a life I no longer recognize.