38 Weeks Pregnant And Done Waiting novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bet
Millicent wakes to a contraction, hears her husband bet on whether she will leave, films it, saves the security footage and walks out. Brett texts her goodnight from the couch.
Ten days before my C-section, I stood in my own hallway and listened to my husband's friends bet on whether I would leave him.
I had woken after midnight with my whole stomach clenched.
It was a practice contraction, the harmless kind, and I lay still until it let go.
The white noise machine was still hushing on the nightstand.
Brett had bought it when I stopped sleeping in my eighth month.
Under the floor, the party was still going.
He had told me it was a few guys, a game and a pizza, and that they'd be gone by eleven.
It was past one.
I didn't call down to him.
I wanted water, so I held the banister and took the stairs one at a time.
At the basement door, a woman laughed.
I knew that laugh. It was Kendall, Brett's assistant.
She had dropped off lasagna when I was sick every morning, and at the holiday party she had hugged me and said Brett was lucky to have me.
Brett hadn't said she was coming.
The door stood open a hand's width, and yellow light lay across the hall carpet.
I put my shoulder to the wall and looked in.
Kendall was sitting across Brett's lap on the leather couch.
She wore a white dress shirt with the top buttons undone and a black bra under it.
I had given Brett that shirt on our anniversary. I had picked the fabric and wrapped the box myself.
There was a smear of red lipstick on the collar.
One of his hands was under the hem, flat against her back.
The other hand held my hospital folder.
I hadn't seen it in a week. At my last appointment, Brett had told the nurse I'd been "really anxious lately" and asked her to write it down.
I had laughed, because I wasn't.
Then he had tucked the folder under his arm and said he'd keep it, so I didn't have to worry about it.
Kendall kissed him, and Brett kissed her back without hurry.
Somebody clapped. Somebody else banged a bottle on the coffee table.
Not one man in that room said, "Your wife is upstairs, thirty-eight weeks pregnant."
Brett dropped the folder on the table, and the others stacked cash around it.
Dale, who had hosted every game night since college, tapped the surgery date on the cover. "Last round. Does Millicent walk out before this day, yes or no?"
"No," said a man in a gray hoodie. "She's the size of a house. Where's she going to go?"
A man at the end of the couch lifted his phone. "Hold on. I'm filming the pot, so nobody welshes."
Dale squared the bills so the date showed in the frame.
"She can't bend down to put her shoes on," Kendall said. "Does anybody think she's packing a bag?"
They all laughed.
My ankles were swollen and aching.
That morning Brett had knelt by the bed and pulled my socks on for me.
He had been so patient about it.
He had said, "Almost there, Millie. After the baby you'll feel like yourself again."
I had thought I had the best husband in the world.
Now he took five hundred dollars out of his wallet and set it on the pile.
"She's not leaving."
He said it calmly, without a second's pause.
"Even if she finds out, she'll cry. She's scared of the surgery, and the nursery's here. If anything goes wrong at that hospital, I'm the only person she has."
The man with the phone kept it pointed at him.
Kendall turned his wedding ring around his finger. "And what about me?"
Brett's hand slid up her thigh. "You don't have to compete with her."
"Because she'll never leave?"
"Because she doesn't have the nerve."
Kendall grinned and kissed him again, and he pushed her back into the cushions.
His elbow swept the five hundred onto the floor, and nobody bent to pick it up.
The man with the phone did not stop filming.
I backed away along the wall to the corner of the stairs and took out my own phone.
Our security app was still logged in under my account.
The basement camera didn't show the table, but it had recorded the door and every word said in that room.
I found the clip from five minutes earlier and saved it.
Then I went back to the gap in the door and filmed Kendall, Brett and the surgery date lying in the cash.
I uploaded both videos to two separate cloud accounts and emailed them to an address I made up on the spot.
My stomach was hard again, and this time I let it pass standing up.
I wasn't going to cry for him. He had already bet on that.
So I stepped out.
I went upstairs, took the hospital bag from the back of the closet, and typed to my sister: "Come get me. Don't ring the bell."
June wrote back: "Coming."
I carried the bag down the front stairs while the laughter rolled up through the vents, and I eased the door shut behind me.
I sat on the porch step in the cold with my coat over my belly.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
It was Brett, sent a minute earlier.
"Sleep tight, Millie. Love you. I'll bring you breakfast in bed."
He had written it with her on his lap and my folder in the cash, while I stood five feet away.
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