My Husband’s Affair Made Me End Our Miracle Baby

The smell of bacon woke me before the alarm did.

I lay still under the sheets, listening to the soft scrape of a spatula against our cast iron pan. The morning light came through the blinds in clean stripes, falling across the side of the bed where Cristian used to leave his watch. He hadn't slept on that side in three days. He'd taken to the couch without being asked, like a penitent assigning himself the harder pew.

I sat up. My hand went, automatically, to the small flat plane of my stomach. Eight weeks. Then nine. The numbers ticked forward without me agreeing to them.

"Morning, beautiful." He appeared in the doorway, dish towel over one shoulder, hair still damp from the shower. He was holding a glass of orange juice on a wooden tray. There was a single white tulip in a bud vase next to it. "Fresh-squeezed. Doctor said the folate is important."

"You squeezed oranges."

"I squeezed oranges." He smiled the smile he used for nervous patients. "And I made turkey bacon. The other kind has nitrates."

I took the glass. The pulp clung to the rim. "Thank you."

He sat on the edge of the bed, careful, as if I were something that could shatter. His hand hovered over my stomach, and I watched it land. Light. Reverent. He spoke past me, to a place six inches below my navel.

"Hi, peanut."

My skin moved under his palm, a slow involuntary shrink. He didn't notice. He never noticed the small things anymore. He was too busy noticing the big ones.

"Cristian."

"Yeah?"

"The bacon's burning."

He shot up and was gone, swearing softly down the hall. I set the orange juice on the nightstand without drinking it and reached into the drawer for the small leather notebook I kept under my paperbacks.

Monday. Breakfast in bed. Tulip — where did he buy a tulip at six a.m.

I clicked the pen closed.

At the obstetrician's office on Thursday, he sat beside me with a Moleskine open on his knee. He had questions written out in his physician's handwriting, neat columns of them. Folic acid dosage. First trimester screening windows. Genetic panels. The doctor smiled at him the way nurses had been smiling at him for ten years — the warm, half-flirting smile reserved for tall men in good shirts who seemed to care.

"You're a lucky woman, Mrs. Wood."

I didn't correct her on the name. I let it sit on the table between us like a coaster nobody was using.

Cristian squeezed my knee. His thumb worked a slow circle. Through the thin fabric of my dress, I could feel the same exact pressure, the same exact rhythm, that he'd used on Kensley's thigh in the photo my mind kept developing, frame by frame, in a darkroom I couldn't lock.

I smiled at the doctor. "I know."

In the elevator down, he kissed my temple. "You did so good in there."

"I sat in a chair."

He laughed. He thought I was being funny.

The campaign was thorough. He cooked. He vacuumed. He poured my decaf into the same mug every morning, the chipped one I'd kept since college, because he'd noticed I reached for it without thinking. He rubbed my feet in the evenings while a cooking show murmured on the television, and he said the word "we" so many times in a row that I started counting them. Twenty-three on Tuesday. Thirty-one on Wednesday. Wednesday was a heavy day.

He never said her name.

That was the tell. A normal man, a man clawing for his marriage, would have said her name at least once. Would have offered an explanation, a context, a confession even half-baked. Cristian had decided the cleanest path forward was to behave as though the night I came home early had not happened, and if he simply layered enough new evidence on top of it, the old evidence would compress into something unreadable.

He'd forgotten who he married. I read evidence for a living.

I watched the schedule of his tenderness. He was at his most attentive between six and ten in the morning — the hours, I realized, when a woman might be deciding things. By six in the evening he relaxed. By nine he was checking his phone in the bathroom, the door closed, the fan running. The fan never used to run. He hated the noise.

On Friday I scrolled through his hospital's published call schedule, which he'd given me access to years ago, back when access felt like intimacy. He had volunteered for two extra Saturday shifts this month. I cross-referenced the dates against a staff directory I'd had no business memorizing. Both Saturdays, Dr. Dixon, K. was on the floor.

I wrote it down. I closed the notebook. I put it back in my bag.

The phone calls from my mother started arriving like clockwork, a quarter past nine, right after she finished her coffee.

"How are you feeling, sweetheart? Any nausea?"

"A little. It passes."

"Ginger candies. The real kind, from the Asian market on Mott. Your aunt swore by them." A pause. The pause was where the real call lived. "And how are things with Cristian?"

"He made me breakfast."

"He's trying, Sloane."

"He is."

"A baby changes everything. Whatever happened — and I'm not asking — whatever happened, you have something now that's bigger than that. Think about what you're building together."

I looked at the ceiling. The crown molding had a hairline crack I'd never noticed before. It ran from the corner toward the light fixture, thin as a pencil line.

"I hear you, Mom."

"Your father agrees."

In the background, Thatcher's voice, distant and dutiful. "She knows we love her."

"I know you do."

When the call ended, I held the phone in my palm for a long time. The screen went dark. My reflection appeared in it — the woman my mother thought she was talking to. Composed. Pregnant. Persuadable.

I set the phone face-down on the kitchen island.

That night Cristian came home with a paper bag from the bookstore on Fifth. He spread the contents across our duvet like a dowry. What to Expect. The Birth Partner. A small board book with a cartoon giraffe on the cover. He arranged them in a row, smallest to largest, and looked up at me with an expression so soft it bordered on grief.

"I want to do this right," he said.

I picked up the giraffe book. The cardboard was cool against my fingers. I traced the outline of the animal's face with my thumb, slow, the way he had traced my belly that morning.

"I know you do," I said.

He exhaled. He thought he had won something.

When he went to brush his teeth, I slid the books into the nightstand drawer, on top of the leather notebook, and closed it. The drawer caught at the end the way it always did. I pushed it the last quarter inch with the heel of my hand until I heard the small, definite click.