“I tried to call, you didn’t pick up your phone.”
My phone was upstairs. I hadn’t brought it to breakfast and I didn’t have it now. Another thing I didn’t know about having a child. You always had your phone. Ben had assumed I had mine.
“I thought that it would make it less weird for the two of you to meet, but obviously that was a mistake. I’ll tell her to go.”
He shook his head, looking a little bit angry.
“Michelle wants you back. That’s what you left out.”
He tilted his head, confused. “What did you say?”
I started to tell him how I’d done the math based on when Maddie had said she’d last seen Clay. Michelle and Clay had ended their relationship, Michelle had reached out to Ben. She’d made a decision to make herself available to him, she’d made a decision that she wanted that.
“That’s what you haven’t told me. And then you just let her come here?”
“No . . .” he said.
“Why aren’t you looking at me, then?”
Ben shook his head. “She’s . . . Michelle is complicated. She’s confusing wanting to take a shot with me and wanting to take a shot with Maddie’s father. It’s not the same thing.”
“It is, actually. That’s who you are, Ben.”
Ben’s eyes got cold. “Why do you care what Michelle wants from me?”
“She is the mother of your child. That has weight.”
“Not to me, just you,” Ben said.
It didn’t feel appropriate to say the obvious, which was that it mattered to Michelle too. Apparently, it mattered to her more than anything, including her own relationship and whatever hurdles she had to overcome to tell Ben the truth.
“This is a woman that eviscerated you. And now she wants you.”
He shook his head, frustrated. “I never said she eviscerated me,” he said.
I looked at him in disbelief, that word locked in my brain from the time he’d volunteered it. Even if he was choosing to forget, it had power that she had disappeared on Ben. And that she wanted the opposite now. This was hard enough when I imagined that Michelle was still with Clay, like the magazines said she was, like Ben had let me believe she was.
“Look, let’s focus on what matters, okay? Michelle knows that the best thing we can do together is be good parents to Maddie. She knows that. She knows that I love you. She knows that I’m marrying you.”
“Why?”
“Why am I marrying you?” he said.
It didn’t feel like a great time to ask that question. But I wondered: If what I’d thought was connecting us—honesty, friendship, a deep understanding—was gone suddenly, then what was between us?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ben said.
“Why are we moving to London, Ben? Is it for the job? Or did you find the job so you’d have a reason to be near them?”
“I wanted that job long before I knew about Maddie. You can’t really be suggesting I’d be that duplicitous. You can’t suggest you don’t know how long I wanted that job.”
Ben wasn’t wrong. It was a low blow. He had wanted that job and I knew that. We had talked about it late at night, many times. This was his dream job—working for the London firm, designing homes all over Europe. We had talked about whether my career would allow the move. The firm’s new London office made it easy. My desire to live abroad, to live in one of the greatest cities in the world, made it preferable.
But when he reminded me of that now, it just felt like another thing he was trying to prove.
Ben moved closer to me. I moved away.
“It’s hard for me to turn my back on Maddie,” he said. “When she needs me.”