Chapter 8 - A Baby Made of Borrowed Stories
The next morning, my father asked Vivienne to meet with him in the sitting room where sunlight fell across the same blue rug Nora had selected years earlier.
He invited Miriam to attend, offered Vivienne the opportunity to bring an adviser of her own, and explained that he wanted to discuss both the marriage and the documents.
Vivienne arrived in a cream sweater and loose black trousers.
Without the artificial belly, her silhouette looked ordinary, and the contrast was so jarring that I had to look away.
She sat with both hands clasped tightly in her lap.
"You don't know what I went through," she told him before anyone had asked a question.
He replied that he wanted to understand, but that the truth could not change from one explanation to another.
"Were you ever pregnant?" he asked.
She stared at the window.
"I wanted to be."
"That isn't the question."
Tears gathered in her eyes.
"I thought if I had a child, you'd stop treating Avery like the center of everything."
My father seemed physically diminished by the words.
"Avery is my daughter," he said.
"She wasn't competing with you."
"You don't understand what it's like to enter a house where another woman is treated like a saint."
She gestured around the sitting room.
"Every story, every photograph, every charity event was about Nora."
"Nora died," I said quietly.
"She didn't leave because she wanted to be remembered."
Vivienne looked at me with something resembling hatred, then turned back toward David.
"At first I told myself I was only buying time," she whispered.
"Then everyone began congratulating us, and you looked so happy."
My father asked again whether any pregnancy had existed.
After a long silence, she shook her head.
The admission did not bring relief.
It made the previous five months feel even more calculated because she had continued the lie while watching him plan a nursery and speak to an imaginary child.
"Where did the ultrasound pictures come from?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"An image service."
"They weren't your medical images."
"No."
"And the appointments?"
"Sometimes I went to a salon or a fitting."
Her voice became defensive.
"I didn't expect it to go this far."
"You told me last week that our son kicked when you heard my voice."
She covered her face.
"I know."
I remembered my father kneeling beside her chair during a family dinner, laughing with wonder because she claimed the baby responded to his touch.
The memory now belonged to someone who had been performing for an audience of one.
Miriam asked whether Miles had known the pregnancy was false.
Vivienne's expression changed immediately.
"He handled financial matters."
"That wasn't the question," my father said.
She folded her arms.
"I'm not answering questions about Miles without my own attorney."
Miriam nodded.
"You have that right."
The conversation ended soon afterward.
My father did not demand that Vivienne surrender her phone or explain everything before she could leave the room.
He simply stated that the marriage could not proceed as though nothing had happened and that counsel would arrange separate living arrangements.
She stood in the doorway and made one final attempt to reach him.
"David, if you leave me now, everyone will say your family never wanted me."
He looked at me, then back at her.
"My daughter tried to tell me the truth."
"And you believed her over your wife."
"No," he said.
"I believed what fell out of your dress in front of forty witnesses."
I had never heard my father draw such a clear distinction between evidence and loyalty.
Vivienne left without answering.
For the rest of the morning, my father sat alone in the nursery she had decorated.
There was a small white cradle, a pale-green blanket, and a wooden mobile carved with birds.
I found him holding a pair of shoes that could fit inside his palm.
He looked at me as though asking permission to grieve something that had never been alive.
I sat beside him.
"You were preparing to love a child," I said.
"That was real."
"But the child wasn't."
"No."
He stared at the tiny shoes.
"I already imagined teaching him to fish."
His voice broke.
"I imagined your mother would have liked to meet him, if life had been different."
I squeezed his hand.
For once, I did not feel threatened by the idea that he could love another child.
I felt angry that his capacity to love had been used against him.
He asked whether I could ever forgive him for ignoring my warnings.
I told him I did not know.
He offered to explain how the last year had looked from his perspective, then stopped himself.
"You shouldn't have to listen to me justify it right now," he said.
I was grateful for the pause.
My father had spent so long presenting his intentions as proof that he could not have hurt anyone.
Now he was beginning to accept that good intentions were not a substitute for taking care with another person's feelings.
I told him I needed space, not an emotional speech, and he promised to respect it.
That promise was modest enough to be believable, which made it more valuable than another dramatic declaration.
The answer seemed to hurt, but he accepted it.
Later that day, a courier delivered an expensive arrangement of white orchids addressed to him with a note from Vivienne.
It said she had only wanted to feel secure.
He placed the flowers outside the nursery, where the house manager could decide what to do with them.
Then he asked Sofia to help bring Nora's gardening journals out of storage.
He did not call that act revenge.
He called it remembering what had been pushed aside.
When we opened the first journal, a pressed rose petal fell onto the table.
My mother had written a sentence beneath it in her slanted handwriting.
The truth is sometimes uncomfortable, but a garden cannot grow around a rotten root.
I read it aloud.
My father closed his eyes.
In another room, his phone began ringing again.
May you like
This time the caller was a journalist asking whether the fake pregnancy had been part of a corporate financial scheme.
Neither of us knew how far the story had already traveled.
