5. Jenna
CHAPTER FIVE
Jenna
The week that followed was one of the best weeks of the pregnancy, maybe of the whole year, and I've gone back to it so many times since, turning it over like a stone I keep in my pocket, that I sometimes worry I've polished it into something better than it actually was.
But I don't think I have. I think it really was that good.
Grant came home on time every night. He took Tessa's calls, when they came, quickly and at a distance, telling her once, gently, that he needed to be more present at home in these last weeks and that he trusted her to lean on her attorney and her sister for the day-to-day questions.
I only knew that conversation happened because he told me about it afterward, unprompted, which felt like its own kind of evidence.
He wasn't hiding anything. He wanted me to see the change.
We spent one whole Saturday doing nothing that mattered and everything that mattered, depending on how you counted it.
We finished the nursery, hung the last picture frame, a little watercolor print of a fox that Grant's mother had found somewhere and mailed to us with a note that said for whichever one you get, animals work for either.
We reorganized the diaper bag four times because Grant kept insisting there was a more efficient configuration, which made me laugh until my back hurt, and then he rubbed my back until it didn't.
He talked to Sophie every night before bed, his mouth close to my stomach, telling her about his day like she could understand any of it, which she probably couldn't, but I loved him for doing it anyway.
He told her about a supplier problem he'd solved that afternoon, walked her through the plot of whatever he'd been watching the night before, informed her with great seriousness that her aunt Paige made better lasagna than her grandmother Ruth did but that this was a fact we were never, under any circumstances, to repeat out loud.
"You're going to ruin Thanksgiving," I told him.
"She's not going to remember Thanksgiving. She's three weeks from existing."
"She'll remember the betrayal in her bones."
He grinned up at me from where he had his head against my stomach, an expression so unguarded and happy that I felt something in my chest loosen, all the wariness of the last month easing back, just for that moment, into something closer to peace.
We had Grant's parents over for dinner that Tuesday, a low-key evening that had somehow become tradition every few weeks since we'd announced the pregnancy, Ruth arriving with something homemade and Daniel arriving with an opinion about whichever sports team had disappointed him most recently.
Ruth pulled me aside in the kitchen while the men argued cheerfully in the other room about whether the crib mattress we'd chosen was too firm, a debate neither of them had any actual expertise in but both seemed determined to win anyway.
"You look tired," Ruth said, not unkindly, studying my face the way mothers do.
"I am tired. Third trimester tired."
"Just that?" She kept her voice light, but there was something searching underneath it, and not for the first time I wondered exactly how much Grant told his mother, and how much she simply picked up on her own, the way mothers so often do regardless of what their children choose to share.
"You know you can talk to me, if there's anything else.
I raised that boy. I know some of his habits better than he knows them himself. "
"We had a rough patch about a coworker of his taking up too much of his time. I think we worked through it."
Ruth's expression flickered, something careful and knowing passing across it before she smoothed it back into warmth.
"Grant's always liked being needed. Even as a boy, he'd take on every stray project at school nobody else wanted, every kid nobody else would partner with.
It's a good quality in most contexts. It gets more complicated once you're married and there's someone at home who needs you specifically, not just anyone who happens to ask.
" She squeezed my hand. "I'm glad you said something to him.
He listens better than his father used to, for what it's worth. That's not nothing."
I filed that away too, the way I'd been filing everything away that fall, another small data point in a ledger I hadn't fully admitted to myself I was keeping.
Wednesday evening, the night before the gala, Grant's sister called from out of state, wanting to talk through her own plans to visit once the baby arrived, and I listened to Grant's half of the conversation from the kitchen, easy and warm, full of genuine excitement about coordinating schedules so both grandmothers wouldn't descend on the same week.
He mentioned, near the end of it, that everything had been calmer at home lately, that he felt like he and I had found our footing again after a rough patch in the fall, and hearing him describe it that way to someone who loved him, unprompted, without me in the room to perform for, meant something to me I hadn't expected.
It wasn't a performance. It was simply how he'd come to describe our life to the people closest to him, and that quiet consistency, more than any single grand gesture, was what had actually started to rebuild my confidence in him over the preceding week.
On Thursday, he had an event. Bellcourt was opening a new property downtown, a restored old textile warehouse converted into an event space they were calling the Loom House, and the opening gala had been on the calendar for months, a chance for Miles and the executive team to show off the property to investors and press before it started booking weddings and corporate functions the following spring.
Grant had been working on the logistics of it for the better part of a year.
It mattered to him professionally in a way that had nothing to do with Tessa at all.
"You should go," I told him, when he brought it up hesitantly over dinner, clearly testing whether I'd want him to skip it given how close we were to my due date.
"I'm fine. I'm not due for another two and a half weeks, and first babies are almost always late anyway.
Paige is fifteen minutes away. I'll call you if anything happens, and you'll come home, and in the meantime you should go be proud of the thing you built. "
"You're sure."
"I'm sure. Go wear the good suit. Let Miles introduce you to the investors as the man who made the timeline work. You earned that."
He looked relieved in a way that told me he'd wanted to go all along but hadn't wanted to ask, which I found unexpectedly endearing. Grant, who ran toward other people's problems without a second thought, had needed permission to go be proud of his own work.
"My phone will be on the whole night," he said. "I mean it. If you call, I'm answering, and I'm coming home, whatever's happening at that party. You call, I leave. That's not negotiable, no matter who else is there or what's going on."
"I know."
"I want to say it anyway. Out loud. So there's no version of this where you wonder later if I meant it."
I remember that detail specifically, afterward, in the weeks when I turned every piece of that night over and over looking for the moment things could have gone differently.
He said it unprompted. I hadn't asked him to reassure me again, hadn't brought up the parking garage or Tessa or any of it.
He offered the promise on his own, freely, because he wanted me to feel safe sending him out the door.
I spent that Wednesday doing my own version of nesting, though not the domestic kind everyone always talks about in pregnancy books, the kind where women scrub baseboards at thirty-nine weeks.
Mine looked more like wrapping up loose ends at the office, training my junior colleague on the accounts she'd cover while I was out, writing detailed notes on every open project so nothing would fall through the cracks in my absence.
Carol stopped by my desk near the end of the day, told me to go have this baby and not think about work for one single second longer, and then, almost as an afterthought, asked how Grant was handling everything.
"He's excited," I said, which was true, and easier than explaining the rest of it.
"Good. You're going to need him fully present.
First few months are no joke." She said it lightly, moving on to her next thought before I could decide whether there was anything underneath the comment worth examining, and I let it go, because I didn't have the energy that week to read meaning into every offhand remark anyone made near me.
The morning of the gala, he was tender in a way that still catches in my throat when I think about it now.
He made me breakfast, eggs and the good bread from the bakery near his office that he only bought on special occasions, and he sat across from me at the table in his undershirt, his suit still hanging upstairs, and told Sophie, through my stomach, that she was absolutely, categorically not allowed to make her debut during his one work event of the year.
"She's not going to listen to negotiating tactics," I said. "She's a fetus."
"Everyone responds to a clearly stated incentive structure. I'm offering her extended nursing privileges and a college fund if she waits until Friday."
"You already have a college fund for her."
"I'm sweetening the deal."
I laughed so hard I had to put my fork down, and he watched me laugh with an expression of such uncomplicated happiness that I thought, not for the first time, that whatever small frictions we'd had over the last month, this was still, underneath everything, a marriage worth all of it.
Worth the fights about phones and boundaries and Tessa Monroe's divorce, worth the two years of trying before Sophie finally took, worth every hard year that comes before you get to sit at a kitchen table eight months pregnant, laughing at your husband's terrible jokes, believing completely that he would show up for you no matter what.
That evening, I helped him with his tie, because his hands, steady in every other circumstance, always went slightly clumsy with a tie when he was nervous about something mattering.
I straightened his collar and told him he looked handsome, which he did, and he kissed me slowly, one hand spread wide against the small of my back, careful the way he'd learned to be careful with me these last months, and told me he loved me.
"Call me the second anything feels off," he said, at the door. "Anything. Even if you think it's nothing. I'd rather leave a party for nothing than miss something because you didn't want to bother me."
"I will."
"I promise, Jen. Whatever's happening there, you call, I leave. There's no version of tonight where that's not true."
I believed him. I sent him out the door with a kiss and a hand on his cheek, and I settled onto the couch with my feet up and a documentary about coral reefs that Sophie apparently found soothing, based on the way she calmed down every time I put it on, and I felt, for the first time in weeks, entirely at peace about where my husband's loyalties stood.
I had no way of knowing, watching him back the car out of the driveway and wave through the windshield with that same easy, happy grin he'd worn all week, that I was watching the last uncomplicated evening of our marriage.
I didn't know that somewhere in the next several hours, a promise I fully believed was going to be tested in a way neither of us had imagined, and that it was going to fail.
I just waved back, and went inside, and waited, the way wives wait, trusting the night to go the way he'd promised it would.