STEPHANIE OPENED HER MOLESKINE and tried to tune out the rest of the room as Cheryl asked for someone to read their four words. She started making a list of things she needed for dinner.
“You said not to self-edit,” an amiable guy spoke from the other end of the table, “so this is what I’ve got: Fat. Happy. Golfer. Husband.”
Her cell phone, sitting on the table in front of her, started to vibrate. Without even looking at the number, she waved at Cheryl. I have to take this, she mouthed and left the room as quietly as she could. Relief.
She looked down at the incoming ID: Beatrice Plumb.
Standing in the hallway outside the meeting room, Stephanie was surprised to find how happy she was to hear Bea’s voice. She’d begged off the phone quickly, telling Bea she wanted to talk but was in a meeting (true) and couldn’t stay on the phone (true) and that, yes, Leo had mentioned something about new work but they’d both been incredibly busy and maybe they’d talk about it tonight (lie).
Bea sounded so anxious that Stephanie found herself feeling protective, maternal almost. She didn’t know if Leo had read Bea’s stuff; she doubted it, but she could ask. She briefly wondered why Bea had handed the pages to Leo and not her, but then again—they probably weren’t new pages, they were probably old pages that she was passing off as new and Leo wouldn’t know the difference. Stephanie would remind Leo to read them, and she would help him come up with something to say to Bea, something nice and noncommittal. She’d put it on her list.
Back in the conference room Gideon was up again, this time reading his four words (musician, pessimist, wizard, Democrat). A slight wave of nausea roiled her stomach; she sipped the lemon water she’d brought into the meeting. She was going to have to eat something soon.
She slid her phone out of her jacket pocket to check the time. Once it was in her hand, she couldn’t resist opening the app she’d downloaded that tracked the development of the baby based on due date. This week your baby is the size of an apple seed! This week your baby is as big as an almond. This week an olive! She hit the button and watched the photo appear of what her embryo looked like at nine weeks—like a tiny bay shrimp, a curled crustacean with an immense head and sci-fi budding arms. As she did almost every time she looked at the eerie images, she felt herself blush. It was unseemly, really, how addled she found herself to be forty-one and single and accidentally pregnant by Leo Plumb, beyond a shadow of a doubt the most irresponsible and least paternal of all the men she’d ever loved in her entire life.
She knew it was crazy, told herself a million times a day that it was crazy, but she found she couldn’t completely suppress a few fleeting moments of optimism—about the baby for sure, about Leo, maybe. She was surprised by how responsible he’d been lately, how present. He helped around the house. He seemed to be working every day and was enthused about meeting with Nathan. He read all the time. Nothing in his behavior made her believe he was anything other than completely clean and sober. She couldn’t help but wonder if everything in her life had been pitched toward this moment—agency sold, money in the bank, some time on her hands, a seemingly renewed Leo in her bed, trying to make some kind of amends to someone or something. That she was on the receiving end of this newly burnished Leo, the very thing she’d desired and abandoned as so much wasted effort all those years ago—Leo in the living room scribbling on a legal pad, Leo in her bed in the morning running a finger down her back, Leo in her kitchen every night, closing a book and pulling her onto his lap—well, she’d decided not to question it. She’d decided to selfishly, greedily, take it. All of it. Maybe even this new wrinkle, the unexpected residue of the power outage.