The Pregnant Wife Left Waiting

1. Jenna

CHAPTER ONE

Jenna

Grant knelt on the bathroom tile trying to buckle the strap of my sandal, and I stood over him with one hand braced on the counter and the other resting on the underside of my belly, laughing so hard I had to tell him to stop for a second so I could breathe.

"I had this," he said, not stopping. "Give me one more try."

"You've had four tries."

"I'm an operations executive. I solve logistical problems for a living." He turned my foot slightly, frowning at the tiny buckle like it had personally wronged him. "This is a logistical problem."

"It's a sandal, Grant."

"It's a sandal on a foot I can't currently see past your stomach, which makes it a blind logistical problem.

" He got the buckle through on the fifth try and sat back on his heels, pleased with himself in a way that made me want to kiss him even though I'd been irritated with him for exactly this kind of smugness for seven years. "There. You're welcome."

"Thank you for solving me."

"Anytime." He put his hand flat against my belly before he stood, the way he did a dozen times a day now, like he was checking that she was still in there, still real.

"Hey, Sophie. Your mom's making fun of me.

You're going to have to pick a side eventually, and I want it on record that I'm the one who buys the good ice cream. "

"She's not going to remember any of this."

"I'll remind her." He stood, wincing a little because his knees weren't twenty-five anymore and neither were mine, and pulled me in by the waist as much as my waist still existed as a concept. "You look nice."

"I look enormous."

"You look nice and enormous. Both things are true.

" He kissed my forehead, then lower, and I let myself lean into him for a second, into the solid, familiar weight of him, because three and a half weeks out from my due date I had stopped taking for granted that I could still do things like stand in a bathroom being teased by my husband.

Some days my back wouldn't let me stand for more than ten minutes.

Some days Sophie found a rib and stayed there out of spite.

This was a good day. I wanted to enjoy it.

I'd had a decent day at work too, which helped.

I'd spent the morning walking a hotel developer through fabric samples for forty guest room chairs, a client who changed his mind so often my whole team had taken to calling him The Pendulum behind his back, and for once he'd approved something on the first pass.

My boss, Carol, had stuck her head into my office afterward just to say good job, which from Carol counted as a parade.

I'd told Grant about it over a late lunch he'd surprised me with, dropping off soup from the place two blocks from my office because he said the walk would do him good and also because, he admitted, he liked seeing me in the middle of a workday, liked watching me be competent about something that had nothing to do with him.

We were supposed to be at Paige's by six for a birthday dinner for our niece, and we might have made it on time if Grant's phone hadn't gone off while he was still holding onto me.

I felt him check the screen over my shoulder before he'd even fully let go of me, and something in his posture changed.

It was subtle. If I hadn't been standing that close, I might not have noticed at all.

After seven years, though, I knew the shift in Grant's posture when he was deciding whether to answer something.

"Work?" I asked.

"Tessa." He was already swiping to accept. "Give me two minutes."

He said that a lot lately. Two minutes. It had started meaning something closer to fifteen.

I went back into the bedroom to find my other shoe and could hear him in the hallway, his voice dropping into the register he used for people who were upset, calm and steady, the same voice he used on nervous vendors and overwhelmed junior managers.

"Hey. Hey, slow down. What happened?" A pause.

"Okay. That's not okay, he can't just show up like that, did you call the leasing office?

" Another pause, longer. "No, I know. I know you didn't want it to go that way either. "

I finished with my shoe and sat on the edge of the bed and let my hand rest on my stomach, feeling Sophie shift, an elbow or a heel rolling under my palm like she was settling in to listen too.

Tessa Monroe worked in brand development at Bellcourt, two floors down from Grant's office, and her divorce had been going on for what felt like most of my third trimester.

I knew the broad strokes because Grant told me the broad strokes, in the generous, sympathetic way he talked about anyone he thought was getting a raw deal.

Her ex, Derek, had moved out in the spring and had spent the months since finding new ways to make the separation expensive and humiliating for her.

He'd shown up unannounced at her apartment building twice.

He'd frozen a joint account without telling her.

Grant felt for her the way he felt for anyone he saw as outmatched by circumstances, which was to say completely, and without much capacity to modulate it.

I didn't dislike Tessa. I'd met her twice at company events, and she'd been perfectly pleasant both times, sharp and funny in a way I could see being friends with, if we'd met under different circumstances.

I didn't think Grant wanted anything from her that he shouldn't want. That wasn't the part that bothered me.

It was closer to fifteen minutes before he came back into the bedroom, tucking his phone into his pocket like it was something he wanted out of his hands.

"Sorry. Derek's back in the picture, apparently.

Showed up at her building with his brother, wouldn't leave when she asked.

She called the police, but by the time they got there he was gone, so now she's just sitting in her apartment feeling like it's going to happen again.

" He picked his own shoes up off the floor.

"We should go, we're going to be late for your sister. "

"Is she okay?"

"She will be. She's tough. She just doesn't have a lot of people right now, her friends mostly took his side after everything came out about the money, which is its own mess.

" He sat down next to me to put his shoes on, and I watched him do it, the ease of the motion, the way his mind had clearly already moved from Tessa's apartment to Paige's dinner to whatever was next on his list. "You ready? "

"Yeah." I let him help me up, because getting up off a low bed at thirty-six weeks pregnant was its own logistical problem, blind or otherwise. "That's the third time this week."

"Third time what?"

"She's called three times this week. That I've seen."

He shrugged into his jacket, not quite looking at me, which was its own kind of answer. "It's a bad stretch for her. It won't be like this forever."

"I'm not saying you shouldn't help her."

"Okay." He said it easily, like he'd already decided there wasn't a real conversation underneath what I'd said, and maybe there wasn't yet. Maybe it really was just a bad stretch. "You want me to drive, or do you want to drive and make me sit in the death seat again?"

"I'll drive. Your driving stresses out the baby."

"The baby doesn't know what my driving is."

"She knows. She can feel your blood pressure through the amniotic fluid. It's science."

He laughed, and the moment loosened, the way it always did with us, the two of us falling back into the easy rhythm we'd built over seven years of arguments that weren't really arguments and jokes that were half deflection.

He held the front door for me. He carried the gift bag for Paige's daughter because I wasn't supposed to lift anything with a strap on it anymore, doctor's orders, and he'd taken that instruction more seriously than almost anything else in his life, more seriously than his own cholesterol numbers, which drove his mother up a wall.

Paige's daughter, freshly six and newly obsessed with the idea of becoming a big-cousin figure to a baby who didn't exist yet, spent a solid fifteen minutes of the party interrogating Grant about exactly when Sophie would be able to play with her, whether babies could catch a ball, and whether it was true, as she'd heard from a friend at school, that newborns couldn't see anything at all.

Grant answered every question with the same patient seriousness he brought to actual business negotiations, explaining newborn vision in more technical detail than a six-year-old strictly required, and I watched her listen to every word of it, rapt, clearly delighted to be taken so seriously by an adult.

At dinner he was wonderful. He was wonderful most nights, which was the whole problem with trying to explain any of this to anyone, because if you listed the actual evidence, item by item, it sounded insane to be worried about anything.

He got down on the floor with our six-year-old niece to admire her new bike helmet like it was the most impressive object he'd ever encountered.

He refilled Paige's husband's beer without being asked.

He put his hand on the small of my back when I stood up too fast and got dizzy, and steadied me before I even registered that I needed steadying, the way he'd done since the day Sophie's due date started to feel real instead of abstract.

He talked about the nursery, which we'd finally finished the week before, the two of us assembling a crib at eleven at night while arguing cheerfully about whether the instructions were wrong or we were wrong, painting the walls a pale, warm yellow because we'd refused to find out the sex and yellow felt like it worked for anyone.

He told Paige's husband, with real wonder in his voice, that he'd started talking to my stomach in the car because apparently newborns could recognize voices they'd heard before birth, and he wanted Sophie to already know his.

Josh laughed and told him that was nothing, that he'd read the whole first Harry Potter book aloud to Paige's stomach twice with their oldest, convinced it would make her precocious, and now, six years later, she mostly used her precocious vocabulary to negotiate for more screen time, so Grant shouldn't get his hopes up too high about what any of it would actually produce.

"You're going to be good at this," Paige told him later, in the kitchen, while I sat with my feet up because my ankles had started doing something concerning around hour six of any given day.

"I mean it. Some men fall apart the second the baby's real.

You've been like this since the pregnancy test."

"I've wanted this a long time," Grant said, and I believed him, because I'd wanted it too, because we'd tried for two years before it happened and he'd been the one holding me the two times it didn't work before it did, and there wasn't a version of this where I doubted that he loved his daughter or loved me.

It was on the drive home, with him driving because I'd had two hours on my feet and my back had started to ache in the way that meant I needed to lie down, that his phone lit up on the console between us.

TESSA, the screen said, and under it a photo from some company event, her laughing at something off camera.

He glanced at it. He didn't answer it. But I watched him glance at it, and I watched him not silence it, and I filed that away the way I'd started filing away small things over the last month.

No single one of them meant much on its own.

Together they added up to the quiet feeling that comes from noticing a pattern before you have a name for it.

That night, after he fell asleep, I lay awake for a while with my hand on my stomach, feeling Sophie's occasional restless movements, listening to Grant breathe beside me.

His phone sat on the nightstand, face up, the screen dark but the ringer still on, the way it had been every night for weeks now.

He used to put it in the drawer. I remembered it because because it had been one of the small marital negotiations of our first year together, him learning that a phone on a nightstand made me feel like a third person was in the room with us.

He'd started putting it in the drawer without me even having to ask a second time.

I didn't say anything about it. I told myself it wasn't worth a conversation yet, that I was hormonal and anxious in the way third trimester made you anxious about everything, that Grant loved me and wanted this baby and had never once given me a reason to doubt where his heart was.

I got up once, close to midnight, unable to get comfortable, and stood for a while in the doorway of the nursery instead of going back to bed right away.

The room still smelled faintly of paint.

The crib sat empty and precise against the wall, the mobile Grant's sister had sent us hanging motionless above it, small felt stars that would, in a few weeks, spin lazily over an actual baby instead of just catching moonlight.

I ran my hand along the top rail and thought, the way I'd started thinking more often lately, about all the ways our life was about to change, and about whether Grant and I had actually finished the conversation we'd started having, quietly, in pieces, over the last month, or whether we'd just agreed to stop having it out loud.

I told myself we had time. Three and a half weeks felt, that night, like an enormous amount of time, an entire season still ahead of us to get everything sorted before it mattered.

I didn't know yet how wrong that math was going to turn out to be.

I just noticed the phone stayed out of the drawer for six nights running before I finally said anything to him about any of it at all, and even then, it wasn't about the phone.

It was about something bigger, and it would take me another several days to find the words for it.