Chapter 15
ISABELLE
Xavier mentioned it at the pho place on Irving, which had become their place now, theirs in a way that none of Xavier's restaurants had ever been.
This was their third week here. The owner, a woman named Mrs. Linh, had started bringing Isabelle extra lime wedges without being asked, and last week she'd looked at Isabelle's belly and said, "Almost halfway, yes?"
Isabelle had said “Yes.” Mrs. Linh had brought her a bowl of coconut pudding on the house, patted her hand and said, "Good. You eat. Baby needs sweetness."
Xavier had watched the whole exchange from across the table with an expression Isabelle was still learning to read. Softer than the old Xavier. Less composed.
"There's a gala next month," he said, stirring his pho. "The Pacific Foundation benefit. It's at the Fairmont."
"I know the one. My parents usually go to that one.”
“Right—I almost forgot. Well, I have to go. It's a fund thing. Davis is giving the keynote and half our LPs will be in the room."
"Okay."
He looked up from his soup. "I'm not asking you to come. I want you to know that. I'm mentioning it because we said we'd tell each other about schedule things, and this is a schedule thing."
"When is it?"
"Saturday the fourteenth."
"What time?"
"Seven. Black tie." He paused. "Isabelle, I'm really not asking."
"I know you're not asking. I'm offering."
He set his chopsticks down.
"I'd like to come," she said. "If you'd like me there."
"Of course I'd like you there. I always want you there. I just don't want you to feel obligated or pressured or..."
"Xavier."
"Yeah?"
"I'm offering to come to a gala. I'm not moving back in. We're still separated. I'd be coming as your wife because I haven't been to a social event in months. This dress I bought last week actually fits over the belly and I'd like to wear it somewhere."
"You bought a dress?"
"I bought a dress. It's green."
"Green."
"Celadon green."
Emotion washed over his face. The celadon room. The color she'd painted the nursery six months before she'd told him she was pregnant. She'd bought a dress in that color and chosen it deliberately. They both knew it and neither of them was going to say so out loud.
"I'd love for you to come," he said.
"Good. Pick me up at six-thirty."
Later, she went home, stood in the closet and looked at the dress, which was hanging in a garment bag next to clothes that no longer fit her.
She was seventeen weeks pregnant. The baby was the size of a mango and had started moving last week, tiny flutters low in her belly that she'd mistaken for nerves the first time and then realized, with a shock of recognition that had made her sit down on the kitchen floor and press both hands against her stomach, were kicks.
The baby was kicking. Their baby was kicking and she'd been alone in the kitchen when it happened.
She'd closed her eyes and longed for her husband.
She wanted his hand on her belly, his face close to hers, his voice saying Bella, Bella, Bella the way he'd said it in the hallway when she'd told him.
She'd wanted it with a ferocity that frightened her because the wanting had outpaced the hurt, the wound.
Now, she pulled the dress from the garment bag and held it against herself in the mirror. It was silk, a column cut that draped over the belly: it made the pregnancy look deliberate, elegant, undeniable. The green was warm without being bright. It was the color of new growth.
Margaret came over the next afternoon and sat on her bed while she tried it on.
"Turn," she said.
She turned.
"Again."
She turned again.
“Oh, Isabelle.”
"What?"
"You look devastating."
"I look pregnant."
"You look devastating and pregnant. Those are not mutually exclusive. Xavier's going to have a cardiac event."
"That's not why I'm wearing it."
"Of course it's not why you're wearing it. You're wearing it because it's beautiful, you chose it and it makes you look like a woman who could conquer a small nation. The cardiac event is a bonus."
The night of the gala she got ready alone.
She did her own hair, swept up and pinned loosely.
She put on earrings she'd found at an estate sale in Marin years ago, Art Deco drops in silver and marcasite.
She stepped into the dress and zipped it as far as she could reach and then used a ribbon looped through the zipper pull to get the rest, a trick Margaret had taught her in college that she'd never forgotten.
She looked at herself in the mirror. The belly visible and proud beneath the silk.
Her face had changed during the pregnancy: fuller, warmer, something in her skin that glowed without any help from makeup.
She put her hand on her stomach and the baby moved beneath her palm, a slow roll, and she smiled.
Xavier arrived at six-thirty. She opened the front door, watched his face and the expression that crossed it was worth every minute she'd spent getting ready.
He stared at her. His lips parted. He blinked twice.
His eyes moved from her face to the dress to the belly beneath it and back to her face, and what she saw there wasn't the old possessive sweep, the cataloguing gaze that had once moved over her like an inventory.
This was something else. This was a man looking at a woman, being undone by her and making no effort whatsoever to hide it.
"You're staring," she said.
"I am.” His voice was rough with love, with desire.
Xavier was in a tuxedo. She'd expected that.
What she hadn't expected was how it would affect her.
She'd seen Xavier in a tuxedo hundreds of times.
But this Xavier, the one who went to therapy and ate pho, wore khakis and had learned to sit with discomfort, this Xavier in a tuxedo was different.
The formality sat on him differently now.
He wore it lightly, almost reluctantly, as though the man inside the suit had outgrown the costume.
"Shall we?" he said, offered his arm, and she took it.
The Fairmont was grand, glittering, full of San Francisco's wealthiest citizens drinking champagne in a ballroom with ceilings that belonged in a cathedral.
Isabelle had been to dozens of these events.
She'd stood at Xavier's side, smiled and complimented wives and charmed partners.
Played the role of Mrs. Xavier Grant that had become, over the years, indistinguishable from her actual personality.
Tonight was different. She could feel people noticing her, noticing the belly, noticing that she'd arrived on Xavier's arm after months of absence from the social circuit.
The room shifted around them. She could see the glances, the whispers, the rapid mental calculations happening behind champagne flutes.
Where has she been? Are they back together? Is that a baby bump?
She didn't care. She genuinely, thoroughly didn't care, and the not-caring was new and intoxicating.
Xavier stayed close but didn't hover. He got her sparkling water without being asked.
He introduced her to a new partner at the fund, a woman named Claire who had kind eyes and complimented the dress without looking at Isabelle's stomach first, which Isabelle appreciated more than Claire could have known.
Dinner was at round tables. They were seated with Davis and his wife, a couple from a pension fund in Sacramento, and Isabelle’s parents.
Kara was in midnight blue, her hair done, her posture impeccable.
Richard stood when they approached, kissed Isabelle on the cheek and shook Xavier's hand.
Kara offered her cheek. Isabelle kissed it. They sat.
"You look lovely, darling," Kara said, her eyes moving to the belly beneath the celadon silk. "Pregnancy suits you."
"Thank you, Mom."
The salad course arrived. Conversation moved around the table: Davis and the pension fund couple discussing interest rates, Richard asking Xavier about a deal he'd read about in the Journal. Kara turned to Isabelle.
"So," Kara said, adjusting her napkin. "Margaret tells me you've taken on clients.”
"Yes. Full restoration and interior redesign."
"How fun." Kara waved her hand dismissively. "I think it's wonderful that you have something to keep you busy while you're expecting. A nice creative outlet. And then once the baby comes you can just focus on being a mom."
Irritation roiled through Isabelle, and she set down her fork. But before she could speak, Xavier's voice came from beside her.
"It's not just a creative outlet, Kara."
The table went quiet. Kara’s eyebrows rose a fraction. Richard looked up from his wine. Davis paused mid-bite.
"Isabelle runs a restoration and design practice," Xavier said.
His voice was even. Calm. "She's currently restoring a Queen Anne in the Western Addition.
She stripped four decades of bad renovation off the original millwork by hand.
She recovered pocket doors that hadn't worked since the 1980s.
She developed the entire interior design palette from scratch, testing paint samples against restored trim at different hours of the day until she found colors that honored the period and the clients' preferences simultaneously. "
Kara was staring at him.
"She laid the kitchen floor in our house herself," Xavier continued.
"Reclaimed terra cotta from a farmhouse in Sonoma.
She found the original ceiling medallion for our dining room in a demolition yard in Oakland, wrapped in newspaper from 1987, and cleaned the plaster detail with a toothbrush.
She mixed the plaster wash on our living room walls herself, because no one else could get the color right.
She repointed the garden wall with her own hands. "
The table was silent.
"I spent years thinking she had good taste. She doesn't just have good taste. She has extraordinary skill and she's been doing professional-level restoration and design work for nearly a decade on our home. So it's not just a creative outlet. It's a career. And she's the best at it I've ever seen."
Kara was silent for a long moment. Her lips parted, then closed.
She looked at Isabelle, and for the first time in Isabelle's memory, her mother's expression held something that wasn't assessment or correction or the polite, devastating condescension that had shaped every conversation about Isabelle's creativity.
It was… uncertainty. It seemed her mother, who had never once been uncertain about anything, didn't know what to say.
"I didn't know you laid the floor yourself," Kara said, finally.
"You never asked," Isabelle said.
The sentence sat between them. Kara's chin lifted a fraction, the old reflex, the armor going up. But then something shifted. The chin came back down. Kara picked up her wine glass and took a sip.
“Well," Kara said , setting down her glass and straightening her shoulders, composure restored. "I had no idea."
"Most people didn't," Xavier said. "That's changing."
Under the table, Isabelle's hands were trembling in her lap. She pressed them against her thighs and breathed. She didn't trust her voice.
Xavier's hand found hers under the table.
His fingers laced through hers and held on.
She let him. She held his hand beneath the white tablecloth and gripped hard and he gripped back.
Neither of them looked at each other, and as the table resumed its conversation around them, their hands stayed locked together through the main course, the dessert and the speeches.
After, in the car, she was quiet. Xavier drove.
The city moved past the windows in streaks of light and fog, the bridge lit up in the distance, the bay black and silver beneath it.
He drove the way he used to drive to her parents' house, one hand on the wheel, except tonight the other hand wasn't on her thigh.
It was on the center console, open, waiting, and she could have taken it or left it and he would have accepted either.
She took it.
His fingers closed around hers. She could hear him exhale, slow and controlled, as if he’d been holding his breath.
They pulled up to the Pacific Heights house. Her house. He parked, came around and opened her door, which he'd always done at her parents' house and which tonight felt different. She took his hand, stepped out.
“What you said at dinner…” she began.
"I was wrong, Bella,” he murmured. “About a lot of things. About most things. I'm trying to be right about the things that matter."
Warmth filled her as she gazed at her husband’s handsome face: those green eyes focused on her with loving intensity. She stepped toward him and put her hands on his face. His jaw was warm beneath her palms, his breath caught at her touch.
She kissed him. His hands came up to her waist, gentle, so gentle, holding her as though she were something he might break.
His mouth was warm and tasted like the coffee he'd had after dinner and beneath that he tasted like Xavier, like the man she'd been kissing for ten years, and the familiarity of it nearly took her knees out.
Xavier kissed her back with a restraint that she could feel vibrating through his entire body, the effort it took him not to pull her closer, not to deepen it, not to take more than she was giving. He let her lead. He let her set the pace, the pressure and the duration.
When she pulled back he let her pull back, but his hands stayed on her waist, steady, trembling, and his forehead dropped to hers.
They stood like that for a long time. Foreheads touching. Breathing each other's air. His hands on her waist and her belly between them, the baby right there, their baby.
“I’m sorry," he whispered. “For everything. You’re extraordinary, Bella. I'm sorry it took me so long to see it. But I’m going to keep on proving it to you.”
A swell of love filled her at his words, but she made herself step back. His hands released her waist and she could see what it cost him to let go, could see the effort in his jaw and his shoulders and his hands that curled at his sides as though they were still holding the ghost of her.
"Goodnight, Xavier."
"Goodnight, Bella."
She walked up the path, turned and looked at him one more time, standing on the sidewalk in his tuxedo with his hands, his face open and wrecked and beautiful, and she went inside.
She closed the door and leaned against it. She pressed both hands over her mouth, breathed, and the baby kicked against her palm, hard, insistent, alive.
Isabelle stood against the door for a long time, and she let herself want him. She let herself want him without punishing herself for it, without framing it as weakness or surrender.