He Was There for Her Baby, Not Mine novel · Chapter 1 of 2
Chapter 1: The Cake Wasn't Cut
Dalton leaves Noelle's baby shower for another woman's sick baby, and Noelle finds the rent he has been paying her, packs the hospital bag and walks out. His text: don't tell your father anything yet.
Dalton left my baby shower with the knife still in my hand.
His mother had set the cake in front of me, white frosting and yellow ducks.
Twenty-three people stood around her dining table, waiting.
The banner over the sideboard said Welcome Baby in her looping writing, and the gift card said Noelle Brannigan.
I was thirty-two weeks pregnant.
I had one hand flat on the tablecloth to steady my back.
Dalton's phone buzzed beside the cake plates.
He had it at his ear before the second buzz.
I knew who it was by the ring he had set for her, a different one from everybody else's.
A baby was crying on the line.
I could hear it from where I stood.
"Slow down," Dalton said. "What's his temperature?"
His aunt raised her phone to film the cutting.
She kept it up.
"Colette, I'm coming," Dalton said. "Ten minutes."
"Dalton," I said. "It's my shower."
He covered the phone and looked at me, wide open and sorry.
"Her baby's at a hundred and three, Noe. Theo."
"She's alone in that duplex, and she doesn't drive after dark."
"Call the nurse line," I said. "Call an ambulance."
"She won't, she's scared of the bill. I'll be back before you finish the first slice."
His mother put a hand on my arm.
She ran the Brannigan Family Diner, and everybody in town did what she said.
"Let him go, honey," she said. "A fever is a fever. That poor girl has nobody."
"I have somebody," I said. "He's standing right here."
"You have all of us," his mother said, and she smiled at the room. "Go on, Dalton."
He kissed the top of my head.
He smelled like sawdust and cold air.
"Last time," he said into my hair. "I swear on the baby."
Then he was out the front door with his keys in his hand.
The truck started.
The truck pulled away.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
His aunt lowered her phone, and I watched the little red dot go out.
"Well," his mother said brightly. "Who wants the corner piece?"
I set the knife down on the plate.
"Not me," I said. "Thank you for the cake."
I cut the first slice anyway, because I had been raised to.
I smiled while I handed out twenty-three plates.
I did not eat any.
By four o'clock the guests had gone.
I told his mother I would walk home.
She said it was a mile, and I said I knew.
It was nine blocks, and I took them slowly with a hand under my belly.
I had asked to meet Colette three times.
Each time Dalton said, "Next week, Noe. She's shy about people."
She was not shy about his phone at four on a Saturday.
All he had ever told me was that she was a friend of a friend, new in town, with a baby and no family.
I had said that was kind of him, and I had meant it.
I had even looked for a stroller to give her.
At home I sat at the kitchen island and opened the bank app, because I could not think what else to do with my hands.
I wanted anything that said where he had been all those evenings.
A restaurant charge, a pharmacy, a gas station.
What I found was a line that came on the first of every month.
C. Voss, rent. $1,800.
I scrolled up and it was there in October.
It was there in September, and August, and July.
That was four payments, seven thousand two hundred dollars out of our joint account, and I had never seen one.
Below them sat the other charge, the one I knew by heart.
Cedar Road Storage, $89.
He had paid it every month since my brother's funeral.
It held what Dalton called Jack's things, the stuff he could not bring himself to throw out.
I had asked to see it more than once.
He always said later, when I was less tired.
I had never been inside the unit.
He had never once let me come along.
I put the phone face down on the island.
I had already lost one baby, at nineteen weeks, in this house.
Dalton had held me on the bathroom floor for four hours that night.
He had promised me he would never leave a room I was in.
I got up and went to the closet.
The hospital bag was on the top shelf, packed since September.
I took it down and put on my coat.
So I stepped out.
I took my ring off and left it on the island by his key bowl.
I locked the door behind me and put the key under the planter.
I called my father from the porch.
"Dad," I said. "Can you come get me?"
"Where are you?"
"Home. Not for long."
He did not ask why.
He said, "Ten minutes," the way he always had.
My phone buzzed in my hand before his truck turned onto our street.
Dalton had written: Home soon. Where are you? Don't tell your father anything yet. I can explain.
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