Chapter 2
Igave it two days.
Not because I was uncertain. Because I needed them. There were nursery orders to cancel, money to move, a phone call to make, and all of it had to happen while Beckett was at meetings and Constance was on her boards and the house was empty except for me and the ultrasound in the kitchen drawer.
Wednesday morning I made his coffee the way I always did. Black, one sugar, the mug already on the counter when he came downstairs at seven. He picked it up without looking at me, the way he picked up everything I set in his path — gratefully, automatically, without registering who put it there.
“Board meeting at ten,” he said. “The Harding retrospective walk-through is at three, I might be late.”
“I’ll keep dinner flexible,” I said.
He nodded. Kissed my forehead. The furniture-touch.
He picked up his briefcase — the one I’d had monogrammed for his thirtieth birthday, because that’s what you do when your husband is a man whose life runs on embossed surfaces — and he walked out the front door and pulled it shut behind him, and I stood in the kitchen and counted to sixty.
Then I picked up my phone and started.
The nursery orders first. I’d placed them the week before, after the pregnancy test came back positive and before Dr. Adler’s appointment confirmed it — a rocking chair from the shop on Charles Street, paint samples for the north-light room on the third floor.
I’d used his account for the chair because the shop knew his name, and I hadn’t wanted to explain why I was buying nursery furniture under a card he’d never see the statement for. The paint samples were on mine.
I canceled the chair. The woman on the phone said, “Of course, Mrs. Aldridge, we can hold the order if you change your mind,” and I said, “We won’t,” and she said, “Understood,” with the specific kindness of someone trained to handle expensive women having expensive second thoughts.
I canceled the paint samples. I deleted the confirmation emails from his account, which I had the password to because I had the password to everything.
I cleared the browser history on the shared desktop in the study — the browsing I’d done for crib reviews, for nursery layouts, for the article about introducing a baby to a Back Bay townhouse with original hardwood and no baby gates.
I erased every trace of the future I’d been building in the margins of his attention.
Then the money. We had a joint checking and a joint savings, both his — his family’s money, reinvested and compounding and managed by people whose names I’d memorized and whose assistants I’d trained to take my calls.
I also had a personal account, the one he’d insisted on when we married.
“For independence,” he’d said, which had sounded generous at twenty-three and now sounded like the vocabulary of a man who wanted to feel like he’d offered a choice he never expected to be taken.
The personal account had $3,400 in it. Birthday gifts from my mother, the occasional freelance gig I’d done early in the marriage before his calendar ate mine whole.
Not enough. I transferred enough from the joint savings to last six months — rent, groceries, doctor’s visits, the bare arithmetic of a woman with no degree, no income, and no work history that didn’t have his name on it.
The amount was small enough not to trigger a notification. Large enough to be a runway.
I was not stealing from him. I was collecting a severance for six years of work he’d never thought to pay me for.
Then Andie.
I called her from the guest bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub — the same spot where I’d sat Tuesday night, the same cool porcelain under my legs, the same silence. The phone rang twice.
“Hey.” Her voice was warm and flat at the same time, the way it always was.
Andie didn’t perform. She didn’t do vocal inflection for the sake of social lubricant, which was why she was the only friend I’d kept from before the marriage.
Everyone else had learned to modulate for Beckett’s world.
Andie had met him once, at our wedding, and told me later that he seemed like the kind of man who’d be surprised to learn his shirts didn’t iron themselves.
“I’m leaving him,” I said.
A pause. Not shock — processing. Andie was a sculptor and a co-op founder and a woman who built things with her hands. She didn’t waste time on sounds that didn’t carry information.
“Okay,” she said. “When.”
“Friday. Before dawn.”
“You’re coming here.”
It wasn’t a question. Rockport was where she lived, where the co-op was, where the spare room had clean sheets and a door that locked from the inside and a view of the harbor.
Rockport was two hours north of Boston and a world away from the Back Bay, and Andie had been there for eight years doing the thing I should have been doing: making art, paying her own rent, not asking anyone’s permission for the shape of her life.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
A longer pause. Then: “How far?”
“Eight weeks.”
“Does he know?”
“No. And he’s not going to.”
I could hear her thinking. Not about whether to help — that was already settled — but about logistics. Andie loved like a contractor: here’s the key, here’s the bed, the studio opens at seven, we’ll figure the rest out when you get here.
“Spare room’s yours,” she said. “Bring whatever fits in a bag. Leave whatever doesn’t.”
“Andie.”
“Don’t. You can thank me when you’re painting again.”
She hung up. That was Andie — she didn’t need the speech, and she didn’t give one.
She’d said “I told you so” exactly once, six years ago, when I called to say I was dropping out of RISD to marry a man who collected art instead of making it, and I’d hung up on her and she’d never brought it up again.
I figured she was owed the next one. I figured she’d earned it by waiting.
Wednesday night was the foundation dinner.
I wore the green silk dress Constance had approved for spring events — “It photographs well,” she’d said, which was how she said she liked something — and I sat next to Beckett at the head table and smiled at the development director and laughed at the board chair’s joke about a licensing dispute and ate salmon I didn’t taste and drank sparkling water I told the server was for my stomach.
The room was full of people I’d managed for six years.
The caterer whose son’s peanut allergy I’d flagged on every event order.
The museum director’s wife, who squeezed my hand and said, “Arden, you always make these things bearable.” The foundation’s program officer, who leaned in and whispered, “Your seating chart is a work of art — you put Henderson and the comptroller at opposite ends.” I smiled at each of them and felt, underneath the silk, the specific calm of a woman who has stopped belonging to the room she’s sitting in.
Beckett put his hand on my knee under the table.
Twice. The first was automatic — a claim, a signal to anyone watching: this is mine.
The second was softer, almost conscious, his thumb moving against my kneecap in a slow circle while the speaker talked about the trust’s annual report.
For one second I saw the man I’d married.
The one who’d stood in front of a Sargent and talked about light like it mattered, who’d reached for my hand in a dark theater on our third date and held it with both of his like it was something he’d been given.
I let his hand stay. It cost me nothing. In thirty-six hours I would be on a bus.
Thursday I told Beckett I was meeting a friend for lunch — a lie that required no detail, because he’d never tracked my social calendar the way I tracked his — and I walked to the public library on Boylston Street.
The building was warm and smelled like binding glue and radiator dust and the particular silence of a public space where nobody is trying to impress anyone.
I sat at one of the shared computers and pulled up the Greyhound website.
The ticket was $23 one way. Boston to Rockport, transfer in Gloucester.
The 5:15 a.m. departure arrived at 7:40.
I paid with cash I’d withdrawn from an ATM on the walk over and printed the ticket on the library printer and folded it into the inside pocket of my coat, where it sat against my ribs like a second heartbeat.
I walked home through the February cold with my hands in my pockets and the ticket against my knuckles and the baby — Dr. Adler had sent a weekly tracking email, “Your baby is now the size of a grape!” with an exclamation point I hadn’t earned — doing its quiet work.
I passed the brownstones and the bare trees and the shop windows on Newbury Street where I’d spent six years buying things with money that wasn’t mine for a life that wasn’t mine in a city that had opened its doors for me at twenty-three and was about to watch me walk back out.
Thursday night I cooked. Not ordered, not arranged — cooked, for the first time in months.
Pasta with garlic and olive oil and the good Parmesan from the shop on Hanover Street that Beckett didn’t know existed because I was the one who found it and restocked it and grated it onto plates he never thought to compliment.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I wanted the last meal to be something my hands had made.
Maybe I wanted to feel the heat of the stove and the weight of the pan and the smell of garlic in butter, all the small physical facts of a life I was about to disassemble.
Beckett came home late. The Harding retrospective walk-through had gone long. He smelled like the museum — that mix of climate control and old paint and filtered air that used to make me homesick for RISD and now just made me tired.
“Elise had great notes on the lighting,” he said, hanging up his coat.
“Good,” I said.
He looked at me. Really looked, for the first time in days — or maybe months. I’d lost the ability to tell the difference. “You sure you’re okay? You’ve been quiet.”