At ten minutes to nine on December 4, Celia put a clean glass on the table, filled it with water, and moved it out of reach of her elbow. Then she moved it back. The place she had chosen for the call faced the kitchen, so that Quentin would not see the bassinet behind her before she spoke.
She turned the chair around.
She had kept the appointment for independent advice the previous afternoon. It had left her with questions to discuss later, not a reason to postpone this call.
Nell was in Ruth’s arms, drowsy after her feed. Her sister stood beside the window in a coat she had not taken off.
“You’re allowed to sit,” Celia told her.
“I’m allowed to stand too.”
“You look as though you’re waiting for an evacuation.”
Ruth unbuttoned the coat. Underneath it she wore a sweatshirt with a smear of something green across one sleeve. Her work would be waiting; it always was. Celia had asked for two hours, until eleven, and had nearly withdrawn the request when Ruth checked her diary instead of answering immediately.
“What will you do if he doesn’t answer?” Ruth asked.
“Call again.”
“Good.”
“Do you think I won’t?”
“I think you put the glass in four places.”
Celia looked down at it. She had a sudden absurd urge to smash it in the sink. Not from anger at Ruth. From wanting, briefly and violently, something else to require attention.
Her sister kissed Nell’s head and lowered her into the bassinet. “I’m going to be in the bedroom. I won’t listen at the door.”
“You can if you want.”
“I don’t want.” Ruth paused beside her chair. “You don’t have to persuade him to be pleased.”
“He won’t be pleased.”
“Then that’s one thing you don’t have to accomplish this morning.”
Celia caught her hand before she went. They had never been graceful about these things. Ruth squeezed her fingers once, hard, and left.
At nine, Celia pressed the call button.
The sound went on for long enough to make her wonder whether he had forgotten. She pictured him looking at her name, deciding how much of his day she could have. Then the screen changed, and there he was in a room with a blank wall and a lamp too bright at one shoulder.
“Celia. What’s happened?”
He looked older than the man who had stood in their kitchen in January. Or perhaps she had stopped seeing him every day and could finally notice the lines beside his mouth. His shirt was open at the throat. She knew that shirt. The recognition was so ordinary that for a second the words she had prepared seemed impossible.
“Are you alone?”
His expression sharpened. “Yes. You said it was important.”
“It is.”
He waited. His waiting had always felt like a deadline.
Celia placed her palms flat on her thighs. “When we separated in January, I was pregnant. I found out the day before you told me you were leaving.”
He didn’t move. She could see the lamp reflected in one of his eyes.
“Our daughter was born on August fourteenth,” she said. “Her name is Nell.”
The room went so quiet that she heard the refrigerator switch off.
“What?”
“I had a baby. Your baby. I should have told you before now.”
He leaned toward the screen. “What are you talking about?”
She had expected anger. This disbelief, almost scornful, made her want to produce evidence before he asked. She kept her hands where they were.
“Nell is sixteen weeks old today. She’s well. I can send you a photograph, and I’d like you to meet her when you get back.”
“Sixteen weeks.” He said it slowly. Then his voice rose. “Sixteen weeks, Celia?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re telling me now?”
“Yes.”
He pushed his chair back. She saw more of the blank wall as he stood and moved out of the camera’s view. The absence was worse than his face. She waited while something scraped against the floor at his end.
“Quentin?”
“I’m here.”
He came back into view with his hand against the top of his head, his familiar gesture when a flight was canceled or a reservation had gone missing. Seeing it here made her feel briefly cruel.
“Why?” he asked.
She had written an answer the night before. It had explained the apartment, the canceled deposit years earlier, the way she had feared telling him would mean waking up inside his decisions again. Reading it afterward, she had heard a woman making a case to be acquitted.
“At first I was frightened that you’d decide everything for us,” she said. “Where I’d live. What would happen next. I wanted to get my own home before I told you. Then I had it, and I still didn’t tell you.”
“You thought I’d force you to do something?”
“I thought I’d give in.”
He stared at her. “So this is my fault.”
“No.” The answer came with surprising force. “You left me. I kept the pregnancy from you. Those are two things that happened.”
He laughed, one sharp breath. “That’s very neat.”
“It isn’t neat. I don’t know how to say it so it sounds better.”
“You could try saying you were wrong.”
She felt heat crawl up her neck. Behind her, Nell made a small sleepy noise. Quentin’s eyes shifted toward the sound.
“I was wrong to keep her from you,” Celia said. “I’m sorry I did it.”
She had imagined the apology as something large enough to release her. Spoken aloud, it was insufficient. Of course it was. It could not give him an August afternoon he had never known existed.
“Where is she?”
“Here.”
He swallowed. “Can I see her?”
Celia rose and brought the bassinet closer, angling the camera down. Nell slept with her mouth slightly open, one arm bent beside her head. Celia held the phone steady. The ordinary impulse to narrate—to tell him which expressions meant what, to soften his shock with some charming fact—was so strong she nearly obeyed it.
Instead she waited.
Quentin leaned toward his screen. His face changed. She could not put a name to the change, and she didn’t try.
“She’s little,” he said.
“She was smaller.”
It came out before she could stop it. His eyes rose to hers, and she was ashamed of the unnecessary wound. Then she saw he had not taken it as one. He was looking at the baby again, his forehead creased in wonder or distress.
“Nell,” he said, quietly this time.
The baby moved her lips and slept on.
Celia put the phone back on its stand. Her legs felt unsteady when she sat.
“I’ll send a photograph,” she said. “A recent one. And one from when she was born, if you’d like.”
He nodded. Then the movement stopped. “Does Mom know?”
“No. I’m calling her tomorrow. I want to tell her myself.”
“You don’t get to ask me to lie to her.”
“I’m not. If you want to call her now, you can. I’m asking for the chance to speak to her too.”
He looked away. She heard his breath scrape in the microphone.
“Who does know?”
She told him. Ruth. People she saw regularly. Margaret. Adrian.
“Who’s Adrian?”
There it was, a question she had not wanted to answer in the same conversation, although she had known she would have to.
“He’s the man I’m seeing.”
Quentin’s mouth tightened. “And he knows.”
“Yes.”
“He knew before I did.”
“Yes.”
The lamp was making his room look hot. Celia wanted to open a window for him, a ridiculous remnant of seven years of knowing how he liked things.
“You had time to start a new relationship,” he said. “You didn’t have time to tell me about my own child.”
“It wasn’t about time.”
“I can see that.”
There was no answer that did not become another defense. Celia let the silence remain, though every second of it scraped at her.
At last he said, “I come back on the twelfth. We need to sort this out.”
“I’d like you to meet her on the thirteenth. At my apartment. For a little while to begin with.”
“Your apartment. Right.” His gaze moved beyond her, taking inventory. “How big is it?”
“Big enough for us.”
“You can’t keep a baby in one room forever.”
“She’s not in one room.”
“You know what I mean. We could make this simpler.” He leaned forward again, his voice becoming brisker. “I’m back now. Or I will be. There are things to arrange, but if you came home—”
“No.”
He stopped.
Celia gripped the edge of her chair. She had not expected the old invitation to feel so chilling. Home. As if she had only been visiting somewhere else, as if the months in which she had made a daughter and fallen in love could be packed away with her coat.
“I’m not coming back to you, Quentin.”
“I’m talking about the baby.”
“So am I. She can know you without us living together.”
“Don’t make decisions before we’ve even discussed it.”
Her pulse beat in her fingertips. She looked past the phone to Nell, who had woken and was regarding the light fitting with solemn interest.
“That’s a decision about me,” Celia said. “I’ve made it.”
He sat back, hurt showing briefly beneath the anger. She could feel sorry for the hurt without changing her answer. It was a new and difficult kind of room to remain in.
They arranged the visit. Two in the afternoon on December 13. Ruth would be there, somewhere nearby; Celia said so plainly. Quentin objected to the idea that he needed watching, and Celia told him she needed company, and those were not necessarily the same thing. He asked about Nell’s health, about her name, about money. She answered what she could. For the larger questions she said they would need time and advice, and he disliked that, but he did not hang up.
Near the end he said, “Did you ever try to call me?”
“No.”
He looked at her for a long time. She did not reach for a kinder version of the truth.
“Send the pictures,” he said.
“I will.”
When the screen went dark, Celia stayed in the chair until Nell began to complain. Then she lifted her daughter, pressed her face into the soft hair above one ear and held her close.
Ruth came out of the bedroom. She didn’t ask how it had gone. She put a hand on Celia’s back and stood with her until Celia could say, “He knows.”
After Ruth left, Celia sent two photographs. In the first, newborn Nell lay against the blanket at the hospital, her small face creased and furious. In the second, taken the previous afternoon, she looked up from Celia’s lap with one fist wedged under her chin.
Quentin replied to ask what she had weighed at birth.
Celia answered. He sent no further message.
The day continued with almost offensive indifference. The laundry needed moving. Nell’s clean clothes had somehow diminished to a single impractical dress and a pair of leggings with wet cuffs. A delivery truck reversed outside. Celia found herself standing in the kitchen eating a slice of bread without tasting it.
She called Adrian.
He answered on the second ring. “Hello.”
“I’ve done it.”
“All right.” His voice changed. “Where are you?”
“At home. I’m looking at a very unsatisfactory lunch.”
“Can I come?”
She closed her eyes. She had not known until that moment how much she wanted him to ask before offering anything else.
“Yes. Please.”
He arrived forty minutes later carrying no flowers, no champagne, nothing that mistook this for a victory. There were sandwiches in a bag because, he said, he had been looking at an unsatisfactory lunch himself. Celia took the bag and set it down, then walked into his arms so fast he had to shift his feet.
He held her. She could feel the cold of his coat against her cheek.
“He’s angry,” she said.
“I thought he might be.”
“I was too.”
Adrian kissed the top of her head. She drew back enough to look at him.
“That doesn’t make me want him.”
“I didn’t think it did.”
“I know. I wanted to say it.”
He nodded, and some strain left his face that he had not asked her to ease.
They ate sitting on the floor beside Nell’s blanket because the table held the abandoned water glass and Celia couldn’t bear to sit in that chair again yet. Adrian described a man at the venue who had spent ten minutes explaining where a bus could be parked to a company that was no longer bringing one until Sunday. Celia laughed once, then properly. The laugh surprised her enough to make her cry.
“Oh, I hate this,” she said, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“The story wasn’t that bad.”
She nudged him with her knee. He passed her a napkin without making an occasion of it.
Later, Nell fell asleep against Adrian’s chest. Celia sat beside him with her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow. There would be more calls. There would be Dorothy tomorrow, and the first visit, and questions she could not answer today. She had wanted telling him to end something. Instead it had begun several things at once.
Adrian shifted, making room for her against him. She put her head on his shoulder and watched their daughter—her daughter—sleep beneath his broad, still hand.
The slip inside her own mind caught her. She did not correct the tenderness that had made it. She only took Adrian’s free hand and brought it to her mouth.