Chapter 2

Julian came home to find her sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs like a teenager, the ultrasound photo in her hand.

"What's that?" he asked, shrugging off his coat.

"Come here."

He crossed the kitchen slowly, studying her face like he was trying to read a verdict before it was spoken.

She handed him the photo.

For a moment, he just stared at it. Then his hands began to shake.

"Elle." His voice broke on her name. "Is this…"

"I'm pregnant, Julian."

He made a sound she'd never heard him make before somewhere between a sob and a laugh, and pulled her off the counter into his arms, lifting her clean off the floor, spinning once before setting her down like she was something breakable.

"Thank God," he whispered into her hair. "Thank God, thank God."

She laughed, crying too, gripping the back of his shirt like she might fall if she let go.

"I told you we'd get here," she said.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, his palms framing her face like she was something sacred. "I'm sorry. For everything. For how I've been."

"I know."

"I'm going to make this up to you. I promise."

She believed him completely. She had no reason yet not to.

---

The weeks that followed were the happiest of Eleanor's marriage.

Julian came home early. He cooked for her ; badly, but he tried, burning a pan of salmon so thoroughly that the smoke detector went off twice and rubbed her swollen feet on the couch while she dozed through old movies. He went to every appointment, held her hand through every ultrasound, asked Dr. Bell more questions than she did.

"Is the heartbeat strong?" he'd ask. Every single visit. "Is she growing the way she should be?"

"Strong as ever, Mr. Hale," Dr. Bell would say, and Julian would exhale like a man finally allowed to breathe.

Eleanor noticed his fixation but told herself it was just love. Just relief after years of disappointment. She wanted, so badly, to believe the warmth between them was simple.

"You ask the same questions every time," she teased him once, in the elevator after an appointment.

"I just need to know she's okay." His hand drifted to her stomach, resting there with a tenderness that still, after everything, made her chest ache with love. "I need to know nothing's going to take this from me."

"Nothing is going to take this from you," she said, laughing softly. "Except maybe a very long labor."

He didn't laugh back. Not really. He just held her a little tighter, his eyes somewhere far away.

---

Her family noticed the change too.

"He's like a new man," her father said one Sunday, watching Julian fuss over a blanket for Eleanor's lap.

Even her stepmother, Diane Reed a woman who'd never been particularly warm toward Eleanor, who'd spent years offering thin smiles and thinner compliments seemed thrilled beyond reason.

"A grandchild," Diane said one evening, pressing a hand to her own chest like the joy was too much to hold. "Finally. This family needed this."

There was something strange in the way she said it. Something too eager, too relieved, as if a grandchild were the answer to a problem Eleanor didn't know existed.

Eleanor brushed the thought away. She didn't have room in her heart for suspicion. Not now. Not when everything finally felt right.

"You've never been this excited about anything I've done," Eleanor said, half-joking, watching Diane fold tiny onesies with reverent care.

"This is different," Diane said, not looking up. "This matters more than you know."

Eleanor laughed it off. She thought it was sentiment. She didn't yet understand it was relief.

She thought, sometimes, about how strange it was that Diane, who had never once asked about the years of failed tests, who had changed the subject every time Eleanor tried to talk about the heartbreak of those four years, had suddenly become the most invested person in the family.

"You never used to ask about this stuff," Eleanor said once, half-joking, watching Diane smooth her hand over a stack of folded baby blankets. "Now you call every other day."

"I just want to make sure everything's going smoothly," Diane said, not quite meeting her eyes. "For all of us."

*For all of us.* Eleanor turned the phrase over later that night, lying awake beside Julian's sleeping form, and couldn't quite shake the feeling that it meant something she wasn't being told.

---

Her stepsister, Cassidy Reed, visited less than she used to.

When she did come around, she was quieter than usual, picking at her food, avoiding eye contact with Julian in a way Eleanor found odd but didn't dwell on.

"You okay?" Eleanor asked her once, the two of them alone in the kitchen while the others sat in the living room.

Cassidy's smile was thin, stretched too tight at the edges. "Just tired. Work stuff."

"You'd tell me if something was wrong, right? You know that."

"Of course," Cassidy said. Too quickly. Her eyes flicked toward the doorway, toward the sound of Julian's laughter drifting in from the other room, and something in her face closed like a door shutting.

"Cassidy."

"I'm fine, Elle. I promise." Cassidy reached out and squeezed her hand, and for a second her eyes were wet, glassy with something Eleanor mistook for exhaustion. "I just want you to be happy. That's all that matters right now."

Eleanor let it go. She had so much joy of her own to hold onto; she didn't have it in her to chase down someone else's sadness.

She didn't know yet that Cassidy's sadness and her own happiness were two threads of the same terrible knot, pulled tight by a man neither of them fully knew.

---

As her belly grew, so did Julian's devotion almost frantic in its intensity.

He bought a crib before they even knew the baby's sex. He hired a contractor to renovate the nursery, choosing a soft yellow because "it works for either." He started leaving work at four every day instead of seven, something he'd never once done in the four years before this.

"You don't have to do all this," Eleanor told him one night, watching him assemble a bookshelf for a baby that wasn't due for months.

"I want to." He didn't look up from the screwdriver in his hand. "I need you to know how much this matters to me."

"I do know."

"No." He finally met her eyes, and something in his expression unsettled her desperate, almost frightened. "You don't. Not yet."

She didn't understand what he meant. She told herself it was just a man overwhelmed by love, by the fear of losing something he'd waited so long for.

She held onto that explanation the way a drowning woman holds onto driftwood, not because it was sturdy, but because it was the only thing within reach.

---

By her seventh month, Eleanor had stopped being disturbed entirely. The pills, too. She didn't need them anymore not with Julian's hand in hers every night, not with her family gathered around her like a fortress, not with a heartbeat fluttering inside her that gave her a reason to want mornings again.

She thought she'd found her way back to the marriage she always believed she had.

She thought the worst was behind her.

One night, lying in bed with Julian's hand resting on her stomach, she whispered, "I'm scared, sometimes."

"Of what?"

"That this is too good. That something's going to take it away."

Julian went very still beside her.

"Nothing is going to take this away from me," he said quietly. "I'll make sure of it."

She thought it was a promise of love.

She had eight weeks left before she would understand it was something else entirely.

---

Diane insisted on throwing a baby shower in the final month, despite Eleanor's protests that it was too much, too soon, too close to her due date for all the fuss.

"Nonsense," Diane said, already pulling out a guest list. "This family has waited four years for this. We're celebrating properly."

The shower filled their living room with pastel balloons and trays of finger food, with cousins and aunts Eleanor hadn't seen in years, all of them cooing over her belly like it was the eighth wonder of the world. Julian stood near the doorway for most of the afternoon, watching the room with an expression Eleanor couldn't quite place something between hunger and grief, like a man watching a fire he'd started burn brighter than he expected.

"You should be sitting," Cassidy told her at one point, guiding her gently toward the armchair by the window. "Take it easy. You're almost there."

"You've been so good to me through all this," Eleanor said, squeezing her stepsister's hand. "I don't think I've thanked you enough."

Cassidy's smile faltered, just slightly, before she forced it back into place.

"You don't need to thank me," Cassidy said quietly. "I just want this to be over soon."

Eleanor laughed, assuming she meant the pregnancy. She didn't realize, watching Cassidy slip out of the room moments later, eyes glistening, that the words had meant something far darker.