Chương 2
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good. Don’t start inventing things.”
Claire leaned against the mirrored wall.
The wine stain covered the front of her dress in an uneven red fan. Her cheek had begun to sting.
Denise opened her purse and handed over a folded cocktail napkin she had apparently stolen from upstairs.
“You look like you murdered someone.”
“Helpful.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
They descended in silence.
On the twenty-seventh floor, the elevator stopped.
A man in a hotel uniform stepped in carrying a plastic tub of folded white towels.
He looked at Claire.
Then at the wine.
Then at Denise.
Nobody spoke.
He pushed twenty-three.
Denise’s mouth twitched.
Claire looked away so she would not laugh again.
It felt wrong to laugh.
That was probably why it almost happened.
When the elevator reached the lobby, Claire’s phone began vibrating inside her small evening bag.
Once.
Twice.
Then continuously.
She did not look.
Her mother did.
“At least forty people just discovered they care very much about you.”
“Most of them care about the party.”
“That too.”
They stepped outside.
The first drops of rain had started.
Claire stood under the hotel awning while attendants moved quickly between black cars and umbrellas.
She breathed in warm wet pavement, gasoline, perfume drifting from the lobby.
Her phone stopped.
Then began again.
Denise said, “Where are you staying tonight?”
“My apartment.”
“No.”
“Mom.”
“You live with him.”
“I own the apartment.”
“You live with him.”
Claire looked down the street.
Technically, Ethan had moved into her apartment eight months ago because his townhouse renovation had been delayed. Then the renovation finished, but there had always been a reason to stay. His office was closer. Her building had better security. The townhouse needed furniture. His mother was using one floor for a fundraiser.
Somehow, his shirts had multiplied across Claire’s closet until her apartment felt like disputed territory.
“I need my laptop,” Claire said.
“You need pants.”
“That too.”
“Come to the hotel with me. Your father’s already there.”
Claire stared at the wine soaking into the ivory fabric.
Her father had left the party twenty minutes before the confrontation because rooftop events made his knees hurt and he considered any gathering lasting longer than two hours evidence of poor planning.
“What did you tell Dad?”
“That he should keep his phone on.”
“That’ll terrify him.”
“Yes.”
The hotel doorman approached.
“Ms. Bennett?”
Claire looked up.
“Yes?”
“There’s a car for you.”
“I didn’t call one.”
The doorman hesitated. “Mr. Cole did.”
“No.”
She did not say it loudly.
She did not need to.
The doorman nodded and stepped away.
Denise took out her phone.
“I’m calling a cab.”
Claire’s phone buzzed again.
This time a name appeared on the screen that stopped her.
MARGARET COLE.
She let it ring.
Then another message arrived.
Please do not go home alone.
Claire read it twice.
Her mother watched her face.
“What?”
Claire showed her.
Denise frowned. “That woman has terrible timing.”
“She has an envelope.”
“I noticed.”
“You noticed?”
“I spent the last three months looking at her because every time I tried to talk to you at one of these parties, she interrupted.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s mostly true.”
Claire’s phone vibrated again.
Margaret.
I should have told you months ago. There are things Ethan has not told you. I have proof of some of them.
Claire locked the screen.
Rain began hitting the awning harder.
For six weeks, Claire had carried a private suspicion that Ethan was lying to her.
Until tonight, she had not understood its size.
Three months earlier, on a Tuesday morning in May, Claire had sat in the waiting room of Hudson Reproductive Medicine wearing blue paper shoe covers and pretending to read a financial magazine from the previous year.
Ethan sat beside her answering emails.
They had been trying for a child for nearly a year.
Claire had not been desperate. That was the word people around her used, as if wanting a baby after twenty-nine required some kind of fever. She wanted one. Ethan said he did too. They agreed to stop preventing pregnancy after the wedding date was set.
When months passed, Ethan suggested testing.
His suggestion impressed her.
He spoke clinically about hormones, timing, sperm analysis, statistics.
Claire had been ashamed of how relieved she felt that he was not one of those men who treated fertility as a referendum on masculinity.
Her tests came back normal.
Ethan’s did not.
He told Claire the clinic had found a severe issue with sperm count, but not complete infertility.
Then, two weeks later, he told her there was another option.
A sperm donor.
Claire initially said no.
Not because she objected to donor conception. She simply wanted time. She wanted them to understand what was happening, maybe seek a second opinion, maybe talk to someone.
Ethan pushed.
“We want a child,” he told her in their kitchen. “This is how we get one.”
“We’re allowed to think for ten minutes.”
“We’ve thought for a year.”
“I haven’t thought about this for a year.”
He had gone quiet.
That silence, more than shouting, was how Ethan punished disagreement.
A day later he apologized.
A week later they met with a counselor.
A month later they chose an anonymous donor from a clinic program.
The first insemination failed.
The second did not.
Claire found out she was pregnant five weeks before the engagement party.
Ethan had cried when she showed him the test.
Real tears, she had believed.
He sat on the bathroom floor in a white dress shirt and held her around the waist.
That memory was now impossible to place beside the man who had knocked a glass into her face.
Her mother’s cab arrived.
They got inside.
As Manhattan blurred in rain beyond the windows, Claire opened her messages.
There were ninety-three.
The first was from her college roommate.
Are you okay?
Then her cousin.
May you like
Call me.
Then someone from work.
