They were still fighting though. And the night that she told him, he’d been throwing a party. She arrived home from the hospital, another late shift. She’d promised herself that she would stop taking them—that she would spend more time with him—that she would do whatever she had to in order to make this work. She would quit if it would stop the merry-go-round that was Tom’s fickle affection.
After she told him, things did change.
Tom stopped staying late at the office. For all she knew, he’d ended his affair with Ione Larsen. She hoped that he had. But there was a part of her that didn’t care, so long as it seemed like he had. She’d have gladly eaten his lies if they satisfied the hunger that she felt deep within her core. A hunger that he had starved for so many years, handing her crumbs and scraps. She wanted to gorge herself on the attention he lavished on her.
Vanessa kept track of her pregnancy religiously in her planner. Appointments, milestones, the size of the fetus. And before that, she had tracked her cycle and the times that she had sex with Tom (marked with a black heart) and the times she had sex with Mark (marked with a red one). This secret code was just for her. Tom didn’t care enough to ask or even look at the planner and she never worried about it.
Things seemed to be good between the two of them.
“I’ve missed this,” she said to him one night, lying beside him after sex. Her hand stroked his chest, letting the hair run between her fingers.
His arm wrapped around her shoulders, he kissed her on the crown of her head. But he said nothing. He was somewhere faraway.
“Tom, what’s wrong?”
“Do you think I’ll be a good father?” he asked.
His eyes met hers. And she saw something there that she’d never seen: fear. Tom was genuinely afraid of messing this up. And there was something infinitely tender and endearing about that. She’d never seen him scared of anything.
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t have a baby with you if I didn’t think you would be.”
Tom seemed to think about this and with a squeeze of her shoulder, he accepted it.
Life went on and things were better than they had been in a long time. One afternoon, Vanessa got a text message from Mark.
I miss you.
Her heart raced at the thought that his fingers had hammered out the message on the other end of the line. The idea that he was staring at his phone, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, letting him know that she was frantically telling him the same thing. But she swiped left on his name, allowing the Delete option to pop up. She touched it and the message disappeared. The only record of its existence his number on their phone bill.
But there was a part of Vanessa that felt sick about it. She had asked Tom not to tell anyone at work that she was pregnant yet. She wondered, though, what had been said to Ione. There was a part of Vanessa that hoped Ione was jealous that she was carrying Tom’s child instead of her. But she had her doubts that a baby was what the girl even wanted from Tom.
There had been others before her, Vanessa knew that. But there was something about this one that bothered her especially. For so long, she’d been able to shut down the things that she felt about Tom’s affairs. The disgust and the irritation, the gut-wrenching grief that came with betrayal. It felt like a death. That was all she could compare it to. Except the thing that had died was the trust between them. It had been replaced by a mess of emotions that were tangled up in a ball that might never be unraveled.
When he’d begun to see Ione, something had changed. With the others, Tom had still loved Vanessa. She knew that. They had just been flavors of the month—or the semester—and they moved on and so did he. But with Ione, it was different. Something changed in Tom. He closed off part of himself to her. It was like she was only allowed to go into certain rooms within his heart and there was a giant padlock keeping her out of the deepest, most tucked-away closets.
And that was where he kept himself.
She’d hoped that it would resolve itself, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach that it wouldn’t. And that was when Mark had come into the picture. He gave her the sense of security that Tom had ripped from beneath her. But now, they were working to rebuild what had been destroyed between the two of them. They were meeting in the middle.
Tom was at work when Vanessa had her first ultrasound appointment. She didn’t mind going without him. The technician greased her belly with a Vaseline-like substance and ran the machine over the curve of her abdomen, still concave.
The cool plastic made her shiver at first. An image popped up on the screen. The tech pointed to a small dot. Their child. Vanessa watched in wonder. Though her background was scientific, it amazed her that she and Tom could have made something like this together. For all the hate they shared, there was love there, too.
And here was the manifestation of that.
“Conception looks to be about eight weeks ago,” the tech said.
Vanessa left feeling warm even in the cold. She placed her hands over her abdomen in the car, marveling at the life that brewed inside her. But something was bothering her.
At home, she placed the picture of the ultrasound on the fridge, eager for Tom to look at it when he got home. She wondered what she might see in his face the first time he saw
