Chapter 5 - The Doctor Who Never Existed
Beckett came home that evening with flowers.
Not grocery-store carnations.
Good roses, the kind he used to bring me when we were first dating, wrapped in paper from the florist on Marlow Street.
He set them on the kitchen counter and put his hand on my back like nothing had happened.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're sorry," I said.
"It was a mistake.
It was nothing.
She meant nothing."
I looked at him and kept my face still.
I had spent the afternoon with a shoebox of papers and a dead man's phone, but I didn't say that.
I let him talk.
I let him tell me how tired he'd been, how I'd been so focused on the baby, how he hadn't felt like himself in months.
Every word was smooth.
Every word was rehearsed.
I smiled and said we'd talk when I wasn't so tired, and I went to bed early and lay there with my eyes open.
He fell asleep fast.
He always did.
When I heard his breathing go slow, I got up and went down to the kitchen with my phone and the number from the voicemail written on the back of a receipt.
I dialed it at eleven forty in the evening, and I expected nothing.
A woman answered on the second ring.
"Who is this?" she said.
"I'm calling about a message left for a Mr. Beckett," I said.
"There's no Beckett here."
"The message said it was about test results.
From a clinic."
The line was quiet for a second.
"Ma'am, this is a prepaid phone," she said.
"There's no clinic.
Some man bought a handful of these at the store and paid cash.
We've had people call about it before.
It's not ours anymore."
"What store?"
I asked.
She told me.
A convenience store two towns over, the kind that sells burner phones next to the lottery tickets.
I thanked her and hung up and stood in my kitchen with my hand flat on the counter.
There was no doctor.
There were no test results.
There was only a man who wanted a voice on a phone in case someone searched his things, someone like me.
I walked back into the study, where Beckett kept his desk, and I opened the bottom drawer where I'd found the policy earlier that day.
I put the policy on the desk and turned on the lamp.
Half a million dollars, taken out eleven months ago, with him as the beneficiary.
My name in his handwriting at the top, or something close to my handwriting.
I waited until morning.
He came downstairs at seven and saw me sitting at the table with the paper in front of me.
He didn't deny it.
He didn't even flinch.
"That was for our family," he said.
"Our family," I said.
"If something happened to you, I needed to be able to take care of the baby.
You know how the hospital bills are.
You know what the future looks like."
I asked him why he'd never told me about it.
He said I would have worried.
Then he said something else, and his voice got quiet and careful.
"The pregnancy surprised me," he said.
"I didn't think I could have children.
A doctor told me years ago.
I thought it wasn't possible."
He said it the same way Ysolde had said it in the nursery.
The same words.
The same little pause before the word possible.
I sat there and understood that he hadn't just lied to Ysolde.
He had built the lie into something he could say to anyone who looked too closely, including me.
I didn't scream.
I didn't throw anything.
I said, "I need to think," and I walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs, and I stood in the hallway with my hand on my belly and my heart going like a hammer.
He hadn't been rehearsing for Ysolde.
He'd been rehearsing for me.
