Part 2: Counting the Weeks
After that, he became the husband I’d been missing.
It was as if someone had flipped a switch.
He carried the groceries in from the car. All of them. He wouldn’t let me lift anything heavier than a carton of eggs.
He came to every appointment. Every ultrasound. Every blood draw. He took time off work and sat next to me in the waiting room, holding my hand. He asked the doctor questions, good ones, and wrote down the answers in a little notebook.
He noticed when I needed rest. He’d slide a pillow under my feet without being asked. He made me tea at night. He started cooking dinner again, on the nights I was too tired.
He stopped working weekends.
At first I couldn’t believe it. I kept waiting for it to end.
It didn’t.
One night in early December, we were on the couch watching a movie. I was about sixteen weeks along, my feet in his lap.
The baby kicked.
It was the first real kick. Not a flutter. A solid kick, right below my belly button.
I grabbed Adam’s hand and pressed it there.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. Just wait.”
We sat in silence for almost a minute.
Then it happened again. A tiny thump against his palm.
Adam’s whole face changed.
He smiled. A big, slow, amazed smile. A smile I hadn’t seen on him in years. Not since Sophie was a baby, not since he used to lay her on his chest on the couch and sing her Beatles songs, badly, until she fell asleep.
I covered his hand with mine.
“There you are,” I whispered.
I meant him. Adam. My husband.
I thought he was finally finding his way back to me.
That same night, Sophie asked him to read an extra chapter before bed.
They were working through the second Harry Potter book together. Usually, when she begged for an extra chapter, Adam said, “Not tonight, bug. Daddy has emails.”
This time he said yes.
He stayed in her room for an hour. I could hear them from downstairs. Adam doing all the voices. Sophie giggling. Then the giggling grew quieter and quieter, and then there was no sound at all.
When he came down, I was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
“She’s asleep,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “That meant a lot to her.”
He kissed my forehead.
“Things are changing,” he said.
I believed that too.
So that was where I stood, on that night in January. Twenty-four weeks pregnant. Certain my marriage was finally coming back to life.
Standing in the dark hallway outside the kitchen.
Listening to my husband say, Once she’s delivered, I’m leaving her.
For a second, I couldn’t breathe.
I mean that literally. My lungs simply stopped. My chest clamped down as if someone were sitting on it.
Then the floor beneath me creaked, ever so slightly.
I backed away from the kitchen door, slowly. One step. Two. I knew exactly which floorboards creaked in that hallway. I’d lived in that house for nine years. I stepped around every one.
I slipped into the little downstairs bathroom and closed the door without switching on the light. I gripped the edge of the sink with both hands.
The room was spinning.
I stood there holding the cold porcelain, breathing through my nose, until the dizziness finally passed.
Adam and Graham.
Together.
I repeated it in my head, over and over, as if I were learning a word in a foreign language.
Adam and Graham.
I’d been carrying a baby for my husband’s lover.
I thought of Adam’s hand on my belly. On the couch. The first kick.
That smile.
That big, slow, amazed smile. I’d believed it was for me. I’d believed it was him finding his way back.
He hadn’t been smiling because he’d come home.
He’d been picturing the family he would build without me. With Graham. With this baby. He’d been feeling the child who would be his, in Graham’s house, with the fire on the white stones.
And I was just the place it was growing.
I don’t know how long I stayed in that bathroom.
When I finally came out, the kitchen light was still on. I could hear Adam’s voice through the door, low and murmuring. Still on the phone.
I went upstairs.
Sophie’s bedroom door was cracked open. It always was. She was afraid of the dark and liked a little glow from the hallway nightlight.
I could see her in bed, curled on her side, Professor the rabbit tucked under her chin. Her hair was all over her face.
I sat down on the hallway floor outside her door with my back against the wall.
I sat there a long time.
I wanted to go back downstairs and fling open that kitchen door. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to snatch the phone from his hand and yell into it at Graham.
I wanted to demand the truth.
But I thought about what would happen if I did.
Adam would deny it. Or he’d say I’d misunderstood. Or he’d cry, and somehow, by the end of it, I’d be the one apologizing again.
And Graham? Graham would be gentle. Graham would be sorry. Graham would say all the right things in his soft voice.
Neither of them would tell me what I truly needed to know.
What was going to happen to Sophie.
Sitting there on the floor, I counted the weeks until my due date.
Sixteen.
Sixteen more weeks.
Adam had apparently been counting them too.
For a completely different reason.
Eventually I pulled myself off the floor. My back ached. My legs were stiff.
I went into our bedroom and lay down on the far edge of the bed, as far from his side as I could get without falling off.
I drew the blanket up to my chin.
Sometime later, I heard him climb the stairs. I heard him brush his teeth. I heard him get into bed.
He reached over in the dark and found my hand.
He held it.
I lay there with my eyes shut, breathing slowly and evenly, pretending to sleep.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
The next morning, Adam kissed my forehead at the kitchen counter.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Baby keeping you up?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” He rubbed my back. “I’ll pick up dinner on my way home tonight. That Thai place you like. You shouldn’t have to cook.”
I watched him take his car keys from the hook by the door. The keys to the big black SUV.
He did it the way he did every morning. Flipped them up in his hand, caught them, slid them into his pocket. A tiny, familiar gesture. I’d seen it a thousand times.
Suddenly it looked entirely different. As if I were watching a stranger.
I wanted to scream at him.
Instead, I said, “Okay.”
He smiled and left for work.
I needed to know what they’d done before either of them could explain it away.
I needed to understand exactly what I’d signed. What my rights were. What would happen to me, and to Sophie, and to this baby.
So after dropping Sophie at school, I sat in my car in the library parking lot and called Joan Feld. My independent attorney. The one who’d walked me through the surrogacy agreement.
“I learned something about the intended father,” I said. “And my husband. Something I wasn’t told.”
I told her everything.
She listened without interrupting. Not once. When I finished, a long pause hung on the line.
“Hazel,” she said at last. “I’m so sorry.”
“Is there a way out?” I said. “Does this change anything? Can I…”
“I’m not going to promise you a loophole,” Joan said. “I won’t do that to you. I don’t want you making assumptions about what this does or doesn’t mean for the agreement until we look at it carefully. Against the documents and the law in this state.”
“Okay.”
“But there are things I can tell you right now,” she said. “Your medical decisions are yours. Your body, your care, your doctors, your choices about your health during this pregnancy. Those are yours. Nobody else gets to make them. Not Graham. Not Adam.”
I closed my eyes.
“And you need a family-law attorney,” she said. “Today. Not for the surrogacy. For your marriage. For your daughter. I can give you some names.”
I booked a meeting with one of the names she gave me for two days later.
Then I went home on my lunch break and pulled out the surrogacy agreement. All forty-one pages. I sat at the kitchen table and read it again. Slowly. Every single word.
The first time, in Joan’s office, I’d treated parts of it like chores. The long sections on insurance and payment schedules and medical records. I’d skimmed them. I’d trusted Joan to flag anything wrong.
Now I read every line.
And every signature on every page looked like a decision I’d made to protect a marriage that Adam had already walked out of in his mind.
I was so angry my hands shook.
But anger wasn’t going to undo those signatures. I knew that.
What I could do was make sure I understood every one of them. Before anyone asked me for anything else, ever again.
I made more calls that afternoon.
I booked a follow-up appointment with Dr. Lin, the counselor at the clinic. For me. Just me.
I phoned my prenatal care team directly and spoke to the nurse coordinator, a woman named Bev who’d been at every appointment.
“From now on,” I said, “I’d like all appointment information to come directly to me. Not through my husband. Only me.”
A short pause.
“Of course, Hazel,” Bev said gently. “I’ll put a note in your file.”
She didn’t ask why. I was grateful.
Then I called my sister, Mara.
Mara is two years older than I am. She’s an emergency room nurse at the hospital downtown, and the toughest person I know. When we were kids, she once punched a boy in the nose for stealing my bike. She was nine. He was twelve.
“Can you pick Sophie up after school tomorrow?” I asked. “And maybe keep her for a few hours?”
“Of course,” Mara said. “Are you okay?”
I thought about it.
“No,” I said. “But I will be.”
She didn’t push. She just said, “I’ll be there at three.”
I didn’t tell Sophie anything yet. Not a word.
She came home from school that day chattering about a girl in her class named Ava who’d brought a lizard for show-and-tell, and how the lizard had escaped and run into the coat closet, and how the teacher had screamed.
I laughed in all the right places.
She went up to her room to play. I heard her through the floor, talking to the baby.
“Okay, baby,” she was saying. “This one’s really good. Are you listening? What do you call a bear with no teeth?”
A pause.
“A gummy bear!”
I sat down on the stairs and put my face in my hands.
That evening, Adam texted me at five-thirty.
Work dinner tonight with some clients. Sorry, totally forgot to tell you. Won’t be late. Love you.
He’d forgotten about the Thai food.
I put my phone down. Then I picked it back up and opened our bank account.
Adam and I shared a joint checking account. We’d had it since we married. I had full access, because I paid half the household bills. Utilities. Sophie’s swim lessons. Groceries.
I’d never really looked at it closely before. Not his side. It had never occurred to me. Why would I check up on my husband?
I scrolled back, month by month.
There were charges from a restaurant called Lucca. An Italian place on the north side of town. Over and over. Every few weeks.
I knew where Lucca was. Four blocks from Graham’s house.
I checked the dates.
Every one fell on a night Adam had said he was working late. Or a weekend he’d said he was covering shifts.
I sat there staring at the screen.
I knew those charges weren’t proof of anything. Not by themselves. Anyone can eat dinner at an Italian restaurant. Maybe he really did take clients there.
But they gave me dates. They put dates on the lies.
I kept scrolling back. Further and further.
The earliest one was from February. The previous February.
Before his birthday.
Before the cake with too many sprinkles.
Before he ever said the word surrogate to me.
I remembered all those nights at the kitchen table.
The bills he’d spread out in front of me, every time I hesitated about Graham. The mortgage statement. The car payment. The credit card. He’d lay them out in a row like a card game, then sit there in silence.
He’d go quiet until I apologized. Until I said something to make him feel better.
Those bills were real. I want to be fair about that.
Our money trouble was real. The mortgage really had gone up. The car payment really was too high.
But he’d taken something real that we were both frightened of and made it into a lever. He’d used it to steer me exactly where he wanted me to go.
The next morning at breakfast, I asked him.
“Any news about regional director?”
Adam didn’t look up from his phone.
“Not yet,” he said. “Why?”
“You said the decision was coming soon. In the spring. You said that in March.”
“Things take time, Hazel.”
“Did Graham ever actually promise you an interview?” I said. “For the job? Did he ever say your name for it? To anyone?”
Adam frowned. He finally looked up.
“Why are you interrogating me?” he said.
There it was.
The move. The same move he’d made a hundred times. I recognized it now. I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before.
Before, I would have reassured him. Immediately. Without thinking.
I’m not interrogating you, honey. I’m just asking. I know how hard you work. I’m so grateful. Sophie and I are so grateful. Everything’s going to be better soon. I’m sorry.
And he’d feel comforted. And I’d feel ashamed for asking. And somehow we’d never actually discuss the problem.
This time, I said nothing.
I didn’t apologize.
I just looked at him.
After a moment, he lowered his eyes to his phone. He finished his coffee in silence and left for work.
The following day, Mara picked Sophie up from school, and I went to meet the family-law attorney.
Her name was Denise Okoro. Her office was in an old brick building downtown, above a bakery. She had a big wooden desk, a bowl of peppermints, and photographs of three teenage boys on the shelf behind her.
I told her everything. It took an hour.
She listened and took notes. When I finished, she put down her pen.
“Okay,” she said. “First thing. I’m sorry. This is a terrible thing to find out. In the worst possible way.”
“Thank you.”
“Second thing. I’m not going to tell you this is simple. It isn’t. You’ve got a marriage, a seven-year-old, a house, debt, and a pregnancy with a contract attached. All tangled together.” She took off her glasses. “We’re going to untangle them one at a time. Okay?”
We talked about temporary finances. What would happen with the mortgage. The car. The joint account.
We talked about parenting arrangements for Sophie. What a fair schedule might look like.
We talked about what separation could involve, step by step.
Nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be.
But when I walked out of that office an hour and a half later, I had a list. A real list. Concrete steps. Things I could actually do.
I sat in my car in the parking lot and read it three times.
It was the first time in a long while I’d felt I had any control over anything.
That evening, I sat at the kitchen table and waited for him.
Sophie was upstairs, asleep. Mara had dropped her off at seven, fed and bathed. She’d hugged me at the door for a long time and whispered, “Call me after. No matter what time.”
The notes from Denise’s office were tucked beneath my phone on the table.
I heard the SUV pull into the driveway at 8:40.
Adam came in through the side door, loosening his tie. He looked tired. He smiled when he saw me.
“Hey, honey,” he said. “Have you eaten?”
He went to the refrigerator and opened it.
I watched him reach in for a bottle of water.
“How long have you been sleeping with Graham?” I said.
He froze.
His hand stayed on the refrigerator door. The cold light from inside lit his face.
He didn’t turn around.
