Chapter 1: A real wife

Scarlet ♠️

I heard them before I saw them.

Ruth’s voice carried through the walls of my own home like she owned every brick of it,  sharp, deliberate, loud enough that there was absolutely no question about whether I was supposed to hear. This was not a private conversation. This was a performance staged specifically for my ears, and Ruth Benson had always been an excellent performer.

“That’s enough, Noah. Eight years. Eight years and that woman still has not given you a child.”

I sat at the dining table with my hands folded in my lap and my back straight and my face arranged into something that could pass for calm. The table was set. Candles lit. Food goes cold. I had cooked tonight  deliberately, carefully,  because Ruth was coming and I had learned in eight years of marriage that a well-set table gave her fewer things to criticize.

I should have known she would find something anyway.

I heard Noah say something low that I couldn’t make out, and then Ruth’s voice again, louder this time, in case the first round hadn’t reached me clearly enough.

“Don’t defend her. You deserve a son. Your father and I had you before we were thirty. Look at you now,  almost forty with nothing to show for it because of that woman.”

My jaw tightened. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs beneath the table and breathed through it.

That woman. After eight years I was still that woman in Ruth Benson’s mouth.

They came out together,  Ruth first, Noah behind her, his expression carrying that particular tightness around the eyes that I had spent years learning to read. He looked at me and I looked back and for one moment I thought,  say something. Just once, say something.

He pulled out his mother’s chair and sat down beside her.

I kept my face still.

“Mum, you came.” I gestured to the spread on the table, voice warm, smile intact. “Please, join us for dinner.”

Ruth sat. She looked at the food, then looked at me, then looked at Noah the way a woman looks at her son when she wants him to understand something without her having to say it in full sentences.

Noah cleared his throat. And then,  quietly, but not quietly enough, he said it.

“Mum is right, Scarlet. We’ve been trying for eight years. Something has to change.”

The candle in front of me flickered.

I turned my head and looked at my husband. The man I married at twenty-four believing in forever. The man whose name I had taken, whose house I had made a home, whose mother I had endured with more grace than anyone in this room was currently acknowledging. He was looking at his plate. He could not even look at me while he said it.

Ruth’s chin lifted. Satisfied.

“You see?” She addressed me now, directly, hands folded on the table like a woman presiding over a verdict she had already written. “Even your husband agrees. You are wasting his time, Scarlet. You are wasting your own. A man like Noah, “ she gestured at her son like he was an exhibit, “deserves children. Deserves a real wife.”

A real wife.

I set my fork down. Carefully. Deliberately.

“Mom.” My voice came out quieter than I planned, and steadier. “I am sitting right here. At my own table, in my own home, that I have kept and cooked in and made comfortable for eight years.” I looked at her first, then at Noah, and held his gaze until he finally looked up. “If either of you have something to say about our marriage, you say it to me. Not through walls. Not across tables like I’m not present.” I stood. “I will not sit here and be discussed like a problem to be solved.”

The room went completely silent.

Noah opened his mouth. I didn’t wait to hear what came out of it. I placed my napkin on the table, pushed in my chair and walked upstairs without looking back at either of them.

That night I lay in the dark beside my husband and felt the distance between us like a physical thing,  measured, real, too wide to pretend across anymore.

He had come to bed without apologizing. Without explanation. He turned off his lamp, pulled the cover up and within twenty minutes his breathing had evened out into sleep, smooth and unbothered, like the evening had been perfectly ordinary.

I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about the last time Noah had touched me, I can’t remember the last time we had sex, not even touch. Like a real touch, not the performative affection he deployed in public, and I had to go back further than I wanted to. Weeks. Maybe longer. And when I reached for him two nights ago, I turned toward him in the dark and pressed my hand to his chest. He had gone still in that particular way before he said…

“What is the point, Scarlet? What is the point of having sex with you if nothing comes of it?”  

He hadn’t meant it cruelly, or did he?. I think that is worse. He had said it like a genuine question. Like our intimacy had been reclassified entirely,  from love to function, from want to purpose,  and since the purpose wasn’t being achieved the rest of it was simply no longer worth the effort.

I had turned back to my side of the bed and lay there in the dark feeling something I couldn’t name,  not quite grief, not quite rage. Something that sat between the two and had no clean word for itself.

That was two nights ago.

Tonight, lying in the same dark with the same distance between us, I made a decision.

I was done waiting. Done carrying the question in silence. Done letting Ruth and Noah and everyone with an opinion about my womb determine the terms of my own life.

Tomorrow I was going to find out the truth. For myself. Nobody else.

I reached for my phone on the nightstand, shielding the screen so the light wouldn’t wake him, though I doubted anything short of a headline about his business would disturb Noah Benson’s sleep. I opened the browser and typed, private gynecologist, women’s health, appointments available.

The first result loaded.

LIONEL WOMEN’S  HEALTH. 

DISCREET, AND PRIVATE. NEW PATIENTS ARE WELCOME. BOOK NOW.

I pressed book before I could talk myself out of it. Filled in the details with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been making decisions alone for longer than they should have. Confirmed the appointment for ten o’clock the following morning.

I set the phone face down, closed my eyes and breathed.

I had no idea that the name I had just booked under, the name sitting right at the top of that clinic’s page, the name I had been too tired and too determined to register, was about to walk back into my life and rearrange every single thing in it.

I fell asleep for the first time in weeks without lying there counting the distance between me and my husband. I had something to do tomorrow. Something that was entirely mine. I didn’t know yet that Lionel wasn’t just a clinic name. It was a person. And that person was someone I had spent ten years trying to forget.