This Isn't About You

Serena's Pov 

I closed the bedroom door behind me and stood with my back against it for a moment.

The flat was quiet. From somewhere down the hall, I could still hear the low murmur of their voices.

I pushed off the door and went to sit at the edge of the bed.

My hands were in my lap. I looked down at them like. The left one still had my ring on it. Three years old, platinum band, small diamond. Damien had gotten down on one knee in the restaurant we went to on our first date and I had cried before he even finished the question. I had been so sure. So certain or so I thought.

I twisted the ring once. Then I stopped.

I pressed both palms flat against my stomach instead.

My baby. That was the thought that kept arriving underneath everything else. “My baby. My baby. My baby.”

Not ours but mine. Because there was no ours anymore, and there hadn't been for longer than I was willing to admit to myself.

Three miscarriages. Three times I had lain in a hospital bed and held Damien's hand and watched him grieve alongside me and believed — God, I had believed so completely — that we were in the same pain. That we were losing the same thing and every loss was pulling us toward each other even when it was tearing us apart.

But he had been going home to Rose after those hospital visits. He had been building something with her in the shadows of everything we were supposed to be building together. I thought they were just sibling close.

And I had been so busy loving him that I never thought to look.

I lay back on the bed without pulling the covers up. The ceiling was plain white.

I closed my eyes. I thought I would cry, but the tears didn't come. There was something past crying that I had arrived at, some place where the grief was so large and so complete that it had become a kind of stillness instead.

I stayed like that until I heard footsteps in the hallway.

The bedroom door opened at half past eight.

Damien came in carrying his phone, already loosening his collar. He glanced at me on the bed and something crossed his face — surprise, maybe, that I was already in the room. But it was gone so quickly I almost missed it.

"You're in early," he said.

"Tired," I said.

My voice came out even. I was almost proud of it.

He nodded and went to the wardrobe. The familiar smell of his cologne in the room.

"Did you eat?" he asked, his eyes anywhere but me.

"Not yet."

"I'll make something later."

"Okay."

He disappeared into the bathroom. The shower ran. I lay there and listened to it and kept my hand pressed flat against my stomach and kept my breathing steady and thought about nothing. 

When he came back out he smelled like his soap and his hair was damp and he looked like the man I had married and I hated how much that still hurt.

He sat on his side of the bed with his phone.

"Rose is staying over tonight," he said, casual as anything. "The weather's getting bad, I told her not to drive."

I turned my head to look at him.

His face was calm. He met my eyes without flinching.

Three years of marriage and he could look me in the face and say that. “Rose is staying over tonight.” Like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. Like she wasn't carrying his child in the next room. Like I hadn't heard everything.

"Fine," I said.

He looked at me for a half second longer than necessary. Then he looked back at his phone.

"You seem quiet," he said.

"I told you. I'm tired."

"Right."

He scrolled something on his screen. I watched his face in my peripheral vision.

“He was never really yours,” something inside me said. “You just didn't know it yet.”

I waited until his breathing slowed and deepened, and the phone went dark on his chest and his hand fell loose beside it. Until the particular heaviness of deep sleep settled over his side of the bed and I was certain. I closed my eyes and let sleep settle in.

********

Around 2 am, I felt the bed empty beside me. I got up abruptly nearly loosing balance, and picked up my phone from the nightstand.

I opened the voice recorder and pressed record.

And walked out of the bedroom.

The hallway was dark. I moved without turning any lights on, my bare feet quiet on the floor, my heart loud enough that I was afraid it would wake him. 

A thin line of light showed under the guest room door.

I was so sure Damien was with her.

I stopped just before it, close enough to the wall that my shoulder touched the plaster, and I held the phone out at my side and I listened.

Rose's voice first, low and certain. "She doesn't suspect anything. You saw how she was at dinner. She's oblivious."

There was a brief pause.Then Damien interrupted it."She seemed quieter tonight."

"She's always quiet. That's just how she is." Rose's voice was almost dismissive. "Serena has never doubted either of us. Not like we gave her a reason to, Damien. She trusts too easily. It's why this has worked for as long as it has."

My throat tightened. I held very still.

"The baby changes things," Damien said.

"No, it doesn't." Rose's voice was firm. "Nobody has to know it's yours. I've told you already. I'll handle it. I'll raise this baby quietly. I won't ask you for anything publicly. You stay with Serena if you have to, keep the marriage going, and I—"

"Rose—"

"Damien." Her voice dropped to something softer. 

"It is the only way she cannot find out. She would fall apart. You know what she's like. And the divorce would be messy, the family would—"

"I know."

"So we keep things as they are. For now."

Their plan wasn't to end the marriage or come clean or even do the decent, devastating thing of letting me go. The plan was to keep me here. In this flat. In this marriage. In this life I thought was mine, as a wife to show the world while Rose grew round with his child in private.

I pressed my back against the wall and stared at the dark ceiling and breathed silently.

"She wants a baby so badly," Rose said, and her voice had an edge of cruelty in it now. 

"If she ever gets pregnant again, she'll be so focused on that she won't notice anything else. You know how she gets. She'll pour everything into it and everything wouldn't matter to her anymore."

"She's been through a lot," Damien said quietly.

"I know, Damien. So have we."

I walked back to the bedroom, and pressed stop on the recorder. I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and I looked at my screen. I had what I needed.

I didn't sleep that night. I closed my eyes with a vivid thought. It's just plain facts. 

Damien was not going to leave Rose and he'd fight all odds to be with her. Since that's settled, my presence won't be needed anymore. Why not cut the roots before I end up with a decade pain.

And the baby inside me. I pressed my hand to my stomach one last time.

“I'm sorry,” I thought. And I meant it. I meant it with everything I had. “This isn't about you. You didn't choose any of this. Neither did I.”

But I knew what world this child would be born into. I would not do that. I would not bring this baby into that.

By the time the sunlight of early morning began to show around the curtains, I had made every decision.

I was going to divorce my husband, get an abortion, and leave his life.

I was done being the only one who tried.