The Night Before I Gave Birth, I Heard My Husband Pay a Doctor to Make Sure I Never Left the Delivery Room. He Thought I Was Asleep

Not Beckett’s — I had, in some buried way, always half-known what Beckett was, the way you know the weak place in a floor you keep stepping around.

But Larissa I had welcomed.

I had poured her wine.

I had complimented her work to Beckett’s partners.

When she pressed her cool hand to my belly at that gala and told me how excited I must be to become a mother, I had felt a small warmth toward her, this poised, friendly colleague of my husband’s who took an interest in the baby.

And all of it — every smile, every touch, the hand on the belly that held the child she intended to help make an orphan — had been performance, a cruelty so patient and so intimate that it took my breath more than Beckett’s voice had.