I'm Having His Baby. Great. Smile for the Cameras. Here's Your Scandal and a Court Date novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Great

Cora answers the scandal on live microphones and drives Cadence away from the Lindemanns; Cadence says Grady told her Cora couldn't have kids.

Nobody on the courthouse steps said anything.

The only sound was the shutters, forty of them at once.

Grady's hand tightened on mine until the bones ground together.

"This young woman is confused," he said into the microphone, and his smile didn't slip. "She was my wife's student, and she has been writing me letters for months."

Cadence flinched.

"I haven't written you a letter in my life," she said. "I have your texts."

"Cora," Grady said, low, "tell them she's unwell."

I looked at him.

Ten months ago I would have told them.

I took my hand out of his and stepped to the microphone he'd just let go of.

"Great," I said.

The speakers carried it across the whole square.

"Smile for the cameras, Grady. Here's your scandal, and you're standing in front of your court date."

I pointed over my shoulder at the courthouse doors.

Somebody in the crowd laughed, and then a lot of somebodies did.

Grady's father moved before the laughing stopped.

He came across the stone with the fixer at his elbow, a man in a gray suit whose name I'd never been told.

The judge had a voice that had sentenced people for thirty years.

"Cora, dear. Let's take this inside."

"No, thank you," I said.

"You're pregnant, and you're upset."

"I'm pregnant and I'm leaving."

I took Cadence by the elbow.

She was shaking, and she smelled like the cheap vanilla lotion she used to leave a smear of on my classroom desk.

The camera crews opened a lane, because they had both our faces now.

Behind us Grady said, "Cor, wait," in the voice he used when he wanted a room to think he was hurt.

I didn't wait.

My car was in the metered lot on Third Street, a gray Honda with a cracked taillight.

I put Cadence in the passenger seat and locked the doors.

Then I sat with both hands on the wheel and made myself breathe through my nose.

My phone was still recording in my coat.

I took it out and looked at the red dot, and I let it run.

Cadence pressed the envelope to her chest.

"Professor Whitlow, I swear I didn't know he remarried you. He told me you two were done."

"I know what he told you."

"I came to your office hours last year. I liked you."

"I liked you too."

That was the worst of it, so I said it plainly.

She started to cry, the kind where you try not to make noise.

I found a napkin in the console and handed it over, and I looked out the windshield until she was done.

"Show me," I said.

She opened her phone and gave it to me.

The thread was three months long.

The first message from Grady was: The paper wedding is for the campaign, it's a formality, don't be hurt.

It was dated four days after I had stood in this same courthouse in a white dress and said I do for the second time.

The next one said: She's bitter. I don't talk about her.

Then: Meet me at the campaign office, nobody's there after seven.

I scrolled to a photo of an ultrasound with a gray bean in the middle.

The date on the corner was nine days ago.

"Eight weeks," Cadence said. "I told him on Thursday. He said he'd take care of everything. He said to wait for his call."

"Did he call?"

"He sent a man to my apartment with that."

She tapped the envelope.

I didn't take it from her yet.

"Don't give that to anyone," I said. "Not to him, not to his father. Not to me either, not in a parking lot."

"Okay."

"Do you have somewhere safe to stay tonight?"

"My roommate's. But the man knows the address."

My window rattled.

Grady was standing at the glass with his tie pulled loose and his campaign smile gone.

He was breathing hard from the run across the lot.

I lowered the glass three inches.

"Cora, please." He put his palm flat on the roof, and I felt the heat of it through the metal. "We'll fix this at home. I'll explain."

"Sure," I said. "Explain."

"She's a kid with a crush. You know how they get."

"She's twenty-three."

"Cor, I haven't touched her."

Cadence made a small sound on my right.

"Check your phone," I said to him. "Somebody's missing you."

I rolled up the window and drove, and I watched him get smaller in the mirror.

At the first red light Cadence wiped her face with her sleeve.

"Professor Whitlow? Can I ask you something?"

"Cora's fine now."

"Cora." She swallowed. "He told me you couldn't have kids. He said you'd been trying for years and it never happened, and that's why you were so angry at him."

The light turned green and I didn't move.

"So why," Cadence said, "did he stand up there and announce yours?"

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