13. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
The OB’s office is packed.
I’m wedged into a plastic chair between a woman who looks ready to deliver in the waiting room and a teenager playing her music without headphones, trying to find a position where my spine doesn’t file a formal complaint, when the door swings open and Hazel walks in.
She freezes when she sees me.
I don’t freeze. I’ve been expecting something like this - a confrontation, an ambush, some desperate attempt to reclaim ground she lost. What I wasn’t expecting was the setting.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.
Hazel’s chin lifts. She walks past the reception desk, ignores the check-in procedure entirely, and plants herself directly in front of my chair.
“We need to talk.”
Every pregnant woman in the waiting room is watching. This is better than daytime television, and they know it.
“Not here,” I say flatly.
“Where, then? You blocked my number. You won’t return my calls-”
“Because I have nothing to say to you.”
Her eyes flash. “Well, I have plenty to say to you.”
“Then say it outside.” I push myself up out of the chair with as much dignity as eight months of pregnancy allows, which is not much. “I’m not doing this in front of an audience.”
The woman beside me leans over, entirely unashamed. “For what it’s worth, honey, I’d stay. This is better than my stories.”
“I’ll send you a recap,” I tell her, and walk out.
The parking lot is blazing hot, late-summer sun beating down on the asphalt hard enough to make it shimmer. A security guard stands in the shade near the entrance, arms crossed, watching us come out with the bored attention of a man who has seen every kind of parking-lot drama this clinic produces.
Good, the cold part of my brain whispers. A witness.
I lean against the hood of Isaac’s truck - he dropped me off and went to run errands, blissfully unaware of any of this - and I wait.
Hazel stops three feet away, arms crossed over her chest.
“I want you to know that I never meant to hurt you.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. The sound comes out sharp and humorless, and Hazel flinches like I hit her.
“Jesus, Hazel. That’s your opener? You had the whole drive over here and that’s what you came up with?”
“I mean it-”
“You never meant to hurt me.” I push off the truck.
“You slept with my husband for eighteen months. You painted elephants on my baby’s wall while you were sleeping with her father.
You held my hair back at your birthday dinner and then went home and texted him.
Which part of that was the accident? Walk me through it.
I genuinely want to know which part just happened to you. ”
“I was lonely.” The tears are already gathering, right on schedule. Hazel could always cry on command. “Cedrick paid attention to me. He made me feel special. And I know that’s not an excuse-”
“You’re right. It’s not.”
“ - but I want you to understand. I didn’t set out to fall in love with him. It just happened.”
“Nothing just happens.” I step closer, close enough to watch her mascara start its slow collapse.
“Every time you answered his call, that was a choice. Every time you opened your door. Every time you sat across from me at lunch and asked how the baby was - those were choices, Hazel. Twenty years. You taught me to drive stick in your mom’s Corolla.
You were the first call I made when he proposed.
And you looked at all of that and you chose him.
Don’t you dare stand in this parking lot and tell me gravity did it. ”
“I know I can’t take it back.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “I know I can never make it right. But I’m asking you, Chantal - not for my sake, but for the sake of our babies. Can’t we at least try to be civil?”
Everything in me goes very still.
“Our babies.”
“I told you. I’m pregnant.” Her hand comes to rest on her stomach, and even now, even here, there’s a flicker of triumph in it. “Our children are going to be siblings-”
“When’s your due date?”
She blinks. “What?”
“Your due date, Hazel.” I keep my voice pleasant, which is somehow worse than shouting, and we both know it. “If you’re fourteen weeks along like you claimed in your text, you’ve had at least two ultrasounds by now. You have a due date. You have a folder of grainy little pictures. So show me.”
Her mouth opens. Closes.
“Show me one ultrasound photo.” I hold out my hand, palm up. “One appointment card. One prescription for prenatal vitamins. Anything. I’ll wait. I’m eight months pregnant - I’m not going anywhere fast.”
The silence stretches between us like a wire pulled taut, and I watch it happen. The mask doesn’t slip so much as dissolve - panic bleeding through the defiance, the lie collapsing in real time under the weight of one simple question.
“The dates are-” she starts. “My doctor said-”
“Stop.” And god help me, it comes out almost gentle. “Just stop. That’s not a rival, Hazel. That’s a hostage note with nobody in the basement.”
“Chantal-”
“Go home. Get help. Figure out why you’re so desperate to be loved that you’d invent a child to hold onto a man who cheats as a hobby.” I turn toward the clinic entrance. “And stay the hell away from me and my daughter.”
I’m almost to the door when her voice rings out across the parking lot - loud, raw, unraveling.
“You think you’ve won? You think you’re so much better than me because you got to keep him for a few years? He never loved you either, Chantal! He was just going through the motions! At least with me, he was honest about what he wanted!”
I don’t turn around.
I don’t respond.
The security guard peels off the wall and steps between us. “Ma’am, you’re going to need to leave the property.”
“This is a doctor’s office-”
“Which you’re not checked into. Car’s that way.”
I hear her heels retreat across the asphalt, furious little gunshots, and then a car door, and then an engine. The guard walks me the last few steps to the entrance.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine.” I pause with my hand on the door. “Actually - do you write these things up? Incidents?”
“Supposed to, yeah.”
“Write this one up. Every word you heard.” I smile at him, and something in it makes him reach for his pen. “You never know what you’ll need later.”
Isaac finds me in the parking lot afterward, sitting on the tailgate of his truck, staring at nothing.
“Hey.” He sets down the hardware store bag and looks at my face, and his whole posture changes. “What happened?”
“Hazel happened.”
“Here?” His jaw goes tight. “At your doctor’s office? Are you - Jesus Christ. What did she do?”
“Ambushed me in the waiting room. Followed me out here. Told me she never meant to hurt me.” I laugh, and it comes out tired instead of sharp. “Then she told me our babies deserve civility, so I asked for her due date.”
“And?”
“And nothing. No date. No pictures. No doctor. She stood in this parking lot with her hand on her stomach and absolutely nothing behind it.” I shake my head slowly. “She made it up, Isaac. All of it. The security guard had to escort her off the property. He’s writing it up.”
“Good.” He leans against the tailgate beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. “You okay?”
“I think so.” I turn to look at him - at this man who keeps showing up, who keeps holding me together when everything else falls apart.
“Is it wrong that I almost feel sorry for her? She’s so broken.
So desperate for love that she’d do anything to get it.
Twenty years, Isaac. She taught me to drive.
She was my maid of - she was everything, and I keep trying to put that in a box and the box won’t close. ”
“It’s not wrong. It means you’re a good person.” He puts his arm around me, pulling me into his side. “But you can feel sorry for her and still keep her out of your life. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I lean into him. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is simple.” His thumb traces a circle on my shoulder. “People just convince themselves it’s complicated so they don’t have to make the hard call.”
I lean into him, letting his warmth seep into my bones despite the heat coming off the asphalt.
Hazel just stood in this lot swearing we planned each other. And here I am, leaning into him in broad daylight, forty feet from a security camera and a guard with a fresh incident report. Sit up. Pull away. Give them nothing.
I don’t move.
Let them look.
“You okay?” he asks again, quieter this time.
“I am now,” I murmur.
“What?”
“Earlier. You asked.” I look up at him, at the concern etched into every line of his face. “I am now. Because of you.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just kisses my forehead, soft and sweet, and holds me while the sun dips toward the horizon.
***
My mother’s Camry is in my driveway when Isaac drops me off.
“You want me to stay?” he asks.
“She brought groceries. That means she’s staying an hour minimum and she’s already decided something.” I unbuckle. “Go fix the hinge. Look busy. She likes you better when you’re useful.”
“I am useful.”
“Then look like it harder.”
She’s already inside, because she has a key and no shame about it, unpacking bags onto my counter with the aggressive efficiency of a woman who has been rehearsing in the car.
Organic yogurt. Prenatal vitamins I already have two bottles of.
A carton of eggs that meets the counter harder than eggs should.
Her eyes do a lap of my living room before she says a word. The jacket over the arm of the couch. Two coffee cups in the sink. The whir of a drill from the pantry.
“You have company.” Not a question.
“Isaac’s fixing the hinge.”
“At four in the afternoon.”
“It’s a very bad hinge.”
The drill stops.
It doesn’t start again, and I understand that we’re now having this conversation in front of an audience of one, and that my mother knows it, and that she’s decided she doesn’t care.
“I got a call this morning.” She folds the empty bag along its creases, precise, the way she does when her hands need a job.
“Linda Weaver. Book club Linda. She wanted me to know - kindly, she said, kindly - that Hazel Newman has been making the rounds. Coffee dates. Lunches. Anybody who’ll sit still. ”
“Mom-”
“She’s telling people you were sleeping with Isaac before the separation.” The second bag, folded. “That the baby might not even be Cedrick’s. That the dinner party was staged, and you planned all of it, start to finish, because you’re the kind of woman who plans things.”
“That’s insane. The timeline doesn’t-”
“I know the timeline. I was at the dinner party.” She turns around, and there’s something on her face I’ve seen exactly twice, and both of those times somebody died.
“Here’s the part I drove over here for. She’s also telling people Isaac has been in love with you for years.
Since your wedding. That everybody could see it, and everybody said nothing, and he’s been standing in the wings this whole time waiting for Cedrick to hand you over. ”
The pantry stays quiet.
“That one’s true,” my mother says. “Isn’t it.”
I’ve never been able to lie to her. Not at nine, not at nineteen, not now.
“Yes.”
“He never said it. Not once, not to you.”
“No.”
“That’s worse.” She says it flatly, no cruelty in it at all, which is how I know it’s true. “A confession you can disprove. A man’s face across four Christmases, you cannot. Every wedding guest who ever watched him watch you is now a witness for Cedrick, and not one of them has to lie.”
The floorboard creaks.
Isaac is in the doorway with the screwdriver still in his hand, and his face has gone the color of the wall behind him.
“Mrs. Fanning.” His voice is careful. “I’d never do anything that hurt her. Or the baby.”
“I believe you.” My mother doesn’t look at him.
She keeps her eyes on me, which is somehow worse for him than being looked at.
“I’ve watched you carry a crib up those stairs in one trip.
I have eyes, and I’ve had them a long time.
” She picks up her purse. “But intentions aren’t evidence.
Optics are evidence. And right now the picture is my pregnant daughter and her husband’s best friend, and there’s no caption on it that helps. ”
“Then I’ll go.” Isaac sets the screwdriver on the counter. “Until the custody thing is settled. If that’s what it takes-”
“No.” It comes out of me louder than I mean it to. “No. I’m not letting Hazel decide who’s allowed in my house.”
“Sweetheart.” My mother stops at the door, and her voice finally goes soft, and that’s the part that gets me.
“I’m not telling you to end it. I’m telling you they’re going to swing it like a hammer, and it’s the one true thing they’ve got, so they’re going to swing it forever.
” She looks at me a beat too long. “I didn’t raise a fool. Don’t start now.”
The door closes.
Neither of us says anything for a while. Isaac picks the screwdriver back up, looks at it like he’s forgotten what it’s for, and sets it down again.
“She’s right,” he says.
“I know.”
“I could-”
“Say the rest of that sentence and I’ll throw the eggs at you.”
He almost laughs. He doesn’t manage it.
Here’s what I don’t say, standing in my kitchen with my mother’s groceries sweating on the counter: Hazel invented a pregnancy.
Hazel invented a timeline. Hazel invented a version of me cold enough to seduce a man out of spite.
All of it cheap, all of it disprovable, all of it going down under one question about an ultrasound photo.
And underneath the whole pile, load-bearing, is the one thing she never had to make up.
“Hey.” Isaac’s watching me. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere good.”
From the pantry, the hinge gives a long, unhelpful squeak.
“Do you want that fixed,” he asks, “or is the squeak load-bearing? Emotionally?”
“Load-bearing,” I say, and my voice comes out almost normal.