The Shoes in My Hand: Pregnant Wife’s Nursery Betrayal

Then I went back inside.

The nursery smelled like paint and new carpet, and the crib still had the blanket I’d folded that morning.

I went straight to the closet.

Ysolde had said there was something I should see before Beckett got back, and I figured she meant a note or a receipt or some cheap piece of evidence from their little decorating romance.

I was wrong.

But when I knelt down, the baseboard along the back wall shifted under my knee.

It was loose.

I pulled at it, and a piece came away in my hand.

Behind it, in the gap between the wall and the floor, was a shoebox.

I sat down on the floor with it in my lap and opened the lid.

On top were folded papers.

The first was a life insurance policy.

On me.

Half a million dollars, taken out eleven months ago.

Beckett was the beneficiary.

I read it three times before the words made sense.

Eleven months ago, we had been married a little over a year, and I had been healthy and happy and busy planning a future with him.

And he had been planning for me to die.

I don’t know how else to say it.

Under that was another document, a change of beneficiary form for my brother Grant’s small estate.

Grant had left me a little money and a share in his contracting business, and I had never touched any of it.

But the form had my signature on it, or something that looked like my signature.

I did not remember signing anything like that.

At the bottom of the box was an old phone of Beckett’s, a model he’d stopped using months ago.

I plugged it in, and the screen lit up.

There was one voicemail saved.

I played it.

A man’s voice, calm and businesslike, said, “Mr. Beckett, your results are clear.

You were never sterile.

Call me.”

The message was dated seven months ago.

Seven months.

Right around the time I told Beckett I was pregnant.

I sat there on the nursery floor with the phone in my hand and the policy in my lap, and I felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with the air in that room.

Beckett had told Ysolde he couldn’t have children.

He had told her he was divorced.

He had told her a lot of things.

But the voicemail said he was never sterile, which meant he knew the pregnancy was possible, which meant the story he told Ysolde was a lie he had chosen to tell.

And the policy said something else.

It said he had been thinking about my death for almost a year.

I put the papers back in the box, but I kept the phone.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with it yet.

I just knew I wasn’t going to let him come home and find me sitting there crying.

I stood up, and my back ached, and the baby kicked once, hard, like a little reminder that I was not alone in this.

I walked out of the nursery and closed the door behind me.

Then I went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and called the only person I could think of who might tell me the truth about my brother.

His old business partner, Eldon.

It rang three times before he picked up.

“Ariella?” he said.

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s not.”

I told him I needed to ask about Grant, and about Beckett, and about the summer before Grant died.

Eldon was quiet for a long moment.

Then he said, “I was wondering when somebody would call me about that.”