Be It What It Will

**Content Warning: Miscarriage**

- - -

“Are you sure?”

He’s gentle about it, voice low and brogue soft.

On the other side of his desk, Corinne’s sapphire eyes sharpen, fierce.

She upends her purse.

An array of pregnancy tests falls out, white plastic casings clattering across the calendar in a pile of pink lines, blue caps, and digital smiley faces.

“I think it’s safe to say I am, Mr. Lindsay.”

His jaw ticks. He wishes she wouldn’t call him that.

Shadows blur in the hammered glass of his office door. Corinne shrinks, tucking her dark hair behind her ear as the skateboards and cigarettes pass. She looks at him. He lets it go.

He spreads out the tests—all eight of them. She’s written the exact dates and times on each casing in black Sharpie. He arranges them chronologically.

The lines grow more pronounced. More opaque.

The first was three days ago. He was at a conference in Maine.

“You could have reached me.”

“Why?”

The chair creaks as he sits back. He stares at what comes next, jaded and resigned, rubbing his stubbled mouth with a sigh. His placidness makes him feel old—beige, gray, black, old.

His phone vibrates on a stack of Ethan Frome essays.

It’s Maddy.

- - -

Three years ago, on his fortieth birthday, Madeleine Matthews came into his life with her honey-red waves and scarlet pencil dress, and he swore he’d never breathe the same way again. Her nonprofit was on campus, and she told him his tie—printed with the full text of The Raven—was “fun.”

No one had ever called him “fun” before.

Dry, certainly. Bookish. Bit of an ass.

Maddy’s little sister called him Ishmael when they met that Thanksgiving, because he’d mentioned his students were reading Melville.

He called her Rinn.

When her name showed up on his roster for the fall semester, he smiled.

“You don’t mind carpooling, do you, Mr. Lindsay?”

No—he liked it.

One morning, walking to campus, he asked, “Can you get the bus home? I’ve a haircut this afternoon.”

“You’re cutting your hair?”

The indignance gave him pause.

“You disapprove?”

Rinn blushed a very telling shade of red.

“Do what you want,” she muttered, speeding up. “It’s not my hair.”

He smirked.

He didn’t cut his hair.

It was the gravity of a dark corner where their lips brushed for the first time. Something pressing them together like the same poles of magnets until the resistance became so much, they flipped with a quiet snap. Not passionately but curiously, suddenly held in this place by a force he struggled to overcome.

Then he took Maddy home and made love to her like that would erase it.

He almost canceled his class that Monday just so he wouldn’t have to endure those fifteen minutes with Rinn in his passenger seat.

The drone of the road.

The jasmine in her hair.

Any close was too close now. But too close wasn’t close enough. A kiss turned caress turned a class running over. He can still hear the first time he locked the door.

Lines didn’t blur, they bled—and he stepped right over them to avoid the mess.

It was never about indulging in the forbidden. Attraction, to an extent. Convenience. It isn’t exciting, necessarily, but it’s contained. None of that star-crossed lovers talk.

This isn’t love.

That’s not allowed.

This is Massachusetts on a Tuesday.

- - -

His thoughts chase the second hand around his watch.

What is she doing right now?

What is she choosing?

“Did my sister seem off to you today?”

He stills as Maddy gets into bed, rubbing lotion into her hands. He feigns a bewildered frown, shaking his head.

“A little quiet, perhaps. Why?”

“I found a positive pregnancy test in her bathroom when I stopped by my parents’ after work.”

His face goes numb. A high-pitched tone fills his ears.

“Really?”

“Have you noticed her hanging out with anyone?”

“No, I—I don’t see her much during the day.”

He touches her arm, still warm from the shower. He expects shame to scald him. Nothing happens.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” he offers. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

“No, not yet,” Maddy says. “It could belong to a friend. I just hate to think of her going through something like that alone.”

“Maybe she’s already confided in someone.”

Maddy hums. He swallows when she looks away.

“Will you tell me if she says anything?”

“Of course.”

- - -

There’s a blue-collar diner off Eagle Run Road that serves all-day breakfast (“And some really good gravy fries,” according to Rinn).

They go Thursday after class to talk. Her parents are out for the night, and Maddy’s in Springfield until tomorrow, so no one’s missing them.

All the options that begin with the letter “A” are discussed.

There is a clear frontrunner.

They sit with that weight while the sun sets. His brown-gray locks conceal his face as he hunches over his coffee, hands clasped at his mouth.

“It’s okay to change your mind,” he says again. “We don’t have to decide anything today.”

“I think we do,” she says. “Though, if anyone found out…” Her gaze flicks to him, then down. “They wouldn’t have to know the whole truth.”

His eyes harden in admonishment.

“Rinn—”

“You could still have Maddy,” she whispers through the crack in her voice. “She hasn’t done anything wrong—”

“Rinn.”

Her lips pinch shut. She tears straw paper in her lap.

He exhales slowly—patiently—as the waitress lays the check. The napkin dispenser rattles as Rinn takes the last one to blow her nose. He leans in.

“What did I tell you, Corinne?”

She sniffs. “That I wouldn’t do this alone.”

“That’s right.”

She can’t lie her way through this and come out unscathed like he can.

“If you accept responsibility, so must I,” he says. “The only way Maddy doesn’t find out is if there’s nothing to find out about.”

Rinn grabs another straw paper. Tears it.

“If we end it,” she asks, glancing up, “are we…done?”

“Done?”

“Is that the end of us?”

They have bad sex in his car.

She doesn’t make the white whale joke. He checks her face too much. It’s uphill in all the wrong ways—in all the ways it’s never been before. They try to defy it, but it’s too desperate to be enjoyable.

They watch the windows clear to a deepening nautical twilight, her head on his shoulder, his fingers skimming her back.

“We’re just tired,” he says to the stars.

They don’t have to decide anything today.

- - -

It’s a quiet ride in: pale November sunshine and gas station cappuccinos.

Rinn’s blue nails drum along on her lid to the song low on the radio—Keep it comin’, love, keep it comin’, love—and he hits the heel of his hand off the steering wheel because he didn’t switch the laundry before he left.

“Damn it…”

Don’t stop it now, don’t stop—

The car jolts and shrieks sideways.

It’s not violent, just sudden—a red light run in a small New England town. But the side of his head hits the window, and the airbags deploy. Rinn’s cappuccino bursts in his lap. He yelps and tries to slap away the burning liquid as a haze fills the car.

“Rinn?”

Broken glass trickles to the floor when she tries to move her legs. She whimpers and squeezes her eyes shut so tight that something cinches hard in his stomach.

“Don’t move, love. They’re coming.”

The bruising is bad. Her neck is stiff. Because it’s so early, the risk to her pregnancy is low; everything is still small and well-cushioned. But they admit her just to be safe.

She doesn’t wake until he’s on his way out to fetch dinner.

“You said it was okay to change my mind.”

He freezes halfway to the curtain surrounding the bed.

Turns. Masks.

Holds his breath.

Hears his whole life hinge on that breath—

Because it’s going to change everything.

“It is.”

Rinn’s breath hitches softly. His shoulders fall as a teary sigh shudders out of her, and in two strides, he’s back at her side, hugging her head to his abdomen.

“Don’t,” he whispers. “It’s all right.”

“Everyone’s going to hate me—"

Her voice breaks on a sob. She tries to hide, but he gathers her face in his hands and makes her look at him. He sweeps a tear from her bruised cheek with his thumb. Raises his eyebrows conspiratorially.

“They’ll hate me much more, I promise.”

A muddy laugh bubbles through her tears. He smooths her hair, glad of it.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Then believe me when I say,” he murmurs as he lowers himself to her level, "I choose you. I choose you, and I would again. With or without all this.”

Rinn’s lip trembles.

“Are you sure?”

He smiles—fondly.

“I think it’s safe to say I am, Miss Matthews.”

He barely gets the words out before she kisses him. It flusters him, the conviction of it, but he drops a kiss atop her head when he stands, reciprocating the sentiment.

“Two chalupas, yeah?”

“And cinnamon twists.”

“And cinnamon twists.”

He offers a parting smile as he draws back the curtain—

And comes face-to-face with Maddy and her parents.

- - -

Maddy leaves her key on the counter—and all of Rinn’s things in the living room.

It’s all very final: this is his person now.

He buys new bedding while Rinn unpacks. Takes down photos. Boxes up reminders.

He misses a Niagara Falls mug Rinn gifted Maddy.

Rinn drops it in the trash.

“Let’s go to bed.”

She’s lying where Maddy used to be. And he has to swallow that. It’s bitter. It stays. But her black hair spills beautifully over a pillow. He’s never seen that before.

He thinks of the ring in the safe, bought for Maddy days before he kissed Rinn. Then he wonders if that ring was ever meant for Maddy at all and shuts his eyes to shut out the thought.

“Do you regret me?”

He opens his eyes. Looks at Rinn, questioning her place—even here, even now. Even after she’s been thrust at him, like a thing he was too afraid to take.

He can’t remember the last time she smiled.

He takes her hand because it’s what the moment calls for. A gesture of reassurance and solidarity. He squeezes, briefly, to assert that, but her expression doesn’t change, and neither does his.

“We should get married,” he says.

“Is this your idea of a proposal?”

“It’s an idea.”

Rinn rolls into him—the answer to everything. He wraps her close, kisses the back of her neck. She wraps them in their new emerald duvet.

Outside, the wind rushes.

“I’m thinking doomed nineteenth-century whaling vessel for a nursery theme,” she quips.

“I was thinking hobbits.”

“Is that the one with the wardrobe?”

“I’ll ignore that.”

- - -

This is Massachusetts on a Tuesday:

Salt-stained linoleum in a cramped courthouse corridor.

I.D.s and license fees: “Can I help who’s next, please?”

They squeeze past the couple behind them, shoes squeaking in the slush. He holds the door. She zips her coat. It’s frigid outside—the hard cold of early January. The kind the heater won’t overcome until they’ve pulled into the driveway.

While her husband locks the paperwork in the safe, Rinn adds another pregnancy test to the row of fading pink lines on the bathroom counter.

This one is white.

This one is empty.

It is cruel.

He can’t name her stillness. She’s not angry or ashamed or adrift. She just looks like she’s been through something. And it’s left her unsteady.

It’s left her with questions.

He sees them—

But he never wants to hear them.

He slides his hands up her arms and squeezes her shoulders.

“Come lie down, love.”

Rinn looks her reflection in the eye as he steers her toward the bedroom.

She wishes he wouldn’t call her that.