Chương 3
For one ugly second Rachel saw satisfaction there. Not joy. Vindication.
See what your secret did.
Then Eleanor picked up her handbag.
At the kitchen doorway she stopped.
“The lab has not processed anything yet,” she said to Daniel. “The samples were scheduled to be collected Monday.”
Daniel stared at her.
“You scheduled it?”
“Yes.”
“Cancel it.”
“You need the truth.”
“I said cancel it.”
Eleanor’s gaze shifted to Mason.
Daniel moved instantly, blocking the line between them.
“Don’t.”
Something in his tone ended the conversation.
Eleanor left.
Linda remained another few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” she told Rachel.
Rachel didn’t answer.
Linda nodded as though she had received one anyway.
After the front door closed, the house became strange.
The remains of the party were everywhere.
Half-empty glasses.
Napkins printed with little silver stars.
A bowl of melted ice beside warm soda cans.
One blue balloon drifting at shoulder height because it had lost enough helium to descend but not enough to surrender.
Daniel picked up a broom.
Rachel watched him.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s glass.”
“Porcelain.”
He looked at her.
She wished immediately that she hadn’t corrected him.
“Right.”
He swept the pieces without speaking.
The scrape of the broom against the tile seemed obscenely loud.
Rachel put Mason in his crib upstairs, changed his diaper, stood beside him until his eyes closed again, then packed without knowing what Daniel meant by a bag.
Three diapers?
Three days?
She packed six.
At the bathroom sink she washed her face and saw the cream apron still around her waist.
She untied it.
There was a smear of frosting near the pocket.
She had spent forty minutes that morning piping pale blue rosettes around Mason’s cake because the bakery wanted sixty-eight dollars for a design she thought she could do herself.
The rosettes had leaned.
Daniel had called them “windswept.”
She had laughed.
That had been six hours ago.
Rachel folded the apron once and left it on the bathroom counter.
Daniel was sitting on the edge of their bed when she came out.
His elbows rested on his knees.
The bag sat between them.
He looked exhausted.
“Who?”
She knew the question would come.
“Evan Cole.”
Daniel’s eyes closed briefly.
He knew Evan.
Not well. Enough.
Evan had been Rachel’s boyfriend in college for two years. He had attended their wedding because by then he was one of those people everyone insisted could become a harmless friend if enough time passed.
Apparently not.
“When?”
“During the separation.”
“I know that part.”
“Eleven days after you left.”
Daniel looked at the carpet.
Rachel sat in the chair across from him rather than beside him.
“It happened once.”
“Did you see him after?”
“No.”
“Talk to him?”
“A few times. Not like that.”
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“Does he know Mason could be his?”
“No.”
Daniel rubbed his thumb against his palm.
“Why not?”
“I was scared.”
“Of what?”
She almost said losing you.
It sounded too clean.
“Everything.”
He waited.
Rachel made herself be more specific.
“I was scared you’d leave again. I was scared you’d think I came back because I got pregnant. I was scared if I told Evan, he’d want something from me I didn’t know how to give. I was scared your mother would find out.”
He looked at her then.
“You were scared of my mother, so you hid the fact that our son might not be mine.”
Rachel flinched.
Daniel noticed.
He looked away.
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” Rachel said. “You get to be angry.”
“I can be angry without trying to hurt you.”
She nearly laughed because the sentence was so Daniel, and because it was exactly the kind of sentence she had once thought made him safer than anyone she had ever known.
The laugh became a breath.
“I kept telling myself the dates made it unlikely.”
“How unlikely?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have asked a doctor.”
“I asked about conception windows without explaining why.”
“And?”
“She said dates aren’t exact enough to settle something like that.”
Daniel leaned back.
“So you knew uncertainty was still there.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly.
“Did you ever plan to tell me?”
Rachel stared at the zipper on Mason’s bag.
“Yes.”
“When?”
She had no answer that did not sound pathetic.
After the first ultrasound.
After the anatomy scan.
After he was born.
After Daniel signed the birth certificate.
After the newborn months.
After Christmas.
After she stopped nursing at night.
After Mason’s birthday.
There had always been an after.
Daniel understood before she spoke.
“Right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean—”
“Please don’t.”
She stopped.
He stood.
“I’m going to my brother’s place.”
Rachel looked up sharply.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Mason?”
Daniel’s face changed.
“He stays here.”
“You packed—”
“I thought we were all leaving. Then I realized I’m the one who needs somewhere else.”
Rachel’s eyes filled.
She blinked the tears away.
He saw that too.
“I’m not abandoning him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You thought it.”
She looked at the floor.
Daniel crossed the room and picked up his phone.
“Cancel anything with my mother. Any appointment, any test, anything.”
“I will.”
“And don’t call Evan tonight.”
Rachel looked up.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, Rachel.”
The sentence landed harder than everything Eleanor had said.
Daniel looked as though he regretted it.
He did not take it back.
At the bedroom door he stopped.
“Mason wakes around one lately, right?”
“Usually.”
“Text me if he has a fever or anything weird.”
“He won’t know you’re gone.”
Daniel stared at her.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Rachel nodded.
He left.
For the first time since Mason’s birth, Rachel spent an entire night in the house without Daniel.
May you like
She discovered that silence could have weight.
At twelve thirty she wiped dried frosting off the kitchen island because she couldn’t stand looking at it. At twelve forty-five she found one shard of the birthday plate beneath the refrigerator and picked it up with a paper towel. At one eleven Mason cried.
