Chapter 5
XAVIER
The numbers didn't work.
Xavier had been sitting in his office at Grant Capital for two hours with the door closed, doing the math for the fourth time, and the numbers didn't work.
Six weeks pregnant. She'd said it in the hallway with her hand on the celadon door, and he'd been so wrecked by the joy of it that he hadn't done what he always did, what his entire career was built on doing, which was run the numbers.
Six weeks put conception in early March.
Early March. He pulled up his calendar on the second monitor and scrolled back.
February had been brutal. A deal in Tokyo that had required two weeks on the ground, a restructuring in New York that had bled into a long weekend of calls and contract revisions.
He'd been traveling more than half the month.
And when he'd been home, things had been quiet between them. Not cold. Not hostile. Just muted.
Isabelle had been pulling away slightly, or he'd been too exhausted to reach for her, or both.
The fertility treatments had stalled. The last round had failed in January.
They'd agreed, without saying it explicitly, to stop trying for a while.
To let the wound close. To stop turning their bodies into instruments of a project that kept failing.
He remembered March. He remembered coming home from Tokyo and finding her in the garden, kneeling beside the stone wall, her gloves dirty, her hair loose.
He remembered wanting her. He remembered reaching for her that night and the night after.
He remembered how she'd responded: willing, warm, present.
She'd been present. He was certain of that.
He counted backward and hit the first week of March, and the first week of March he'd been in New York.
Monday through Thursday. He'd flown back Friday evening.
He remembered the flight. He remembered the drive from SFO in the dark.
He remembered walking through the front door and finding the hallway lights on and Isabelle already in bed, asleep, her book open on her chest.
So the window was narrow. Not impossible. Friday night through the weekend. They'd been together that weekend. He was almost sure they'd been together that weekend. Almost sure. But "almost" was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and Xavier did not build his life on "almost."
And then there was Sunday.
She'd gone to Douglas's apartment on Fillmore.
She'd told Xavier before she left, casually, pulling on her jacket by the front door.
"I'm going to see Doug's place, remember?
I'll be back for dinner." She'd kissed him on the cheek. He’d smiled and said "have fun”, and stood in the hallway listening to her car start outside.
She'd come home late. Not very late. Nine, maybe nine-thirty. She'd had wine on her breath and she'd been laughing about something before she even got through the door, still finishing a text on her phone. When she looked up at Xavier her face had been bright and flushed.
"The bathroom is worse than he said," she told him, dropping her bag on the island. "The tile is criminal. But the crown molding, Xavier. Original 1890s egg-and-dart. It's stunning. I told him exactly what to do with it and he's actually going to listen, which is more than most people do."
She'd talked about it for twenty minutes. The apartment's bones, the light, the neighborhood. They'd had dinner at a place on Divisadero, she said, and Douglas had made her laugh so hard she'd knocked over her wine glass.
She told Xavier all of this openly. Voluntarily.
With nothing hidden, nothing guarded, nothing held back.
That should have reassured him. A woman with a secret doesn't come home and talk for twenty minutes about the man she's keeping the secret with.
A woman with a secret doesn't say his name with that much ease.
But Xavier couldn't hear the openness. He could only hear her voice when she talked about Douglas's apartment.
It was the same voice she used when she talked about their house, about the salvage finds, the plaster and the things she'd built with her hands.
And she had taken that voice to another man's home, come back glowing with it. Xavier had sat across from her at the kitchen island, smiled and said "sounds like a great place”. He didn’t say what he was actually thinking, which was: you have never once come home from one of my events looking like that.
His phone was on the desk. He picked it up and opened Instagram, which he almost never used, and typed Douglas Torres into the search bar.
The profile was sparse. A few photos from travel: Lisbon, Tokyo, a rooftop in Singapore.
Well-composed. Tasteful. Still no partner visible in any of them.
The most recent post was from two weeks ago: a coffee cup on a marble countertop with a window behind it showing a San Francisco street. The caption read: Home again.
He'd arrived in San Francisco in early March.
Xavier set the phone down. His hands were steady. His heart was not.
This was insane. He knew it was insane. He was constructing a conspiracy out of a calendar, an Instagram post, and the look on his wife's face when she'd said another man's name at dinner.
He was doing the thing he despised in other men: confusing anxiety with analysis, mistaking the feeling of certainty for the fact of it.
He had no evidence. He had no reason. He had a wife who'd loved him for a decade and a marriage that strangers envied and a baby on its way, finally, after years of loss so devastating he still couldn't think about the second miscarriage without something in his chest folding shut.
Douglas Torres had moved back to San Francisco in early March.
Isabelle hadn't told Xavier about the pregnancy for several days.
She'd said I was scared, which made sense, which was perfectly reasonable, which any husband with a functioning conscience would accept without question.
But Xavier's conscience wasn't functioning.
Something else was. Something older, deeper and uglier, a thing that lived in the basement of his psychology, beneath the charm, the competence, the devotion.
A voice that said: People leave. People always leave.
And they never tell you the truth about why.
His mother had left when he was nine. That was the fact he kept in a locked room inside himself, the one he'd furnished with nothing, no context, no narrative, no explanation.
She'd been there and then she'd been gone.
His father had said "your mother needs some time" and that time had become six months and then a year and then permanent.
She'd moved to Vermont. She'd remarried.
She sent birthday cards with checks inside them.
Xavier cashed the checks, threw away the cards and never once, in twenty-two years, allowed himself to connect that abandonment to anything else in his life.
Except it was connected to everything in his life. It was the foundation under everything he'd built. Every deal he closed, every room he commanded, every act of devotion he'd ever offered.
He didn't think about this. He didn't examine it. He didn't go to therapy, despite Isabelle's gentle suggestion two years ago, which he'd deflected with a joke about not needing to pay someone to tell him he was exceptional. The joke had landed well. She'd laughed. The subject hadn't come up again.
Now he sat in his office with the door closed and the skyline of San Francisco in the windows behind him and he could sense it, the locked room opening, the thing inside it climbing the stairs.
His hands were still steady. His pulse was running fast. He looked at the phone with Douglas Torres's Instagram still open, and he looked at the calendar with the narrow window of conception marked in his mind like a red line on a contract.
He left the office at four. He told his assistant he had a personal matter.
He drove home with both hands on the wheel, his jaw set and the radio off.
The city moved past him in a blur of light and fog and he rehearsed nothing.
There was nothing to rehearse. He was beyond preparation.
He was in the part of the negotiation where the numbers had stopped mattering and the only thing left was the fear, vast and formless and consuming.
He was walking straight into it because standing still was worse.
Isabelle was in the kitchen when he came through the door.
She was chopping something, vegetables, her hair pulled back, wearing a linen shirt he loved that she'd bought at a shop in Sausalito.
She looked up when he came in and smiled.
The smile was open, easy. Glad to see him.
For one second, one full second, he nearly stopped.
He nearly set down the accusation, crossed the kitchen, kissed her and let the fear be wrong.
But then he saw the phone on the counter beside her cutting board. And on the screen, before it went dark, a text notification. From Douglas.
He didn't see what it said. It didn't matter what it said.
The name was enough. The name at four in the afternoon, on her phone, in his kitchen, beside the cutting board where she was making dinner for him while carrying what she'd told him was his child.
The name was enough to finish what the calendar, the Instagram and the sleepless nights had started.
"You're home early," she said.
"We need to talk."
The smile left her face. It didn't fade. It left, all at once.
"Okay," Isabelle said. She set the knife down and wiped her hands on a towel. She gave him her full attention, which was what she always did when he used that voice, because Isabelle had spent ten years learning to read the weather of his moods and this was a storm she could see coming.
But she didn't know what kind.
"The baby," he said.
"What about the baby?"