Chapter 1 - The Kitchen That Broke in Two
“How do you know?” The question hung in the air of that spotless kitchen like grease smoke from a scorched skillet.
Grant wouldn’t look at me. He picked up his water glass, the ice clinking against the heavy crystal Diane had bought us for our second anniversary, and set it down in the exact ring of moisture it had left behind. That was Grant—obsessed with lines, terrified of anything spilling outside the borders he believed belonged to him.
Diane didn’t hesitate. She never needed an invitation to draw blood. She leaned forward, resting her diamond-heavy wrists on the linen placemat, and smiled that thin, practiced smile she used for the pastor’s wife and the ladies at the country club.
“A Hollis man has never had trouble giving this town strong boys, Renee,” she said softly, each syllable coated in sugar and venom. “His grandfather had four. His father gave me three. Look at the men in this family—broad shoulders, good blood, healthy stock. Grant was an all-state quarterback before he took over his father’s firm. If there’s an empty crib down the hall, it’s not because the tree has bad roots. It’s because the ground refuses to take seed.”
My chest caved in as if she’d struck me with a lead pipe. I looked at Grant, waiting. Six years. Six years of washing his grass-stained jerseys, six years of typing his company correspondence late into the night, six years of holding his head over the toilet when his ulcers flared from work stress. I had loved him when he was twenty-four and clumsy, when his father died and he cried like a child in the dark of our first rental apartment. I thought those years bought me an advocate.
Instead, Grant pushed his chair back. The oak legs screamed against the hardwood.
“You’re humiliating me, Renee,” he muttered, his eyes glued to the baseboards. “Booking an appointment at a downtown clinic where half my clients have offices? Putting my name on a clipboard like I’m some kind of defective machine? My mother is right. If a woman can’t bear her husband children, that’s between her and God. You don’t drag a man into town to be inspected like prize cattle.”
“I’m not inspecting you!” My voice cracked, raw and high. “I’ve had three surgeries, Grant. I’ve taken hormones that made my hair fall out and my skin burn. I’ve let four different doctors stick needles into my spine while you waited in the lobby playing games on your phone! The doctor said it takes two people to make a baby. Why is it an insult for you to spend ten minutes in an office while I’ve spent three years in tears?”
Diane stood up then, smoothing the front of her tailored tweed skirt. She looked down at me not with anger, but with complete, clinical dismissal. “Don’t raise your voice in my son’s home, girl. You brought nothing into this marriage except an apron and a recipe book from your mother’s trailer, and you’ve given him nothing to carry his name forward. You’re thirty-one years old. If your clock has stopped, don’t blame the watchmaker.”
“Get out,” I whispered, turning on her. “Get out of my kitchen, Diane.”
“Your kitchen?” Grant’s voice dropped into that cold, terrifying register I had learned to dread. He didn’t shout. He just took three steps across the linoleum until his frame blocked the overhead pendant light, casting a heavy shadow across my face. “My father bought the timber for this house. My name is on the deed at the county clerk’s office. You don’t tell my mother to leave my house.”
“I live here, Grant! I’m your wife!”
“A wife builds a house,” he said, quoting some bastardized piece of scripture his mother had probably fed him on the drive over. “She doesn’t turn it into a funeral parlor. I’m tired, Renee. I’m tired of coming home to ovulation calendars taped to the refrigerator. I’m tired of walking into bedrooms that smell like lavender oil and desperation. I’m thirty-three years old, and every man I went to school with has a boy playing Little League while I come home to you crying over baby clothes you bought for a ghost.”
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The cruelty of it knocked the breath clean out of my lungs. I reached for the edge of the granite counter to keep from falling. “You told me you loved me yesterday.”
“Yesterday,” Grant said, looking straight through me, “I thought you still had some dignity left. But dragging me to a fertility clinic so the whole county can whisper about Grant Hollis being broken? That’s where this ends. You packed your bags three months ago when we argued about the holidays. Maybe it’s time you unpacked them somewhere else.”
