4. Jenna
CHAPTER FOUR
Jenna
The appointment was routine, or as routine as anything gets at thirty-seven weeks, which is to say the nurse checked my blood pressure twice because the first reading ran a little high, and I spent four minutes trying not to spiral about preeclampsia while she recalculated.
The second reading came back fine. Dr. Okafor breezed in with her usual brisk warmth, measured my belly, listened to Sophie's heartbeat with the little wand that always made the room go quiet and reverent for a few seconds no matter how many times we'd heard it, and told us Sophie was head down and exactly where she should be.
Grant held my hand through all of it and asked good questions, the kind of questions that told me he'd actually read the books I kept leaving on his nightstand and not just skimmed the chapter headings.
He wanted to know about the signs of labor starting, how we'd know the difference between Braxton Hicks and the real thing, what counted as an emergency versus what could wait until morning.
He asked, too, about the C-section rate for first-time mothers her age, a question that made Dr. Okafor smile slightly before she answered it, and he told me afterward, a little sheepishly, that he'd been up late reading about it, wanting to be able to help me make a fast decision if it ever came to that, rather than freezing up not knowing the terminology.
Dr. Okafor answered all of it patiently and then, near the end, went through the warning signs specifically.
Severe or persistent headache. Vision changes.
Swelling that came on suddenly, especially in the face or hands.
Decreased fetal movement. Any bleeding. Contractions that came regularly before thirty-seven weeks.
Severe abdominal pain that didn't ease. "Any one of those, you call the office, and if it's after hours or feels urgent, you go straight to labor and delivery.
Don't wait to see if it passes. At this stage, waiting costs you time you don't want to lose. "
"Got it," Grant said, and I watched him actually commit it to memory the way he committed operational protocols to memory at work, filing it under things that mattered.
He even asked her to repeat the list a second time, slower, while he typed it into the notes app on his phone, and Dr. Okafor, who had clearly seen a wide range of partner engagement over the years, gave him an approving look that made me unreasonably proud of him.
We were in the parking garage afterward, Grant helping me into the car because getting into a sedan at thirty-seven weeks had become its own small production, when his phone rang. Tessa. He glanced at the screen, and I watched him actually hesitate, weighing it, before he let it go to voicemail.
"Good," I said, and I meant it as encouragement, not as a jab, though I could hear how it might land either way.
"I told you I'd pull back."
We got in the car, and before he'd even started the engine, the phone rang again.
Same name. This time he answered it, apologizing to me with a look before he did, and I sat in the passenger seat of our own car in a parking garage and listened to him talk someone else through a crisis while my own appointment, my own daughter's warning signs, sat fresh in both our minds.
It turned out to be nothing urgent, some new development in the custody dispute over furniture that had gotten unnecessarily vicious, but the fact that it wasn't urgent didn't make it feel better.
It made it worse, in a way. If he'd answered it because something was actually on fire, I could have understood, even resented it a little less.
He'd answered it because it was easier to answer than to let it go a second time in one morning.
When he hung up, I didn't say anything for a minute.
I looked out the window at the concrete pillar in front of the car, at the yellow paint worn thin where a thousand other cars had pulled in and out over the years, and I let myself feel the cold clarity that sometimes comes right after you've been patient for a long time.
"I need to say something, and I need you to actually hear it this time, not just agree with me and then keep doing the same thing."
"Jenna."
"I'm not finished." I turned to look at him.
"I am not worried that you're attracted to Tessa Monroe.
I want to be completely clear about that, because I think if I said this wrong you'd hear jealousy, and that's not what this is.
I don't think you want her. I think you want to be needed, and she needs things constantly, and it's easier for you to answer that need than it is to sit with the discomfort of telling her no. "
He didn't argue. That, at least, told me something.
"But here's what I need you to understand.
We are three weeks from having a baby. The doctor just told us, in that room, what to watch for if something goes wrong.
And I need to know, when something happens, when I call you because I'm scared or because something's actually wrong, that you're going to hear me the way you just heard her.
I need to know that when our family needs you, I won't have to compete for you.
Not with her, not with work, not with anyone.
I need that to be true without question, because I can't carry a baby and carry doubt about that at the same time. I don't have room for both."
Grant was quiet for a long moment, his hands on the wheel, the engine still off, the two of us sitting in a cold parking garage while other cars idled past looking for spots. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost the easy, deflecting quality it usually had in these conversations.
"There's no competition," he said. "You and Sophie will never have to compete with anyone for me. I promise you that. If you call me, I'm coming. Whatever I'm doing, whoever needs something from me, you come first. That's not a hard promise for me to make, Jen. It should already be obvious."
"It's not obvious. That's the problem. It should be obvious and it isn't, and I need you to actually understand why, instead of just being frustrated that I'm bringing it up again."
"I understand why." He reached over and took my hand, his thumb running over my knuckles the way it always did.
"I hear what you're telling me. I promise you, when it counts, I will be there.
It isn't fear of losing you driving that promise.
You and Sophie are simply the thing that counts.
Everything else is just noise I let get too loud. "
I wanted so badly to believe him completely, without reservation, and mostly I did.
I want to be fair to that moment, because it wasn't a lie, not exactly.
Grant meant every word of it when he said it.
I could see that in his face, in the seriousness that had replaced his usual easy charm.
He wasn't performing reassurance. He believed what he was promising me.
The trouble, which neither of us understood yet, was that a promise made with complete sincerity in a parking garage on a Tuesday morning doesn't automatically survive a phone ringing at exactly the wrong moment three weeks later.
Grant believed he would choose me. He'd never had to test that belief against an actual, live competition for his attention, not really, not with real stakes on both sides at the exact same time.
Neither had I. We were both, in our own ways, betting on a version of him that hadn't been tried yet.
"Okay," I said, and I squeezed his hand back. "Okay. I believe you."
He started the car, and we drove home mostly in comfortable silence, the appointment easy now that we'd said the hard part out loud, Sophie shifting occasionally under my ribs in a way that had started to feel less alarming and more like conversation, her particular way of telling me she was there.
Dr. Okafor's nurse caught us in the hallway just before we left, a woman named Bethany who'd seen us at nearly every appointment over the last eight months and had developed the easy familiarity that comes from watching a pregnancy progress in real time.
"You two are going to do great," she said, adjusting a stack of charts against her hip.
"I can always tell which couples have actually talked through the hard stuff beforehand, and you two have clearly talked through the hard stuff.
" I remember feeling absurdly reassured by that offhand comment from someone who saw dozens of couples a week, as if her professional intuition carried some kind of guarantee, and I held onto it for days afterward, another small piece of evidence I wanted to believe.
We stopped on the way home so Grant could pick up the last few things on the hospital bag checklist, a specific brand of nursing pads I'd been putting off buying and a portable phone charger he insisted we needed in case the hospital's outlets were as scarce as everyone online claimed they were, and I sat in the car in the pharmacy parking lot with the windows cracked, watching him move through the automatic doors with a shopping list on his phone and an expression of grim determination, like buying nursing pads was a mission he intended to execute flawlessly.
I found myself smiling, unexpectedly, watching him through the glass storefront comparing two brands with genuine focus, and I thought, not for the first time, that whatever fears I carried about the coming weeks, they existed alongside a real, steady love for this occasionally maddening man.
That night, he put his phone in the drawer without me asking. I noticed. I let myself feel relieved, even though some small, wary part of me noted that noticing whether he put his phone in a drawer was itself a kind of evidence I shouldn't have needed to gather three weeks before my due date.
I told myself we'd cleared it. I told myself the conversation in the parking garage had done what the conversation at the kitchen table hadn't quite managed, that saying the words out loud, need, compete, promise, had made something real between us that would hold when it needed to hold.
I believed that, mostly, for the next several days. I wanted to believe it. And for those several days, Grant gave me every reason to.