There was a picture, too. A selfie of Justin and Ella, already in her green outfit, flashing a thumbs-up and a huge beaming grin. I shouldn’t have underestimated Justin. Sometimes I forgot how much he’d taken care of Ella by himself in the past two years.
After I lost the baby, Justin had taken a month’s leave from his adjunct position at Columbia. His mother also came for the first couple of weeks to help. And thank God, because in those early days, Justin had to focus on holding me as I cried and cried. Once Justin’s mother was gone and I was a bit better, he took over Ella’s care. Despite never having been much of a hands-on dad before, with ease and not a single complaint, Justin brushed Ella’s hair and cuddled with her and gave her long, silly baths. He paid all the bills, dealt with our car being towed, did endless laundry, and cooked all our meals as though the key to our survival lay in his successful completion of household chores. In between, he kept on holding me as much as he could. He didn’t go back to work until he was sure I’d be okay getting myself and Ella through the day. I did get there by week six, but I couldn’t possibly have returned to work at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. No matter how much I had loved that job, I could never again have spent all day talking about pregnancy.
I closed Justin’s message and returned to Stella’s No purple sweats. Sorry! I wrote back.
Shit. I totally forgot.
Me too.
It was typical of Stella to forget the sweatpants—she always forgot things—and to think that someone else might have some lying around. Luckily, she didn’t wear her maternal shortcomings like a badge of honor. Growing up as I had, I was always irked by that. But Stella wasn’t embarrassed by her imperfections either. A gorgeous former stockbroker five years my senior but who looked much younger, Stella hadn’t returned to work after the Lehman crash had left her unemployed. Instead, she’d gotten pregnant with her son Will, now five. Her older son, Aidan, was a junior in high school.
Shortly before Will was born, Stella’s husband, Kevin, had dropped thirty pounds, rented a glossy pied-à-terre in Chelsea, and found a twenty-seven-year-old yoga instructor for a girlfriend. Stella and Kevin had divorced not long after, when Will was six months old. According to Stella, Kevin had wanted out so badly that he’d acceded to even her most absurd financial demands. He was on his third girlfriend—Zumba this time—and visiting the boys only on occasional weekends.
Maybe that was why Aidan was struggling so much. Recently kicked out of St. Paul’s, the area’s most prestigious private school, he’d quickly found trouble at Ridgedale High School. He’d been suspended twice already. Still, I liked Aidan, probably because he shared Stella’s outsize spirit and take-no-bullshit bluntness.
Fuck. Will is going to kill me.
My phone rang then, startling me. Erik Schinazy.
“I was about to call you,” I lied. It was amazing how calm and authoritative I sounded, especially considering how I’d rushed away from the creek in a panic. “I’m just stepping into the office now.”
“Didn’t mean to jump on you, but I’ll be unreachable for a bit,” Erik said in a way that begged for me to ask why. “Wanted to touch base before I left.”
I unlocked the door to the office, balancing the phone to my ear. It was dark inside except for Erik’s office light, left on in the back as though he’d dashed out in the middle of the night. Everyone besides Erik sat in the central open-plan space, where four desks were arranged in a square—one for each of the three of us on staff and an extra for a fourth writer, gone since the advent of the Internet. I headed for my pristine desk, which looked pathetically unbroken in, compared to Elizabeth and Richard’s stacks of research files, tacked-up notes, and piles of printouts.
“Well, there is a body,” I began as I dropped my things on my desk. I sucked in some air. Time to say it out loud without my voice catching. “And it’s a baby.”
“Shit,” Erik said quietly. He sounded genuinely troubled. “My source didn’t say anything about a— That would have been— Obviously, I would have—”
“I don’t have any more details yet, apart from the baby being female,” I said, trying to get past Erik’s fumbling to be kind without admitting what he knew about me and my lost baby. “But I agreed to wait a few hours before running that it’s a baby. Technically, I overheard that part.”
“Overheard?” He did not sound pleased. “What does that mean?”
And here I’d been thinking the “overheard” part would make me seem resourceful. But it did sound vaguely sleazy now that I’d said it out loud.
“I happened to be standing with Steve Carlson, the chief of police, when an officer on his radio mentioned a baby,” I went on. Because it hadn’t been inappropriate, it was fortuitous. “He offered me an exclusive interview in exchange for holding off on disclosing that detail. I’m supposed to meet with him again at ten a.m. In the meantime, Steve’s fine with us running a basic story about the body.”
“Oh, Steve’s fine with it, is he?” Erik asked sharply. “You do realize we don’t work for Ridgedale’s chief of police. We decide what we report on, not Steve.”
“Right.” My cheeks felt hot. I was glad Erik was on the phone so he couldn’t see how embarrassed I was. “I suppose I was trying, as you suggested, not to alienate him.”
Erik wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t given much thought to my obligations as a journalist. Largely because I hadn’t given much thought to myself as a journalist.
“Just remember with something like this, everyone you talk to is going to have an angle—police, parents, university officials. Anything they tell you willingly is going to be in support of a self-serving narrative. That’s not because they’re bad people. It’s human nature. And it’s your job as a journalist to weave these biased threads into some semblance of the truth.”
It sounded so noble. The truth: I wanted to be a part of that. A part of finding out what had happened to the baby and making sense of it for people.