Chapter 6
ISABELLE
Isabelle drove for ten minutes before she realized she was waiting for his headlights in the rearview mirror.
Every block, every turn, every red light on Divisadero, she expected to see them.
The twin beams of the Aston Martin swinging around a corner behind her, Xavier driving too fast the way he always drove when he was upset, pulling alongside her at a stoplight, lowering his window and saying something.
Anything. Come home. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Come home and let me fix this.
He didn't come.
She made it to Presidio Heights in fourteen minutes. She parked on the street outside her parents' house because the driveway had a gate code she couldn't remember. She sat in the car with the engine running, her hands on the wheel and tried to understand what had just happened.
Six weeks. She was six weeks pregnant with her husband's child and he had stood in their kitchen and asked her if the baby was someone else's. He had looked at her with those green eyes and he had not been able to say I believe you. He had told her to leave. And he had not come after her.
That was the part she couldn't get past. The silence afterward. The sound of Xavier not following her up the stairs. The sound of Xavier not stopping her at the door. He’d spent ten years crossing every room to reach her and chose, in the one moment that mattered most, to stand still.
Isabelle turned off the engine. The fog was thick tonight, pressing against the windshield, and the Monroe house was a dark outline behind the hedges.
She should call first. It was almost eleven.
Her mother would be in bed, or in the reading chair in the upstairs sitting room with a glass of wine and a biography of someone important.
Either way an unannounced arrival would be noted as an irregularity, cataloged, and held.
Isabelle got out of the car. She pulled her bag from the back seat and walked up the flagstone path she'd walked up a thousand times, always on Xavier's arm, always in heels.
Always looking like exactly what she was supposed to look like.
But tonight she was in jeans and a sweater she'd grabbed without looking, her eyes were swollen and she didn't care.
She rang the doorbell.
It took two minutes. Then the porch light came on and her father opened the door in his robe, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked at her and his face went soft. Concerned.
"Isabelle?"
"Can I come in?"
"Of course you can come in. What's happened? Where's Xavier?"
"Can I just—come in? Please."
He stepped aside. She walked into the foyer, set her bag on the floor and stood there in the house she'd grown up in, under the chandelier her mother had imported from an estate sale in Connecticut, and she started to cry.
Her father put his arms around her. He held her carefully, like she was breakable.
She pressed her face into the lapel of his robe and cried until her chest ached.
He smelled like pipe tobacco, which he hadn't smoked in years but which had seeped into his clothes so permanently it had become his scent.
She'd loved that smell her whole life. It was the smell of safety, of the study, of the one room in this house where she'd ever been allowed to sit on the floor.
Kara appeared on the stairs. She was in her robe too, her silver-blonde hair down around her shoulders.
She looked at Isabelle, then at Richard and her mouth compressed into a line that meant she was calculating.
Assessing the situation and determining the appropriate response, which was what her mother did with every crisis, every emotion, every deviation from the expected order.
"Bring her into the kitchen," Kara said. "I'll make tea."
They sat at the kitchen table. The kitchen was spotless, unused, the domain of the cook who came five days a week. Kara made tea, and the three of them sat under the overhead light, which was too bright, too white and made everything look like an interrogation.
"Tell us what happened," her father said.
Isabelle told them.
She said it plainly. She said it without embellishment or drama, because she didn't have the energy for either, and because she wanted, desperately, for her parents to hear the words and respond with the appropriate horror.
She wanted her mother to set down her teacup and say: He said what?
He accused you of what? That is unforgivable.
You did the right thing. Stay as long as you need.
Kara set down her teacup.
"Men panic," she said.
Isabelle stared at her.
"Darling, I'm not excusing it. It's terrible. But men panic when they hear news like this, especially after everything you two have been through. The treatments, the losses. It's been years of strain. His mind went to a dark place. That doesn't mean he lives there."
"He asked me if the baby was his,” Isabelle said slowly.
“You told him it was, and he'll come to his senses. Xavier adores you. Everyone knows Xavier adores you. This is a man who checks on you seven times a day. This is a man who built his entire life around you."
"He accused me of sleeping with Douglas."
"Douglas Torres?" Kara's eyebrows rose slightly. "The friend from Berkeley?"
"Yes."
"Well." Kara picked up her tea again. "That's unfortunate. But Douglas is a good-looking man, you two have always been very close, and I can see how a husband might misread that."
"There's nothing to misread. Douglas is my friend."
"I know that. And Xavier will know that too, once he calms down. These things happen. Marriages survive worse than a bad night and a foolish accusation."
Isabelle looked at her father. He was sitting with both hands wrapped around his mug, his eyes on the table.
He looked uncomfortable, he always looked uncomfortable whenever the conversation moved from facts to feelings.
He was a man built for contracts, golf and firm handshakes.
His daughter crying at his kitchen table at eleven o'clock at night was a problem he couldn't solve with any of those tools.
"Your mother's right," he said, finally. "Xavier's a good man. He loves you. He'll realize he made a mistake."
"He asked me to leave.”
"He was upset."
"I was upset. I still told the truth."
Richard nodded. He looked at his mug. He had nothing else to offer, and they both knew it.
Kara reached across the table and took Isabelle's hand. Her grip was firm and cool. "Stay tonight," she said. "Sleep in your old room. In the morning, call him. Or let him call you. These things sort themselves out, Bella. They always do."
"And if they don't?"
"They will. You're married to one of the most successful men in San Francisco. You have a beautiful home. You have a baby on the way. This is a bump. A terrible bump, but a bump."
Isabelle pulled her hand back. She watched her mother register the withdrawal and process it and file it away.
"Mom," she said, slowly. "He accused me of having another man's baby. That's not a bump."
"It's a mistake. People make mistakes."
"You keep saying that. You keep framing this as something that happened to both of us. Something happened to me. My husband looked at me and told me he doesn't trust me. After everything we've been through. He doesn't trust me."
"He trusts you. He's just afraid."
"Then his fear matters more to him than I do."
Kara sighed. "You're being dramatic."
Dramatic. The same word Kara had used when Isabelle dropped out of Berkeley.
The same word she'd used when Isabelle had cried at Margaret's wedding for reasons she couldn't explain.
The same word she'd always used when her youngest daughter had the audacity to have a feeling that exceeded the allotted emotional square footage.
Isabelle pushed back from the table. She stood up.
"I'm not being dramatic. I'm being accurate. And the fact that you can't tell the difference is why I should never have come here first."
"Isabelle, sit down."
"No."
"Where are you going to go? It's nearly midnight."
"I'll figure it out."
"Don't be ridiculous. You're pregnant and upset. You're not driving anywhere tonight."
"Watch me."
She picked up her bag from the foyer. Her father followed her out of the kitchen and was standing by the stairs looking stricken.
She loved him for the stricken look even though it wouldn't change anything.
He was a man who loved his daughter and had no idea what to do with her pain, and those two facts had coexisted peacefully for twenty-eight years.
"Isabelle," he said. "Please stay."
"I can't stay here, Dad. I can't stay somewhere where the answer to 'my husband doesn't believe me' is 'well, he's very successful.'"
Richard flinched. It was subtle, a tightening around his mouth.
"I love you," she said. "Both of you. But I need someone who's going to be angry for me, and that's not what this house does."
She walked out the front door. The fog wrapped around her immediately, dense and wet and cold. She stood on the flagstone path with her bag in one hand and her phone in the other and realized that she had nowhere to go.
The house behind her was her childhood. The house across the city was her marriage. And neither one of them had a room in it where she was allowed to be what she was right now: devastated, furious, pregnant, alone and entirely without a self that existed outside the word wife.
She stood in the fog for a long time. Then she opened her phone and called Margaret.