My Husband Burned Our Baby Into His Roses

Payne Industries took up thirty floors of glass on Sixth Avenue, and by nine at night, most of them were dark. I liked it that way. I liked riding the private elevator with a warm bag balanced on my hip, the smell of garlic and butter filling the small mirrored box, knowing that in a few minutes Isaac would look up from his desk and something in his face would soften, just for a second, just for me.

I'd been bringing him dinner twice a week for three years. Chicken piccata on Tuesdays. Something with rice on Thursdays. It didn't matter that we barely spoke anymore, that he'd stopped sleeping in our bed sometime last spring. The dinners were a rope I kept throwing across a widening gap, telling myself that as long as I kept throwing it, the gap couldn't really be as wide as it looked.

His assistant had gone home. The floor was empty, carpet swallowing my heels, the city glittering behind glass on either side of me like something underwater. I pushed open his office door without knocking. I never knocked. That used to mean something.

Hailey Webb was pressed against the edge of his desk, and his hand — his bad hand, the one that never closed all the way since the night he saved me — was tangled in her hair.

The containers hit the floor before I understood I'd let go of them. Rice everywhere. A lid rolling in a slow, stupid circle until it wobbled and dropped flat.

Isaac stepped back. Not fast. Not guilty. Just annoyed, the way you'd step back from a phone that rang at the wrong time.

Hailey smoothed her blouse down with two fingers, unhurried, and looked at me the way you'd look at a chair someone left in a hallway. "Sofia," she said, pleasant as a receptionist, and walked past me out the door. She didn't even try to make it look like nothing. That was the part that stayed with me. She didn't have to.

"How long," I said. My voice came out steady. I'd trained for years to keep my voice steady no matter what was happening underneath it — stage discipline, my old acting coach used to call it. Useful, it turned out, for more than the stage.

"It's not what you think." Isaac straightened his cuffs. He didn't come toward me.

"How long, Isaac."

"You're overreacting." He said it the way he said everything, flat and final, like a man reading numbers off a spreadsheet. "She's my PR director. We work late. You don't get to interrogate me over a working relationship."

"I want a divorce."

Something moved behind his eyes then — not panic, not even anger. Something colder. He lifted his left hand, the fingers that never fully straightened anymore, and held it up between us like evidence.

"You'd walk out over this," he said quietly, "after everything."

He didn't say the rest. He never had to. Three years ago, in a private dining room two blocks from here, two men had grabbed me by the arms and Isaac had come through the door swinging, and by the time it was over his hand had been broken in four places trying to keep them off me. He never mentioned it directly. He just held it up sometimes, like a bill I hadn't finished paying.

I pressed my thumb into the inside of my left wrist, hard, until the sting of it steadied me.

"Get some rest," I said. "You look tired."

And I left. I didn't slam the door. I didn't cry in the elevator. I drove myself home to the Hamptons in the dark, past the hedges Isaac had planted the spring we got married, and I lay down in a bed he hadn't touched in weeks and stared at the ceiling until it turned from black to grey.

I told myself I'd misread it. I told myself Hailey Webb probably did work late with every executive on that floor, that I was tired, that grief made a person see monsters in ordinary shadows. I did not call Diana. My sister would have asked one question — *are you leaving him* — and I wasn't ready to hear myself say no.

I didn't file anything. I didn't say another word about it. I just pressed my thumb to my wrist and waited for morning, the way I'd waited for a hundred other mornings in that house.

Eight days later, in a bathroom down the hall from that same silent bedroom, I sat on the edge of the tub and watched a second pink line bloom into being.

Six weeks, the doctor's office said over the phone, careful and clinical. Congratulations.

I didn't tell Isaac. I didn't tell anyone. There was something underneath all the wreckage of that week that was still whole, still mine, still untouched by Hailey Webb's hands or my husband's silences, and I wanted to keep it that way for a little while longer. I slid the test behind my copy of *The Seagull*, in the drawer by the bed, between the pages where Nina talks about being a seagull and not knowing it yet.

I closed the drawer. I told no one.

I thought, foolishly, that I still had time.