Chapter 2
Maybe the man who scheduled everything would immediately open his calendar and begin planning three nurseries before lunch.
I stopped at a tiny bakery three blocks from our townhouse and bought four cupcakes.
Three small ones.
One large one.
It was ridiculous.
I knew that.
I didn’t care.
I planned to put the ultrasound photographs beside them and tell him, “Apparently one crib isn’t going to be enough.”
I carried the box home like I was transporting something precious.
When I stepped inside, the house was quiet.
“Ryan?”
No answer.
His coat was hanging beside the door.
His briefcase was on the console.
That surprised me. He was supposed to be downtown until at least six.
Then I saw him through the dining room doorway.
He was sitting at the long walnut table.
No laptop.
No coffee.
No phone in his hand.
Only a black leather folder placed directly in front of him.
I smiled anyway.
“You’re home.”
Ryan looked up.
Something in his face stopped me.
Not anger.
Not sadness.
Decision.
The kind of expression he wore right before signing a contract no one could talk him out of.
“I need you to sit down.”
My hand tightened around the bakery box.
“What happened?”
“Sit down, Natalie.”
My name in his voice sounded strangely formal.
I placed the cupcakes on the sideboard.
My purse remained over my shoulder.
The ultrasound envelope was inside it.
I sat across from him.
For a moment he did not speak.
Then he pushed the black folder across the table.
“Vanessa is back,” he said.
I stared at him.
Of all the sentences I had expected that morning, those three words were so far outside my imagination that they barely registered.
“Vanessa?”
“Vanessa Sinclair.”
“I know who Vanessa is.”
Of course I knew.
I had never met her, but she had existed around the edges of our marriage like a person in an old photograph.
Ryan’s first love.
The woman he had dated through college and into his twenties.
The woman his mother had once accidentally called “the person everyone expected Ryan to marry.”
Vanessa had moved to London almost seven years earlier for a career opportunity.
Ryan had told me their relationship had already been broken by then.
I believed him.
By the time I met him, she had been gone for nearly two years.
Or at least I thought she had been gone.