Chapter 14
CLAIRE
Graham's message came at seven on the morning of the screening appointment.
I remember Nina is going with you today. I won't come to the clinic. I hope everything goes well.
I read it while standing at the kitchen counter with one piece of toast cooling on a plate. I had told him the date three days earlier because I had promised to tell him. I had not given him the time.
For the rest of breakfast, my phone stayed beside the plate.
There was no second message asking when we would be there. Nothing about whether Dr. Patel expected another ultrasound or when I planned to call. He did not remind me that he was the father.
At seven forty, Nina texted from downstairs. I put the phone in my bag and carried the toast with me.
“That's breakfast?” she asked when I got into her car.
“It was more ambitious upstairs.”
She reached behind my seat and produced a paper bag. “Plain bagel. No cream cheese. I bought one for myself, so this isn't an intervention.”
I tore off a piece and ate it while she drove.
The clinic waiting room looked exactly as it had with Graham beside me, except the chair was occupied by a man reading a pamphlet about newborn sleep.
His wife sat close enough that their knees touched.
Across the room, another couple bent over a phone, choosing between two stroller colors while they waited for the nurse.
Nina took the chair on my other side and opened the installation schedule for the Bellamy anniversary dinner.
“I moved the taper candles to the first van,” she said. “If the ballroom load-in stays at two, we can finish the staircase before the florist from the hotel starts complaining about the freight elevator.”
“He doesn't complain. He suffers visibly.”
“With great professionalism.”
I smiled, then looked toward the empty stretch of wall beside the examination-room door.
Graham would have remembered the number from my last blood-pressure reading. He would have watched the nurse's hands, the screen, the way I reached for my coat. When the heartbeat began, his whole face would have changed before he could arrange it.
I had wanted Nina here. I still did. She knew how to make me eat without turning the bagel into evidence that I couldn't take care of myself. She had sat beside me when two pink lines appeared and driven to the first scan when I was too frightened to speak.
Missing Graham did not make choosing her a mistake.
When my name was called, Nina locked her phone and stood. “Do you want me in the room?”
“Yes.”
The screening took longer than the last scan because the baby refused to stay in a useful position. Dr. Patel pressed lightly at one side of my abdomen, waited, and tried again. A small arm lifted on the monitor. Nina leaned forward with both hands braced on her knees.
“Is that a wave?” she asked.
“At this stage, it's probably an objection,” Dr. Patel said.
The baby turned once more. Dr. Patel took the measurements she needed and showed me the steady flash of the heart. The early screening and bloodwork looked reassuring. She reminded me that no screening test answered every question, then asked whether I had concerns.
I checked the short list on my phone. The nausea was improving unevenly. The dizziness had not returned. I asked how long I could keep doing event installations and what signs meant I should stop and call.
“Your work is physical,” Dr. Patel said. “Let other people take the heavy lifting now. Eat before long setups, keep water close, and sit down when your body tells you to. You don't get a prize for making it through a ballroom without help.”
Nina made a quiet sound beside me.
“Don't,” I said.
“I didn't say anything.”
Dr. Patel printed two images and handed them to me. “Everything today looks normal.”
The word carried me all the way into the parking lot.
Nina unlocked the car. “Do you want to call him?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay.”
She put the car in gear and asked whether I could tolerate coffee smell before she stopped for one. That was the end of the question.
At the studio, the Bellamy order occupied the entire center worktable.
Cream roses stood in buckets beneath the windows.
Unopened boxes of taper candles rose beside tubs of greenery, and the sample arrangement waited under a plastic sleeve near my desk.
The dinner was Friday night—two hundred guests, a museum ballroom, eleven long tables, and an old client who had asked for flowers that looked like the garden from her wedding photographs.
I had promised climbing roses without using actual climbing roses. At eleven thirty, that seemed less like design and more like a personal grudge against myself.
I stripped leaves from the first stem and caught the sharp green smell at the back of my throat. The room tilted just enough to make the worktable feel unreliable.
“Sit,” Nina said from the cooler doorway.
“I am about to.”
“Claire.”
I set down the floral knife and made it to the office stool before the nausea rose. Nina opened the back door, moved the bucket farther from me, and brought my water bottle without comment.
The venue coordinator called while I was still sitting.
She wanted the final count for staircase pieces and asked whether I could meet the lighting company at four.
Friday's loading supervisor had also changed the freight-elevator window, which put the staircase installation against the table delivery.
I reached for the schedule.
Nina put it on the desk in front of me instead of taking it away. “I can meet lighting and handle the freight elevator. You keep the client call at three and finish the table recipe here.”
“You already lost half the morning to the appointment.”
“I went because I wanted to. The anniversary dinner is work.” She pointed to the schedule. “Move Paolo to staircase prep, give me Carmen for the first van, and stay off a ladder.”
Normally, I would have found a way to make the overlapping times fit around my own body.
I had built the studio by being the person who arrived first, carried the awkward end, and remembered what everyone else had forgotten.
After I left Graham, work had become proof that the life upstairs could hold me.
The proof did not need to include fainting into a bucket of roses.
I moved Paolo's name. “Carmen needs to return by six.”
“I'll have her back by five thirty.”
“Send me photographs before they move the lighting truss.”
“Of course.”
Nina took the revised schedule and left for the museum after lunch. I kept the client call, approved the final table recipe, and spent twenty minutes on the office couch when the nausea came back. The anniversary dinner continued to exist without requiring me to touch every piece of it.
At three, Mrs. Bellamy joined the video call from a kitchen papered in blue vines. She held her wedding album open to a photograph of herself beneath an arbor, her veil blown across her husband's sleeve.
“The roses weren't so perfect,” she said. “That's what my daughter keeps missing.”
I turned the sample arrangement toward the camera and loosened two stems of jasmine vine. “The ballroom version will have more movement than the sample. We'll keep the color controlled and let the shape wander.”
My phone lit with Nina's photograph of the museum staircase. The lighting truss had taken six inches from our planned width. I marked the change on the recipe and sent Paolo a revised count instead of driving over to show him where every stem belonged.
Mrs. Bellamy smiled at the arrangement. “Richard always liked things a little unruly.”
“Then we'll give him a garden that behaves just enough to get through dinner.”
By the time we ended the call, the nausea had eased. Paolo acknowledged the new count with a thumbs-up, and Nina sent a picture of Carmen measuring the staircase. Work was moving in three places at once. My hand was in it without being the only hand.
At four, I checked my phone.
Graham had not called.
For an hour, I kept listening for Nina to mention his name. She returned from the ballroom, showed me twelve photographs of the staircase, complained about the freight elevator, and left again without doing it.
On my desk, beneath the sample contract, was the family-history form Graham had emailed after the last visit. He had addressed it to me, not Dr. Patel. I had uploaded the relevant page to my patient portal myself.
I opened the message again. His form was neat, dated, and more complete than the clinic required.
Beside his uncle's valve condition, he had included the hospital and the approximate year, then added a note that he could request documentation if my doctor wanted it.
There was no copied address in the header. The only name after his was mine.
I called him after eight, when the studio was locked and the apartment smelled faintly of the ginger Nina had grated into soup.
He answered before the second ring. “Claire?”
“The screening was normal.”
The silence on his end held for a beat. “Normal.”
“The measurements looked good. The bloodwork was reassuring. Dr. Patel said everything was where she wanted it to be.”
He let out a long breath. “Thank God.”
I sat at the kitchen table. The ultrasound pictures lay beside my water glass.
“The baby kept turning away from the technician,” I said.
“Already uncooperative?”
“Nina called it a wave. Dr. Patel called it an objection.”
His laugh was quiet and startled. I had not heard it in months. For a moment, the small apartment held the sound as naturally as the house once had.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Tired. The nausea is supposed to improve soon.”
“I hope it does.”
He asked whether Dr. Patel needed more family history. I said no. Then he waited while I decided whether I had anything else to tell him.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“I said I would.”
“I know.”
The soup simmered behind me. I turned down the burner with the phone still at my ear. Neither of us reached for another question.
“Good night, Graham.”
“Good night, Claire.”
I sat with the dark phone screen for a minute. Then I chose the clearer ultrasound image, cropped out the clinic barcode, and sent it to him.
From today.
His reply came a minute later.
Thank you. I'll keep it with the first one.
He added nothing else.
The next morning, a refrigerated truck arrived at eight fifteen, nearly three hours before the delivery window.
Nina was already at the museum reviewing the rigging change, and the driver had six heavy buckets of garden roses strapped inside his truck.
He could leave them on the loading dock or take them back to the wholesaler.
I tried the handle of the first bucket. Water shifted against the sides, pulling the weight toward my knees. Dr. Patel's voice returned with irritating accuracy.
The driver checked his watch. “What do you want to do?”
I looked toward the cooler, then at Nina's name on the schedule taped beside the loading door. She had her own work to finish. Calling her back would solve my problem by handing it to the person who had already carried half of yesterday.
I took out my phone and opened Graham's messages.
A flower shipment came early. I need help moving six buckets into the cooler. Twenty minutes, nothing else. Can you come?
I pressed send before I could turn the request into another test of whether I was capable alone.
The typing indicator appeared.
Yes. I'll be there in fifteen minutes.