11. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
“You don’t have to do this,” Reid said.
We were sitting in his car outside my mother’s house. The gardens were full of women in summer dresses, wandering between tables laden with pink and white decorations. Laughter drifted through the open windows, bright and artificial, the soundtrack of every Newport party I’d ever attended.
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?” His hands were tight on the steering wheel, knuckles white. He was wearing a suit again, the same one from the Chadwick house, still too tight in the shoulders. He looked like a man heading to his own execution.
“Because if I don’t show up, she wins.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and checked my reflection in the visor mirror. My makeup was perfect. My dress was new. I looked like a woman who had her life together, which was hilarious, because my life was a smoking crater. “And I’m done letting her win.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“Reid-”
“I’m not waiting in the car this time.” His jaw was tight, his voice brooking no argument. “I’m not sitting out here while they do whatever they’re planning to do. I’m coming with you.”
I studied his face. The determination in it. The protective anger burning behind his eyes. This man who’d tried to discuss tide tables with Sandrine Chadwick, who looked at Newport society like it was a mathematical problem he couldn’t solve.
He was willing to walk into my mother’s garden party for me.
“Okay,” I said. “But stay close.”
We walked up the garden path together, arm in arm. I felt him tense beside me as we passed through the gate, felt the way his whole body went rigid at the sight of all those women in their designer dresses, their champagne flutes, their perfect smiles.
The women noticed us immediately.
Conversations stuttered. Heads turned. Someone dropped a champagne glass and didn’t even notice, too busy staring.
Reid Navarro, the nobody with no name, walking into Priscilla Montrose’s garden party like he belonged there.
“Just keep walking,” I murmured. “They’ll get over it.”
His hand settled at the small of my back, warm through the thin fabric of my dress, and my traitorous nervous system lit up like a switchboard.
He was wearing that terrible too-tight suit again and somehow that made it worse, the shoulders straining the seams, the clean line of his jaw above the collar, and I caught myself noticing all of it at my sister’s baby shower, of all places, and made myself stop.
Mostly.
“They’re staring.”
“They always stare. Ignore it.”
We made it halfway across the lawn before I stopped dead.
Birdie was sitting in the center of a semicircle of women, surrounded by gifts and tissue paper.
She was the picture of glowing motherhood, one hand on her belly, the other holding a champagne flute that was probably just sparkling cider.
Her smile was radiant. Her dress was white.
She looked like a virgin bride at her own coronation.
She was opening something, a box wrapped in yellow ribbon, and as she lifted the lid, I saw what was inside.
A blanket. Pale gray, impossibly soft, with little elephants embroidered along the border.
My blanket.
The one I’d bought six years ago, the first time I thought I might be pregnant. The test had been negative, like all the tests would be negative, but I’d been so hopeful. So certain that next month would be different.
I’d kept that blanket in a locked room at The Anchorage.
A room nobody knew about, a room where I stored all the things I’d bought over seven years of hoping.
Baby clothes in neutral colors. Books about pregnancy and childbirth.
A mobile with little sailboats that I’d found at a craft fair and couldn’t resist.
And this blanket. This soft gray blanket with the elephants.
Birdie held it up for everyone to see. “Isn’t it beautiful? I found it in the most unexpected place.”
The women around her cooed and aahed. Someone reached out to touch the fabric, and I wanted to scream at them not to touch it, that it was mine, that Birdie had no right-
“And look at this.” Birdie set down the blanket and reached for another box. “A matching crib mobile. And here - oh, this is my favorite.”
She pulled out a stuffed elephant. Gray, soft, with floppy ears and button eyes.
I’d bought that elephant during one of the worst months, one of the many months the test came back negative, when I’d wanted a baby so badly it was a physical ache.
I’d held that elephant and cried for three hours. Then I’d put it in the chest and locked the door and never looked at it again.
Now Birdie was passing it around a circle of women, smiling, radiant.
“Where did you find all these lovely things?” someone asked.
“Oh, you know.” Birdie’s eyes found mine across the lawn. Her smile widened. “Blythe had them stored away. She never used them, so I thought - why let them go to waste?”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
Seven years of hope. Seven years of locked rooms and secret purchases and dreams I’d never told anyone about. Seven years of praying and waiting and trying and failing.
All of it unwrapped and passed around like party favors.
Reid’s hand closed over mine. “Blythe.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I said I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I was standing in my mother’s garden watching my sister show off the nursery I’d never gotten to fill, and I was anything but fine. But I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me break.
Priscilla appeared at the edge of the circle, clapping her hands with that practiced hostess enthusiasm. “Ladies, ladies - it’s time for toasts! Everyone gather round.”
The women shuffled into position. Birdie stood up, one hand on her belly, her face dressed up as humble gratitude, which fooled no one who knew her.
“I just want to say,” she began, her voice trembling with practiced emotion, “how grateful I am to all of you for being here today. This baby is such a blessing, and I couldn’t have gotten through these past few months without your support.”
She paused. Her eyes found mine again.
“Especially my sister,” she said. “Blythe, I know things have been… difficult between us. But I want you to know that I’ve always looked up to you. You were always the golden child. The one everyone admired. The one who got everything first.”
Murmurs from the crowd. Sympathetic nods. These women had known me for seven years. They’d watched me host charity events and plan galas and smile through every disappointment.
They believed every word coming out of Birdie’s mouth.
“I used to think I’d never measure up,” Birdie continued, her voice catching artfully. “I used to think I’d always be in your shadow. But now…” She touched her belly. “Now I have something that’s just mine. Something you could never have.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd. Delicate, polite, devastating.
The whole lawn watching me, all of them waiting to see if I would crack.
I smiled instead.
“Birdie.” My voice carried across the lawn, clear and steady. “There’s a reason you’re the youngest. You were always second. You’ve always had to wait for me to finish with a thing before you were allowed to want it.”
The laughter stopped.
“My clothes when I outgrew them.” I took a step forward, then another. “My friends when I went to college. My husband when I-” I paused, let the silence stretch. “Well. You know when.”
Birdie’s face went red. Her hand tightened on her belly. “How dare you-”
“How dare I what? Tell the truth?” I stepped into the circle, and the women parted around me like water.
I could feel their eyes on me, curious, scandalized, fascinated.
This was better than any reality show. “You’re having a baby with a man you stole from your sister.
You’re throwing a shower with gifts you stole from my hope chest. Everything you have, Birdie, you took from me. ”
And under my own voice I could hear the older one, the soundtrack of that whole house, my mother’s voice across twenty years: let her have it, Blythe.
You’re older. Don’t make a scene. The doll.
The boy. The coat I saved two summers for.
I had spent my entire childhood being trained to hand things over quietly, and my whole family had simply assumed the training would hold for a husband too.
“That’s not-”
“It is.” I stopped in front of her, close enough to see the hatred burning in her eyes beneath the pretty mask. “And the worst part is, you’re not even smart enough to be ashamed of it.”
Birdie moved.
She crossed the space between us so fast I barely saw her coming, arm raised, hand open, going for my face. Reid stepped in front of me, his body a wall between us, and I heard the collective gasp of a whole garden party getting more drama than it had bargained for.
I put my hand on his arm and moved him gently aside.
“I don’t need it,” I said quietly. “Thank you. But I don’t need it.”
Reid hesitated. His whole body was tense, ready to intervene, but he stepped back and let me face my sister alone.
Birdie swung anyway.
I caught her wrist mid-air. Her momentum carried her forward, and for a moment we stood there frozen. Her arm extended, my fingers wrapped around her wrist, both of us breathing hard. I could feel her pulse racing under my grip, could see the fury and the fear warring in her eyes.
“Don’t make a scene, Birdie.” My voice was soft, almost kind. “It’s enough that you’ve been my husband’s lover for who knows how long. Don’t lose the little you earned by getting pregnant just because you’re pissed at me.”
“Let go of me.”
“It’s not my fault you can’t have things of your own.” I released her wrist. “It’s not my fault you always have to steal.”
Birdie shoved me.
Both hands on my chest, hard enough to send me stumbling backward. Reid caught me before I hit the ground, his arms around my waist, holding me steady.
Birdie stood there shaking, her face scarlet, her mouth opening and closing like she couldn’t find words vicious enough.
Then she made a sound, a gasp, or a moan, or something in between, and looked down.
Water was pooling at her feet.
“Oh god.” Her voice went high and thin. “Oh god, oh god, the baby-”
Chaos erupted.
Women screamed. Chairs toppled. Priscilla rushed forward, her face white, her hands fluttering uselessly. Sandrine appeared from somewhere, barking orders, calling for a car, suddenly competent in a crisis the way she’d never been competent at anything that mattered.
Birdie collapsed onto the grass, clutching her belly, wailing.
“She pushed me!” She was sobbing now, pointing at me with a shaking hand. “She pushed me and now the baby’s coming and she did this, she did this-”
Priscilla turned on me. Her face was twisted with fury, real fury, not the controlled displeasure I’d grown up with.
“What did you do?” She was screaming. “What did you do to her?”
“I didn’t-”
“You pushed her!” Sandrine was there too, her voice ice-cold. “We all saw it. You pushed a pregnant woman.”
“She pushed me first.” I was still in Reid’s arms, still off-balance. “She attacked me. I was defending myself.”
“You’re a monster.” Priscilla’s voice cracked. “You’ve always been a monster. Get out of my house. Get out!”
Around us, a lawn full of phones already up, recording everything. A lawn full of witnesses who would tell whatever story they were told to tell. All of them would remember this as the day Blythe Navarro attacked her pregnant sister and caused an early labor.
I looked at my mother. I looked at Sandrine. I looked at Birdie, writhing on the grass, performing agony for the cameras.
I was so tired.
Fine, then. If they wanted a villain, they could have one.
I looked at my mother and felt something die inside me, the last hope, maybe, that she would ever choose me. That she would ever see me as anything other than a liability to be managed.
Then I smiled, cold, sharp, nothing like the smile I used to wear.
“Enjoy the shower, Mom,” I said. “I hope the baby looks just like his father.”
I turned and walked out with Reid beside me, his hand on the small of my back, his jaw set in a hard line.
We didn’t look back.