14. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
Isaac shows up on a Saturday morning with a garment bag and a guilty expression.
I look at the bag. I look at his face. I look back at the bag.
“What did you do?”
“Okay, before you say anything-”
“Isaac. What did you do?”
“I booked a photographer.” He says it fast, like ripping off a bandage.
“Maternity photos. Today. At the botanical garden. There’s a dress in the bag - your mom helped with the size, don’t ask how that phone call went - and if this is overstepping, tell me, and I’ll cancel, and we’ll never speak of it again. ”
I stare at him.
“You’ve barely answered my texts for two days,” he continues, quieter now.
“And I kept thinking about how this whole pregnancy got hijacked. The appointments he missed. The shower your best friend planned while she was - all of it. Every milestone has a crime scene attached. And I thought, she deserves one thing from these nine months that’s just beautiful.
Something to show her when she’s older that doesn’t have an asterisk on it. ”
I burst into tears.
Not delicate tears. Ugly, heaving, ten-solid-minutes tears, standing in my doorway in yesterday’s t-shirt.
“Shit.” Isaac hovers, hands out like I might fall over. “Okay. This was too much. I’ll cancel-”
“If you cancel I’ll kill you.”
“…So we’re going?”
“Zip me up in twenty minutes.”
The botanical garden is drenched in golden light.
I’m standing in a clearing surrounded by blooming hydrangeas, wearing a white dress that flows over my belly like water, and the photographer - a cheerful woman named Denise with an impressive collection of camera lenses and absolutely zero filter - is positioning me in front of a trellis covered in climbing roses.
“Perfect. Chin up a little. Hand on the belly - yes, just like that. God, the light loves you. Some people I have to fight for. You, I could shoot with a flip phone.”
“You say that to everyone.”
“I absolutely do not. Last week I shot a man who blinked in two hundred consecutive frames.” She fires off a burst. “Okay, let’s get some shots with your partner.”
“He’s not-” I start, but Isaac is already moving toward me from where he’s been watching, twenty feet away, with an expression I’ve been trying not to look at directly all morning.
“It’s fine,” he murmurs as he steps into position behind me. “Unless you don’t want me in them.”
I should say no.
But putting him in my maternity photos? That’s a statement. A declaration.
And it’s exactly what Hazel’s rumor needs. Say no. Say no and hand them nothing.
“I want you in them,” I say quietly.
His hands settle on my belly, his chin comes to rest on my shoulder, and Denise makes a small, satisfied sound behind her camera.
“Beautiful. The light is incredible right now. Turn toward each other - perfect. Now look at the camera. Now at each other… yep. Yeah. Okay. You two are going to make this very easy for me and very hard for whoever ordered wallet sizes.”
Between setups, Isaac takes my hand and pulls me behind a flowering trellis where Denise can’t see us.
“Talk to me.” His voice drops low. “You’ve been a ghost for two days. You answer texts in one word. You took the phone off the hook Thursday - don’t tell me you didn’t, I called eleven times.”
“Eleven. That’s not concerning at all.”
“Chantal.”
I look at the roses instead of his face.
“My mother called me last week,” I say. “Hazel’s telling everyone I seduced you for revenge. That I planned it. That the baby might not even be Cedrick’s.”
“People say shit. Nobody who knows you-”
“She’s also telling everyone you’ve been in love with me for years.” I watch it land. “That she saw it at my wedding. That you’ve been waiting all this time for your chance.”
The silence goes on a beat too long.
“And?” he says finally. Not denying it. Not even flinching. Just - and.
“And that one’s true, Isaac. That’s the whole goddamn problem.
” My voice cracks and I hate it. “Every lie she tells gets to hide behind the one true thing. The fake timeline, the fake seduction, the fake plan - it all sounds plausible because underneath it there’s this one real, verifiable fact that you loved me.
So if we’re seen like this - if we do this - we prove every lie they’re telling. ”
“So that’s it?” He steps closer, and the air between us goes tight. “We let them decide? Hazel writes the story and we just - what, live inside it? Keep six feet apart until the gossips get bored?”
“Isaac. We shouldn’t-”
“Then tell me you don’t want to.” His voice drops, low and intense. “Not that we shouldn’t. That you don’t want to. Those are different sentences, Chantal. Say the second one and I’ll drive you home and that’ll be the end of it. I swear.”
I stare at him.
The truth is, I want this more than I’ve wanted anything in years. I want his hands on my belly and his chin on my shoulder. I want his face in my photos, his voice in my house, his terrible off-key humming in every room of my life.
But want isn’t the same as wise. And wisdom has been in short supply since the night I found that screenshot.
“I can’t say that,” I admit.
“Then stop pushing me away.”
I can’t answer him. Not with words. So I kiss him instead.
It starts soft - a question, an apology - and then his hands are sliding into my hair and mine are fisting in his shirt and it turns into everything we’ve been swallowing for weeks.
His mouth on my jaw, my throat, the pulse hammering beneath my skin.
My back against the trellis, flowers raining down around us.
The photographer is thirty feet away. Anyone could walk around this trellis. Cedrick’s lawyer would sell his soul for one picture of this.
Stop. You should stop. You need to stop.
I pull him closer instead.
His heartbeat slams under my palms. When his teeth graze the spot below my ear, I make a sound I’ve never made for anyone.
“Does that answer your question?” I manage.
“I’ve wanted to do that in daylight for five years.”
“Was it worth the wait?”
“Ask me again later.” His voice is wrecked. “When I can do it properly.”
A wolf whistle cuts through the air. We jerk apart to find Denise grinning at us from around the trellis, camera raised.
“Get a room!” She lowers the camera and taps the screen. “Also, I got that. You’re welcome. That one’s free.”
“Denise-”
“Free! It’s my gift. You’ll thank me at the wedding.”
“There’s no-” I start.
“Uh-huh.” She’s already walking back to the clearing. “Golden hour’s burning, lovebirds. Move it.”
That night, I sit on my couch with my thumb hovering over the post button for twenty minutes.
It’s the one where Isaac’s hands are on my belly, his chin on my shoulder, both of us bathed in golden light. We look happy. We look like a family.
Post it and you hand Cedrick’s lawyer a gift-wrapped exhibit. Don’t post it and you hand Hazel the pen for the rest of your life.
She writes the story, or you do.
I write the caption: New chapter.
And I post it.
Within the hour, the comments start rolling in.
MARGARET CLYBORNE: This is disgusting.
CAROLINE CLYBORNE: Whore.
I screenshot both, block both accounts, and forward everything to my lawyer.
ME: Exhibit A.
Isaac reads the comments over my shoulder and swears under his breath.
“Classy family you married into.”
“Tell me about it.” I set the phone face-down on the cushion. “His sister called me a whore. In writing. On a public post. Under her own name.”
“My lawyer’s going to love that.”
“My lawyer already does. She replied with a thumbs up and the word ‘delicious.’” I lean back into him as his arms come around me from behind, his chin settling on my shoulder exactly the way it did in the photo. “Ask me how I feel.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I should be upset.” I watch the phone light up again against the cushion, another notification, another opinion. “And honestly? I feel free. For the first time in weeks, I’m not hiding anything. There’s nothing left to catch me doing. I did it in golden hour with a professional photographer.”
“That’s the most you sentence I’ve ever heard.”
“Is it, though?” I twist to look at him. “Because they’re going to use it, Isaac. In the divorce. Against us. Caroline’s already promising to testify to god knows what-”
“Let them try.” His lips brush my temple. “We haven’t done anything wrong. You left him because he cheated, and then you started building something with someone who actually deserves you. That’s not a scandal. That’s a success story.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“Five years of watching you from a distance.” His mouth curves against my hair. “Turns out unrequited love is very educational.”
“That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It had a happy ending. Middle. Whatever this is.”
I kiss him then - slow and deep - and for a little while, I forget about the comments and the rumors and the war still raging around us.
Then the kiss stops being slow.
I don’t know which of us changes it. One second his hand is resting warm at the back of my neck, and the next it’s fisted gently in my hair and I’m making a low sound into his mouth that I did not authorize, and his other hand is sliding from my knee up over my thigh like a rumor spreading.
“Water,” I say against his lips. “I need - I was getting water.”
“Were you.”
“Hours ago. Possibly days.” I get up off the couch mostly to prove I can, and I make it exactly as far as the kitchen before I hear him follow me, unhurried, the way he does everything, and the sound of his footsteps behind me does something to my spine that no footsteps have any business doing.
I fill the glass. I don’t drink it. I stand there at the counter with my back to him, hugely pregnant in yesterday’s leggings, hyperaware of every inch of the four feet between us.
“Chantal.”
“Isaac.”
“Turn around.”
I turn around. He’s leaning in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed, watching me, and the look on his face is the one from the garden - the one I’ve been trying not to look at directly all day, because looking at it directly is how you end up against a trellis.
“You crossed the room,” I say. “That’s on you.”
“You made the sound,” he says. “That’s on you.”
“What sound? There was no sound.”
He crosses the kitchen in three steps, and then his hands are braced on the counter on either side of me, caging me in without touching me at all, and his mouth is one inch from mine.
“That sound,” he says quietly, and kisses me.
The glass of water dies a noble death somewhere to my left.
I don’t hear it land. His hands leave the counter and find me instead - my jaw, my waist, the small of my back, pulling me in as close as the baby allows - and I get my fingers into his hair and pull, and the sound he makes goes straight through me like current.
“I’m enormous,” I gasp, when his mouth moves to my throat. Because apparently even now, some saboteur in my head is filing objections.
“You’re-” He pulls back and looks at me, actually looks, pupils blown, breathing hard, and his voice comes out scraped raw.
“Chantal, I watched you in that dress for three hours today and forgot my own phone number. Do not stand in this kitchen and tell me what you are. You have no idea what you are.”
“Isaac-”
“None,” he says, and kisses me again, harder, and lifts me back against the counter edge, and his hand slides up my side, thumb tracing the curve where my ribs give way, and I arch into him shamelessly, and my hands have gotten under his shirt without consulting me - flat against the hot skin of his back, feeling the muscle jump - and he groans against my ear, low and undone, “You’re going to end me,” and I have never in my life felt less like someone’s crime scene and more like someone’s miracle-
And the baby kicks him.
Hard. Right where his stomach is pressed against my belly. A firm, unmistakable, percussive little objection.
We both freeze.
“Did she just-”
“She just,” I confirm.
The baby kicks again, indignant, and Isaac starts laughing - wrecked, breathless, his forehead dropping to my shoulder - and then I’m laughing too, both of us shaking with it, tangled together against my kitchen counter like teenagers busted by a porch light.
He slides down, then. All the way down, to his knees on my kitchen floor, and puts both hands on my belly and his lips just below my navel.
“Noted,” he tells the bump, solemn as a sworn oath. “Interrupting is rude, but noted.”
Another kick, softer. Mollified.
“She’s on your side,” I say. My voice is not steady. Neither are my knees. Watching this man kneel on my linoleum and negotiate with my unborn daughter has finished whatever the counter started.
“She’s on your side.” He looks up at me from the floor, hair destroyed, mouth kiss-bruised, eyes gone soft in a way that’s harder to survive than the heat was.
“Smart kid. Because here’s the thing-” he rises, slow, and takes my face in both hands, “-if she hadn’t stopped us, I would have. Barely. But I would have.”
“Why?” It comes out smaller than I intend. “And be very careful, because there’s a version of that answer that hurts.”
“Not that version. Never that version.” His thumb traces my cheekbone.
“Today they called you a whore in a public comment section, and tonight you kissed me like a countermove. And you’re allowed - God knows you’re allowed - but I’ve waited five years, Chantal.
I’m not going to be your rebuttal. When it happens, it’s not going to be an answer to anything Hazel wrote or Caroline typed.
It’s going to be about nobody but us. I need that.
I think, underneath the adrenaline, you need it more. ”
I stare at him. Pinned to my own counter by a man who wants me so badly his hands are shaking with it, and is saying not yet out of some five-year vow I’m only now seeing the full size of.
“You’re really going to stand in my kitchen looking like that,” I say, “and be noble.”
“It’s costing me everything. I want that on the record.”
“Formally noted.” I pull him back in and kiss him once more - slow, thorough, a promissory note - and I feel him shudder and let me. “For the record: when it happens? It won’t be a rebuttal. It’ll be five years, plus interest.”
His eyes go dark. “You can’t say things like that and expect me to leave.”
“Who said anything about leaving? You’re making tea. I still never got my water.”
He laughs, shaky, and puts the kettle on, and I sit at my own kitchen table watching him move around my kitchen like he was always going to end up in it, the baby rolling lazy and satisfied under my hand.
The phone lights up on the couch cushion in the other room. Another notification. Another opinion.
Let them write whatever they want tonight.
The kettle starts to whistle, and neither of us gets up for it.