Chapter 2: Barren

SCARLET ♠️

I woke to an empty bed and the specific silence of a house that had already decided to go on without me.

Noah’s side was cold. His lamp was off, his pillow undisturbed on his side, he had a habit of remaking his half of the bed before he left, every morning, like he wanted to erase the evidence of having been there at all. I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling and let last night come back in full.

“What is the point, Scarlet.”

“Something has to change.”

“A real wife.”

All of them landed on my mind without permission. 

I sat up.

I was not going to lie here and let those words settle into me any deeper than they already had. I had given them enough space. I had given Ruth enough space, and Noah enough silence, and this marriage enough of my patience to last three lifetimes. Today was mine.

I got up, washed my face, and stood at the bathroom mirror long enough to look myself in the eye.

The woman looking back at me was tired. Not the surface kind of tired that sleep fixes. The deep kind. The kind that comes from performing strength for so long you start to forget it was ever a performance.

Get dressed, I told her. You have somewhere to be.

I kept it simple,  dark trousers, a soft blouse, and flat shoes. Nothing that required effort or an audience. I was going to a clinic, not a function, and for the first time in longer than I could remember I was going somewhere that had nothing to do with Noah’s name or Ruth’s expectations or the carefully maintained image of the Benson marriage.

I picked up my bag, checked the appointment confirmation on my phone:  10:00 AM, Lionel Women’s Health,  and headed downstairs.

I should have gone straight to the car.

Ruth was standing in the compound.

She was dressed already, cream blouse, pressed slacks, and her hair set, which meant she had either stayed the night or arrived early enough to make a point of it. She watched me come through the front door with an expression that sat somewhere between contempt and satisfaction, the look of a woman who had been waiting and was pleased she hadn’t had to wait long.

I kept walking toward my car. I had learned that stopping gave her permission. Today I did not have the capacity to be her audience.

“Where are you going?”

I pressed the key fob. The car unlocked with a soft click.

“Out,” I said.

“Dressed like that?” She looked me over slowly, the kind of look designed to make a woman feel like she had gotten something wrong without specifying what. “No driver? No Noah?”

“I’m capable of driving myself.” I opened the door.

“Scarlet.”

Something in her tone made me stop. Not the cruelty,  I was used to the cruelty. This was different. Quieter. Which, from Ruth, was somehow worse.

I turned.

She took two steps toward me and dropped her voice to the register she used when she wanted the words to go in cleanly, without witnesses to soften them.

“You cannot give my son a child,” she said. “Eight years, and nothing. You walk around this house like you belong here, wearing my son’s name, spending his money, living in his home, and you have given him nothing.” Her eyes held mine without blinking. “A barren woman has no business acting like a wife.”

Barren.

The word hit me somewhere behind the sternum and lodged there.

I had been called many things in this marriage, indirectly, cleverly, in the particular language of women like Ruth who know how to wound without leaving marks. But she had never said it that plainly before. That directly. Like a door she had been standing in front of for years had finally swung open.

My eyes burned. I did not let them do anything else.

I looked at my mother-in-law, I  really looked at her, past the pressed blouse and the careful hair and the performance of righteous concern,  and I said, very quietly…

“If your son wanted a different wife, Ruth, he would have one. He chose me. Eight years ago and every day since.” My voice did not shake. I was proud of that. “Whatever is or isn’t happening in our marriage is between me and Noah. Not you. Never you.”

I got into the car.

I did not look at her face as I pulled out. I did not give her the satisfaction of watching me drive away in pieces. I kept my eyes on the gate, on the road, on the distance between me and that compound, and I kept driving until the shaking in my hands had nowhere left to go.

I called Clara at the first traffic light.

She answered on the second ring, alert and immediate the way she always was when she heard something in my voice I hadn’t put there intentionally.

“Talk,” she said.

So I did. I told her about last night, Noah’s words in the dark, the dinner table, him sitting beside his mother and agreeing out loud like I wasn’t right there. I told her about the compound this morning, about my mother in law calling me barren, she actually said barren, Clara, and my voice only broke on that word. Just once. Just slightly.

“Scar.” Clara’s voice went soft and firm at the same time, the specific combination she reserved for moments when I needed both.

“I just want to be happy,” I said. It came out smaller than I meant it to. More honest than I planned. “I love him. I want to give him a child. I want to have one. I’ve wanted that since the day we got married and now he won’t even… “ I stopped. Breathed. “He told me two nights ago that there was no point. Like no point in having sex, Clara. Like I’m a machine that isn’t producing and therefore isn’t worth running.”

Clara was quiet for a moment. Then she said, 

“Do you remember Marcus?”

I exhaled. “Yes.”

“Six months he made my life absolute hell when I decided to keep the baby. 

Six months of “you ruined my life”  and I never wanted this and every cruel thing a man says when he’s frightened and too proud to admit it.”

 I could hear her shift on the other end of the line. “And now he calls every single day. Cannot go twenty-four hours without hearing our son’s voice.” A pause. “My point is,  you are doing the right thing, going today. You get your answers. You stop carrying a question that has an answer somewhere. And whatever that answer is,  you will know. And knowing is always better than being told.”

I felt the tightness in my chest ease. Not completely. But enough.

“I’m scared,” I admitted. “What if it is me?”

“Then you will know,” Clara said simply. “And you will handle it. Because that is what you do.” A beat. “Call me the moment you’re done.” “Okay” I said then I hung up the phone. Ten minutes later I got to the clinic then I parked my car in the parking lot. 

The clinic was exactly what I had hoped for, quiet, clean, private. No reception crowded with familiar faces. No one would mention to someone that Noah Benson’s wife had been seen at a women’s health clinic on a Thursday morning.

The nurse at the front desk looked up and I watched the small flicker of recognition move across her face, the specific kind that came from press photographs, from charity galas, from being attached to a name that commanded attention in rooms I wasn’t even in.

I leaned forward before she could say anything.

“I need complete discretion,” I said quietly. “Nothing shared. Nothing mentioned. Not to colleagues, not anywhere online. Can you do that?”

She nodded without hesitation. “Of course, Mrs. Benson.”

I sat in the waiting area with my bag in my lap and my phone face down and told myself this was just information. Just answers. I was a woman in a clinic waiting to see a doctor. Nothing dramatic about that.

My name was called.

I stood. Smoothed my blouse. Walked to the door at the end of the corridor and pushed it open.

The doctor was at his desk, head down, reviewing a file. I sat in the chair across from him and folded my hands in my lap and waited for him to look up.

He finished the page. Straightened. Turned toward me.

And everything, the room, the morning, the careful composure I had been holding together since the compound,  went completely, absolutely still.

He had not changed. Ten years and he had not changed, same jaw, same dark steady eyes and hair, same quality of stillness that had always made rooms feel like they had been waiting specifically for him. He was staring at me like I was something he had half-expected and was completely unprepared for.

My mouth opened.

His did the same.

We spoke at the exact same moment.

“Ray!…”

“Scarlly!!…”

 The nickname broke something open in my chest that I had spent ten years keeping sealed. Nobody called me that. Nobody ever had except him,  and the way it came out of his mouth, completely unplanned, like it had been sitting just behind his teeth this whole time waiting for me to walk back into a room,  told me that the trouble I was in was much bigger than anything Ruth Benson had ever managed to cause me.