I'm Having His Baby. Great. Smile for the Cameras. Here's Your Scandal and a Court Date novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Courthouse Steps
Grady launches his Senate run and announces Cora's pregnancy before she has told anyone; the other woman steps up to the cameras.
My husband announced his run for the state senate on the courthouse steps, and then he announced my pregnancy.
I hadn't told anyone.
I hadn't told myself.
Two hundred people stood below us on the wet stone, with four camera crews along the rope.
Grady held my hand up in his, high enough for the cameras.
"My wife, Cora, and I got the news yesterday," he said. "We're expecting."
The crowd made the sound crowds make.
A woman near the front cried and a man in a Lindemann Freight jacket whistled.
I smiled, because a camera was pointed at my face.
Then I tracked back through my calendar, and the math came out to ten weeks.
Grady bent and kissed my temple, so the microphone wouldn't catch him.
"The clinic called my phone first," he whispered. "I'm still your emergency contact. I couldn't keep it in, Cor."
"I'm on the pill," I whispered.
"Pills fail," he said, quickly and sweetly. "Smile."
I said, "You could have asked me first."
"You'd have said no to the stage," he said, and turned back to the crowd.
He was right about that.
I had remarried this man fourteen weeks ago, in a courthouse six hundred feet from where we stood.
Ten months ago, I had walked into his campaign office after hours and found him with my student on the desk.
She was twenty-two and in my Comp II class.
I filed for divorce the next morning, and his father's foundation cut off my mother's memory care.
Every lawyer in the county found a conflict.
So when Grady came crying to my door, I said yes to a second wedding, with a post-nup I had written myself.
Page nine said that proven infidelity gave me the house, a twenty-year fund for my mother's care and forty percent of his campaign account.
Proven meant a witness, a document or a confession he couldn't take back.
In my coat pocket my phone was recording, as it had every day since the vows.
Behind me, his sister Lacey stood holding my purse and his phone.
Lacey was thirty-one and wore peppermint balm on her lips every day of her life.
She was allergic to strawberries.
That was a fact I knew because last week I had found a tube of strawberry hand cream in the cup holder of Grady's car.
"It's Lacey's," he'd said, without looking up from his phone. "She leaves everything in there."
"Lacey's allergic to strawberry."
"Then it's not hers. It's the detailer's. Cor, you're tired."
This morning the car had smelled like strawberry again.
I had asked Lacey on the way over whether the cream was hers.
"Sure," she said, a second too fast, and pressed the peppermint tin between her palms.
Now Grady's phone buzzed in her hand, and the screen lit up in front of me.
The preview said: Dry Cleaner. Miss you already. Smile for them, then come home to me.
Two weeks ago I had seen a text from Dry Cleaner on that same phone, and Grady had called it spam.
Lacey turned the phone face down against her chest.
"Spam," she said, before I had asked anything.
I had known the Lindemanns for nine years, and I knew when one of them was lying to me.
I also knew what page nine required.
I did not have a confession.
I did not have a witness who would say it out loud.
I had a smile, a recording phone in my pocket and a husband who had just told the whole Miami Valley that I was carrying his child.
So I stayed where I was and I kept smiling.
I took my birth-control pill every night from a weekly case that Grady filled himself on Sundays, so I would never forget.
The mayor shook his hand.
Somebody asked for a photo of the couple.
Grady pulled me against his side, and the flashes went off.
That was when a girl in a gray sweater slipped under the rope.
She had a brown braid and a student lanyard, and she was holding a manila envelope against her stomach with both arms.
A deputy reached for her and Grady's father, the judge, lifted one finger and the deputy stopped.
I knew her walk.
She had crossed my classroom every Tuesday and Thursday for a semester.
"Professor Whitlow," Cadence Reed said, and the nearest microphone swung toward her.
Her voice shook, but it carried across the steps.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know he'd married you again. I'm having his baby too."
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