Chương 1
"""“My doctor said I could go into labor tonight.”
Ethan did not stop dragging the cream suitcase across the polished hardwood floor. Its wheels struck the narrow brass strip beneath the nursery doorway and made a hard, expensive little clatter. Beyond him, the crib had already been fitted with white sheets. Three framed ultrasound photographs hung above it, each one straight because Nora had corrected them twice that morning.
“Then call 911,” he said.
He spoke without turning around.
Nora stood in the hallway with one hand beneath the weight of her belly and the other pressed flat against the cream wall. At thirty-eight weeks, she could no longer shift quickly enough to block him without looking as though she were asking to be moved. She had not intended to block him at all. She had only stepped out of the nursery when she heard the suitcase.
Diane waited beside the front door in lavender silk and pearls, watching her son with the quiet approval of someone observing a difficult servant complete a necessary task.
“You heard her,” Diane said. “She has a telephone.”
The baby rolled under Nora’s dress, a slow pressure beneath her ribs. She breathed through it and looked at Ethan’s profile in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the salmon linen shirt she had bought for their anniversary trip the year before, when he had still reached for her hand in restaurants. His sunglasses were already on, though he was indoors.
“Where are you going?” Nora asked.
Ethan stopped only because the suitcase had angled against the baseboard. He pulled it free with a sharp jerk.
“Bermuda.”
“For how long?”
“A week. Maybe ten days.”
Nora looked at Diane. “And you?”
Diane’s smile barely changed. “Someone has to make sure he rests.”
There were two contractions in that sentence, though Nora did not recognize them as contractions yet. The first tightened low across her abdomen. The second came from the way Ethan still would not look directly at her.
He had spent the previous three weeks saying the trip was canceled. His mother’s birthday could be celebrated later, he had told Nora. He would not miss the birth. He would not leave her alone in that last impossible stretch when she needed help putting on shoes and woke at two in the morning convinced she could not breathe.
He had said all of it while answering messages beneath the dinner table.
Diane stepped closer. Her perfume carried the powdery sweetness Nora associated with department-store counters and funeral receptions.
“Maybe giving birth alone will teach you respect,” she said.
Nora’s eyes lowered to the movement beneath her cardigan. The baby had shifted again, pressing one foot or elbow into the side of her belly. She covered the small rise with her palm until it disappeared.
When she looked up, Ethan was adjusting his sunglasses in the mirror.
“Respect for whom?” Nora asked.
Diane gave a soft laugh. “There. That tone. Always that tone.”
Ethan finally faced her. He kept one hand wrapped around the suitcase handle, his watch shining at his wrist.
“This house, the cards, everything you have exists because of me.”
For one strange second, Nora felt almost embarrassed for him.
The house had belonged to her grandmother. The cards were linked to accounts funded by a trust established before she met him. Even the company whose logo appeared on the watchbox in his closet had survived its first year because Nora’s father had written Ethan a check nobody in the family was supposed to mention.
But Ethan said the lie with such certainty that Nora understood he no longer needed it to be true.
She smiled, though she did not mean to.
“Enjoy your vacation.”
Something in her voice made him hesitate. His fingers tightened around the handle. Diane glanced between them, alert for a threat she could name and dismiss.
Ethan opened the door. Bright coastal sunlight spread across the floor. Beyond the stone steps, a black car waited with its engine running. The driver got out to help with the luggage, then paused when he saw Nora in the hallway. His expression changed before he lowered his eyes.
Ethan handed him the suitcase.
“Call me if it’s real,” Ethan said.
Nora did not ask what he meant.
Labor, perhaps. Pain. Marriage. Any of it.
Diane touched Ethan’s arm and guided him outside. She did not look back. The front door shut hard enough to rattle the ultrasound photographs in the nursery.
Nora remained still until the car pulled away.
The house settled around her. The refrigerator compressor hummed in the kitchen. Somewhere near the seawall, a landscaping crew started a leaf blower even though it was June and there were no leaves worth blowing. The ordinary noise felt insulting.
Nora turned the dead bolt.
The click sounded louder than it should have.
She slid the secondary lock into place. Then the old brass chain her grandmother had installed after a break-in thirty years earlier.
Three small decisions.
The baby kicked.
“All right,” Nora whispered. “I know.”
Her phone lay on a console table beneath the mirror. The screen showed no missed call from Ethan, only a weather notification and a message from Diane.
Don’t embarrass us while we’re away.
Nora stared at it until the words lost their shape.
Then she walked into Ethan’s office.
He disliked anyone entering the room without permission. Even the housekeeper left his coffee outside the door. He said the office was where he carried the family, as though the rest of them were seated on his shoulders while he answered emails and watched auction videos of vintage sports cars.
The dark wooden desk faced the windows. On its surface, everything was arranged with aggressive neatness: silver pen tray, leather blotter, framed photograph of Ethan beside a prototype automobile, crystal paperweight shaped like a falcon.
May you like
Nora lowered herself into his chair. The leather exhaled beneath her.
The upper drawers contained ordinary things. Charging cables. Cuff links. Receipts from restaurants he claimed were business meetings. In the second drawer, she found a hotel key card from Boston dated the week he had supposedly been in Detroit.
