19. Isaac #2
She turns to look at me. Her hair is wild, her cheeks flushed, her eyes soft in a way they weren’t an hour ago.
“You wrote that you loved me before you had any right to.”
“I did. I do.”
“The work party.” She says it slowly, like she’s been carrying it around since the letter and has finally found somewhere to set it down. “Three months before Cedrick. You keep saying it like it’s a date on a form.”
“It is a date on a form.”
“You told me it was before your wedding.” She says it quietly, and it lands like a hand on my chest. “On my porch. With my divorce papers in the house. You looked me in the face and you shaved off three months.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because loving you once you were his is a thing you can forgive.” I make myself say it to her face, which is the least I owe her.
“Three months before him means I had a turn, Chantal. Means there was a door and I stood in front of it. Nobody forgives a man for that. I’ve never once forgiven me for it. ”
“Isaac.” She props herself up on one elbow, and the sheet goes with her, and she doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
“I’ve done the arithmetic. I’ve done it in the bath, I’ve done it at two in the morning, I’ve done it at red lights like a lunatic.
Three months. You had three months where I wasn’t anybody’s. ”
I don’t answer.
“So what happened in them?”
The real one. God.
I trace the line of her shoulder, because I can’t say this while looking at her face.
“Nothing,” I say. “That’s what happened in them. Nothing happened in them at all.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the whole answer. That’s the thing I’ve never said out loud to anybody, Chantal - there’s no story.
People want there to be a story. My mother wants there to be a story.
There isn’t one. There’s a room with a bar in it and a woman standing near the window with a drink she wasn’t drinking, and there’s me, twenty-eight years old, deciding I’d say something in a minute. ”
Her breath changes. She doesn’t interrupt.
“And then it was a different minute. And then it was March. And then Cedrick met you at somebody’s thing - I wasn’t even in the room, I’ve never once been able to make that part hurt less by knowing where I was - and he came into work Monday and said I met somebody, and I said yeah?
” I have to stop. “I said yeah? That’s it.
That’s the whole crime. Three months of standing near you being polite, and one syllable. ”
“Isaac-”
“You want to know when it started.” My hand goes still on her shoulder.
“It started in a room where I could have just - said a word. Any word. Hi. And I’ve had five years to work out what I’d have said if I’d been braver, and here’s what I’ve got, after five years: hi.
That’s it. That’s the speech. I couldn’t manage hi, and it cost me everything, and I’ve never been able to decide whether that’s tragic or just embarrassing. ”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I finally make myself look at her.
“That’s five years,” she says. Her voice cracks down the middle of it.
“I’m aware. I was there for all of them.”
“You should hate me. Some part of you. For never seeing it.”
“There was nothing to see. I made sure of that.” I catch her hand and press it flat over my heart.
“You were married. You were happy - or you were performing it so well even I bought the matinee. What was I supposed to do, object at the vows? I’m not that guy.
I was just… there. Being there was allowed. ”
She lifts her hand off my chest and puts it on my jaw instead, and turns my face toward her, and makes me hold it.
“Say hi,” she says.
“…What?”
“You’ve had five years to work on it. Let’s hear it.”
“Chantal-”
“Say it.”
The room is very quiet. The baby monitor glows on the dresser, not connected to anything yet, just waiting.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says back.
And that’s all it takes, apparently. Five years, one syllable, a woman in my arms in a rental house at midnight saying it back like it was always going to be that easy, like the whole thing was a door that had never once been locked.
I have to put my face in her hair for a second.
“Was it always going to work?” I manage.
“I don’t know.” Her thumb moves along my jaw. “That’s the part you don’t get to have, Isaac. You don’t get to know. Nobody does.” A beat. “But it worked tonight.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then:
“Then stop going home at night.” The words are simple. Devastating. “Move in. I don’t want you there just for the birth, Isaac. I want you there for all of it. Every 3 AM feeding. Every fever. Every first.”
“Are you sure? The divorce isn’t final yet. Cedrick’s lawyers-”
“I don’t care about Cedrick’s lawyers.” She takes my face in her hands. “I care about building a life with someone who actually wants to be there. And that’s you. It’s always been you, even when I didn’t know it yet.”
I kiss her then - slow and deep, trying to communicate everything words can’t capture.
“Try and get rid of me,” I say against her lips.
She reaches over me to the nightstand and comes back with a battered paperback from the stack that’s colonized it. 50,001 Best Baby Names. Folded corners. Notes in the margins.
“You’ve been annotating.”
“I’ve been eliminating.” She opens it against her belly like a hymnal. “Veto power is yours if you’re moving in. House rules.”
Veto power. She’s handing me veto power on her daughter’s name.
Something enormous moves through my chest, and I swallow it down before it can leak out my eyes.
“Hit me.”
“Aurora.”
“She’s a baby, not a Disney franchise.”
“Genevieve.”
“Only if we want her to grow up with a wax seal and enemies at court.”
“Renee is lobbying for Renee.”
“Of course she is.”
She flips pages. Then she goes still, and her voice changes - quieter, almost shy, which is a word I have never once associated with Chantal.
“There’s one I keep coming back to. I keep waiting to get tired of it, and I don’t.”
She turns the book toward me, her finger under a single word.
“Lily,” I say.
“Too simple?”
“Say it out loud.”
“Lily.” And her whole face does the thing - the soft, unguarded thing she only does when she thinks no one’s watching.
“That’s the one. That’s her.”
“You didn’t even use your veto.”
“Didn’t need it. She just used hers.” I spread my hand over her belly, and right on cue, something small and stubborn presses back against my palm. “See? Motion carries.”
She falls asleep with the book open on the covers and her hand over mine.
I stay awake a long time, listening to the two of them breathe.
Every 3 AM feeding. Every fever. Every first.
Somewhere in a drawer in this house there’s a decree with another man’s name on it, and eleven weeks between me and the right to say any of this out loud.
I say it anyway, to nobody, in the dark: mine.