I
First Trimester
CHAPTER1
I DON’T DARE look at the pregnancy test.
Not yet. First, I must set up the tripod, adjusting its legs so that it’s the correct height, snapping my phone into the clutch, positioning it perfectly.
I want my reaction to be genuine if it’s good news. I remind myself to think positive thoughts: Worries create wrinkles! Smile instead!
I wouldn’t normally film in our bathroom. It’s a private space, and Graham would be embarrassed, but this is different. Special. Besides, our bathroom is beautiful. It’s new enough that I stop to admire it after washing my hands or, apparently, peeing on a stick.
We redid the downstairs bathroom after we closed on the house, and I told Graham it would be worth the price tag. The sink is made from hundred-year-old reclaimed wood; a porcelain bowl sits atop of it, as if waiting to be filled with colorful fruit, fragrant and shiny. The walls are white wood, and fluffy eggshell-colored towels are neatly displayed on floating shelves. The towels are still warm; I did the laundry earlier today, carefully folding everything. The bathroom smells of lavender, from the oil diffuser on the counter, and eucalyptus, from the ribboned bundle that hangs from the showerhead, tender green heads resting against the subway tiles.
The plastic test is flat on the sink’s counter, sitting on top of a lace doily I crocheted last year. I recorded a time-lapse video of me making the doily, flaxen hair spilling loosely over sun-kissed shoulders, my face fresh and filter-free; it got over a million views.
Standing behind the tripod that holds my phone, I place both my hands on my flat belly, imagining it swelling, imagining the photos I will take, imagining baking barefoot in the kitchen, flour dusting my glowing skin.
Manifest this, I repeat to myself. Manifest.
Graham would tell me to pray, but that’s more his wheelhouse than mine.
I move around the tripod, ducking out of the bathroom to check my reflection in the hall mirror. The one in the bathroom is too close to the pregnancy test. I don’t want to be tempted to glance down before I’m ready.
I examine my face in the mirror. Pinch my cheeks, bringing color to them. My eyes are wide and hopeful. Almost desperate. That won’t do. I lean closer to my reflection and think of sad things like dogs in pounds and old men waiting for the bus in the rain. Dewy tears collect along the rims of my eyes, making them look more hazel and less brown. Perfect.
Now I am ready.
Stepping back into the bathroom, I hit record on my phone and hop into the camera’s frame, smiling.
“Hi, friends! It’s me, Camille. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know how important this is. So I wanted to share it all live.” Technically, that is a lie. There’s no way I would actually live stream my pregnancy results. I want to tell Graham first. And what if it’s bad news?
features. Graham is always saying I look far less cherubic when I’m upset. It will be positive!
“OK, here we go, the results from my pregnancy test!” I chirp, staring into the camera lens. “I’m so excited. I already know we’re going to have a little girl; I can feel it …”
I lean over, lift the test up, cast my teary eyes down, a celebration already forming on my naturally exfoliated lips.
The plastic trembles and my sight blurs for a moment before I refocus, swallowing hard, words tumbling down the back of my throat like rancid pomegranate seeds.
Tearing a piece of toilet paper from the roll, I wind it around the test, dropping it in the trash. I have to remember to take the garbage out before Graham gets home in an hour. And I should have started dinner already. I’ll have to make a few canapés so he has something to tide him over.
All our food must be handmade, cooked from scratch. Dinner will take a while. I was going to do a pork roast with sautéed vegetables; I haven’t even washed the veggies yet. I was avoiding them, ashamed I had to buy the zucchini and peppers from the nearby farm instead of yanking them from my own garden like I did at our old house. I haven’t had enough time to set up a new plot here yet. But I can whip up some bruschetta—we have leftover sourdough from the batch I made this weekend and local tomatoes and basil. There’s fresh-squeezed lemonade in our fridge. We aren’t big drinkers, but maybe I’ll add vodka to Graham’s lemonade tonight. He’ll put on a game and relax on the ivory sectional while I cook, thinking I planned it that way.
At least I had the forethought to not tell him I was testing today. If I don’t say anything, he’ll have no idea.
I take down the tripod quickly, deleting the truncated video from my phone and swiping away the tears, real ones, this time, clinging to my expertly applied mascara. I’m smudging my “makeup-free” look and I’ll have to retouch it before Graham comes home, but I can’t help it.
I really thought things would be different here, in the new house. It’s only been a month, but I had hoped the change in location would make everything better. Instead, here I am again with a negative test and an empty womb.
I need a baby. I promised our family. I promised my husband. I promised my followers.
Looking at my reddening face in the gold-trimmed bathroom mirror, I picture slamming a fist into the glass, watching shards drive into my knuckles and wrist, scowling as blood runs down my arm, staining my beautiful taupe linen dress.
Instead, I shake my head, golden locks swaying, dab at my eyes, and smile.
CHAPTER2
GRAHAM IS GOING to be late. Again. Second time this week.
He texts me twenty minutes after he is due home—the phone screen lights up as my fingers drip with balsamic.
Grabbing drinks with the sales team. Be home later. Don’t worry about dinner.
When I was little, my mother would tell me that every time I felt like frowning, I should smile instead. It’s one of the few memories I have of her.
“It takes more muscles to frown, Camille,” she would say. “Avoid those wrinkles on your forehead. Change the negative into a positive and smile!”
When my mother died, my father continued her tradition, warning me off creases and crinkles by telling me to stay calm and serene.
Early on in our relationship, Graham asked why I smiled so much. I didn’t tell him the truth. I said smiling was part of who I was.
Graham and I met when I was twenty and he was twenty-five. We were both at a farmers market—he noticed my handwoven basket filled with fresh fruit and vegetables and came over to chat, asking if I liked to cook, if I had made the basket myself. We planned a coffee date, an enraptured expression on Graham’s face when I showed up with loose hair and a long, linen dress.
“So, Camille, what do you do?” he asked over lattes and scones.
“Oh, well, I’m not in school anymore, so I’m working at a wholesale growing center. I help grow and harvest plants and flowers, then we send them to retailers and local florists.” Graham’s expression glazed over, his eyes skimming the rest of the coffee shop. Hurriedly, I added, “But I’d love to have a family one day. I lost my mother when I was young, and I’ve always dreamed of giving my child what I didn’t have.”
This Graham liked. He perked up, gaze swiveling back to my face. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Camille. That must have been hard for you. Do you want to talk about it?”
His kindness in that moment endeared him to me even more, and he spent the rest of the date holding my hand across the table, stroking a thumb against my knuckles.
A picnic in the park followed the success of our coffee date, then we made it official. We married a year after we first met. Very romantic. Photos of our wedding day, me with soft curls and a lace dress, him in a smart blue suit, dark hair slicked back, decorate our walls.
Shortly after we wed, I noticed a new type of content pop up online: attractive women in beautiful kitchens, baking bread from scratch, collecting eggs from their chickens, doting upon angelic children who politely smiled for the camera. Their ruggedly good-looking husbands bought them aprons and handwoven wool blankets as gifts. I saw their lifestyle, and I wanted it. With Graham’s blessing, I started posting photos and videos of our life with a pretty, rustic aesthetic that people—mostly women—flocked to.
I made sure to always smile, showing gratitude and keeping those pesky wrinkles at bay.
towel to dry off. I keep my lips curled as I put plastic wrap over the bruschetta and slip it into the huge stainless fridge.
The kitchen smells of pork, slowly roasting. The vegetables sit dripping on the butcher block counter. I haven’t gotten around to cutting them yet.
Learning to cook, and cook well, took me a while. Years, really. It wasn’t natural for me like it is for some of the women online, making meals from scratch easily and calmly. But perhaps that’s because my home education started earlier, under more dire circumstances. When my mother passed, it was only me and my father, so I became the lady of the house. I was eight. Father was an attorney, always busy, always hungry when he returned home. Adopting my mother’s recipe books, I painstakingly learned to cook for him, but I didn’t get any good at it until I reached my teens. Cleaning the house was easier. Keeping things tidy and organized was my forte.
The first time I cooked a perfect steak, my father sighed, lips twitching. “Finally. No more sneaking takeout after you go to bed. Excellent work, Camille. You’re your mother’s daughter.”
That approval meant more to me than anything else in the world. I latched on to it, craved it. Smeared it around my lips and licked it up like ice cream.
No worries, babe, I text back to Graham when I’m calmer and my smile has faded slightly. I’ll see you later. I’ll leave leftovers in the fridge for you in case you get hungry.
He’s been doing this more and more often since we moved. Staying out late. Coming home looking peculiar, like a stranger wearing a mask of his face. We haven’t had sex in weeks. I think of the pregnancy test. I had hoped his dip in amorousness was because he knew, on some level, that I was growing our child. As if his manly, evolutionary instinct had kicked in and recognized the pheromones of his mate. But I know now that can’t be true.
The roast still has thirty-five minutes in the vintage oven Graham bought for us when we first moved in, upon my request. I have some time. Unwinding the ties from around my neck and waist, I drape my apron across the back of a wooden stool at the marble breakfast bar and move around the muted, minimalistic space.
Our new home is a farmhouse-style two-story that we—well, I—decorated to be quietly rustic, with wooden accent furniture and white walls. The color palette for everything is neutral tones—beige, champaign, pearl, sand. Where I wanted pops of color, I used a light apricot, which shows itself in throw pillows and candlestick holders. I had researched other accounts like mine, pausing on videos and zooming in on homes in the background, eager to imitate the gorgeous aesthetic I was never able to recreate in our other house. Our old place was cramped, too small for the farmhouse minimalist style that’s popular within my online niche. But, with Graham’s help, I made this place into the ideal home. Both for us and for social media.
I don’t stop to admire the open-concept living room today. The smell of meat permeates the first floor as I open a charmingly carved pine box that sits on the glass coffee table. I dip a hand inside, digging around the loose change until I find what I’m looking for: a penny, shiny and coppery. I don’t keep ugly coins. If they look green or battered, I toss them in the church collection basket along with whatever crisp bills Graham has in his wallet that week.
Holding the penny loosely in my hand, I move through the living room until I come to the sliding glass door at the back of the house, floating out onto the concrete slab that will eventually become a patio and into the backyard. Which is really just a giant field.
A lot of girls like me have a real farm, but we’re not at that point yet. I don’t even have a chicken coop—we get our eggs and meat from the Calloways, our neighbors up the road. I’ll need to work on that; the least I can do is get the herb and vegetable garden started soon.
We have no fence. We have no boundaries. Our land is sizable and unbound—we are the only house in sight. I stride over the gently
sloping grassy lawn, walking straight into the wheat field, turning the penny in my palm, feeling it grow warm with the heat from my skin.
The ankle-length linen dress I’m wearing shushes against my shins as I walk, bare feet parting the green blades as I go. The late-summer sun is beginning to sink below the faraway tree line, casting mellow liquid gold over the wheat. The field moves as one being in the breeze, and my breath catches as I am reminded again that this is mine now. Well, Graham’s, technically. But part of my life. My home.
The wheat comes up to my shoulders. I discovered early on that walking in the field made me feel like I was swimming in a sea of straw. When Graham caught me wandering into the wheat the first time, he cautioned against it, citing ticks and snakes. Chastised, I avoided the field for a few days before I was drawn back to it. Now I only visit when Graham isn’t home, letting my palms drift against the wheat heads, my feet crunching through the fallen stalks.
The setting sun bathes my face and the penny grows hotter in my hand. I try to swallow the lump forming in my throat, but it makes my eyes water more.
I wander through the field, heading toward the back of the property, where a thick line of ancient trees announces the arrival of the forest. I am consumed by the wheat, and I glance over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of our house’s eaves rising above the thicket.
Everything is quiet inside the field; I am aware of crickets chirping and birds whizzing by overhead, traveling to their nests ahead of the sinking sun, but there is a silence within the wheat all the same. The inside of my head quiets the most, easing away thoughts of the pregnancy test, the pork roast, Graham.
At the edge of the field, the wheat drops away, getting shorter and sparser, creating a bare strip of land right before the trunks of the trees erupt from the ground, signaling the darkness of the forest.
I haven’t dared to go into the woods; I always stay in the liminal space between the wheat and the forest. The trees sprawling before
me are thick and close together—the light is dim and watery, like the bottom of a brackish pond. I can’t see much more from here except gnarled roots and underbrush lashed together.
Walking in the field is one thing, but there are probably animals lurking among the trees that I don’t want to come upon. Bears, maybe. Or foxes with needle-sharp teeth. Owls that will rip my hair out for their nests.
The other reason I don’t like the forest is because it hums. A low, almost inaudible vibration that steals into my body and settles on my bones. But I keep coming back to this part of our property, every chance I get, because this is where the old well is, crouching several yards away from the forest’s hemline.
I approach the well now, weeds flattened around it from where I’ve trampled them, rocky wall eroding slightly, the tattered remnants of a wooden bucket leaning sadly against its side. The whole thing will have to be boarded up when I eventually have a baby, but for now, I keep its existence to myself. I haven’t told Graham.
I discovered the well a week ago, and at first, it frightened me. It smells sweet and sharp, like rotting flowers, and it reminds me of a person, hunched over, waiting to spring to their feet. But now I need it.
Before the car accident, my mother and I used to take walks to Mr. Jasper’s yard down the block from our ranch house. He had a little wishing well in the front yard. There was no water at the bottom, no hole—it was for show only, but my mother and I would still toss pennies in there, wishing.
“What did you wish for?” I would always ask her.
“If I tell you, it won’t come true,” she would reply, smiling.
And every night after visiting the wishing well, while she was tucking me into bed, she would whisper in my ear, “I wished for you to be happy.”
This well doesn’t have the little awning over the top that Mr. Jasper’s well did. Maybe it used to, but it rotted away. The rocky rim comes up to my hips, and the frayed end of a rope drapes against its lip.
I peer over the edge, looking down.
The sun’s rays turn red, growing longer and darker as it begins to slip from my sight, offering no light to examine the bottom of the well with.
I slide my phone from my dress’s pocket and tap on the flashlight app, lifting the light over the lip of the well. The phone’s beam shines into the darkness and immediately disappears.
I pull my hand back, skin prickling. Is my phone broken?
I tap the flashlight off and on. Try again. The same thing happens—it’s like the well has consumed the light, chewing off the ends of the beam so it can’t reach the bottom.
My heart flutters. The quietness in my head dissipates, and I start thinking of the roast in the oven. Of my to-do list, all the things I still need to finish before Graham comes home. What am I doing out here with this musty old well in front of a decrepit forest?
The lighting is nice, though. I quickly step back from the well, turning off the flashlight and positioning the phone for a selfie. I hide my hand with the penny. I stare shyly at the camera, as if I’ve just noticed it, admiring the golden hour glow on my flawless skin. The well is visible in the background. It gives the photo a charming look—my followers might like to hear about it. This could end up being a marvelous content plan: I can throw the penny in, make my wish, and when it comes true, I’ll post the photo and story. It will definitely go viral.
After snapping several dozen photos with slightly different angles and facial expressions, I put the phone back in my pocket and hesitate, staring at the well.
I came here for this, to do this, but now that I’m looking at the yawning opening that eats up light, I am apprehensive.
The pork roast, I remind myself.
Yes. I have things to do.
I step forward again, gazing down into the inkiness of the hole. I press the penny against my lips, kissing it, feeling the hot metal ridge against my mouth.
“I wish for a baby,” I whisper, and before I can second-guess myself, I release the penny, letting it fall into the darkness.
I lean forward, hands resting against the rough ring of rocks around the edge of the well, listening for a splash. Or even a clink if the well is dry. But there is nothing. A cool breeze caresses my face, but it doesn’t come from the woods or the field—it comes up from the well, and it carries a mildewy, earthy scent. The breeze is accompanied by a whooshing sigh. My mouth goes dry, and my hands tremble, gripping on to the lip of the well so hard that they begin to cramp.
The darkness below shifts. There’s no other way to describe it—the hole is becoming even murkier, swirling, moving around within itself. A scraping noise comes from far below me, soft at first, then more insistent. Like a bird rubbing its beak against the metal bars of a cage.
My breath comes short and fast, and I want to pull my hands away, turn back to the house, but I can’t seem to move. My feet are rooted down, a tree that has fused itself to the stones of the well. I can only blink, rolling my eyes back and forth, my brain seeking images within the black hole. The bottom of the well beckons me; the sighing breeze, the rhythmic scraping, the smell of wet soil getting stronger and stronger.
Goose bumps collect on my arms. I can’t look away. The shadows in the well are like liquid, and there’s something moving underneath the surface of them, pulling itself upward, toward the dying light of the day.
My phone chimes, breaking my trance.
I release the lip of the well, gasping, stumbling back, nearly tripping over the skirt of my dress. Automatically, I check my phone, noting Graham’s text: See you soon, love.
Soon? He said he would be late.
When I look back at the well, the sun has set. The sky is an indigo blanket above me, the sleepy shine of early stars showing their faces. The temperature has dropped, and I shiver in my white linen, staring at the well. It’s too
dark to see it clearly now.
Where did the time go? How long was I out here?
“Oh no, the roast,” I murmur.
I turn my back on the well, ignoring the tightness in my chest as I do. I run through the field, following the beckoning lights of our house in the distance, the absence of the penny pressing into my hand.
CHAPTER3
I AM LEANING AGAINST the counter in the kitchen, scrolling through Mara Shoemaker’s Instagram page, when Graham’s car crunches outside on the gravel driveway. Inhaling deeply, I glance up from my phone screen. Hopefully I got the acrid smell of charred pig out of the house—I opened all the windows and lit some incense after returning from the well and throwing out the ruined pork roast. I opted to whip up a simple pasta salad instead, using the veggies as a side. Then I turned to Mara’s social media, needing to forget the strange way time had slid away when I was out in the field, the things I thought I saw in the well.
Mara Shoemaker is my favorite influencer, queen of the niche we both belong to—traditional women who focus on taking care of our families and tending the house, living a natural and healthy life.
Mara was on her way to becoming a potential Hollywood star before she switched to influencing. She was a semi-known household name from her Micastra commercials; people loved the way she sang her line, “Now my heart burns only for you,” to her handsome costar-turned-boyfriend.
Micastra built an ad campaign around her, the Heartburn Girl, with her short dark bob and appealingly soft features. People were actually turning on their TVs to sing along to her catchy and charming commercials, and there were rumors she was being circled for a sitcom pilot. But then she got serious with the man she met on the set of that first commercial, Jake Shoemaker, and married him. Mara hung up her promising acting career and focused on starting a family instead.
I don’t personally know Mara; she has millions of followers and I only have forty thousand on my Instagram and seventy thousand on my TikTok, but that’s to be expected. Mara has a publicity background, plus she and her husband have eight children. I have none. My content is sorely lacking something important, and one of the reasons I’m not seeing much online growth is because I don’t have any children to share with the world.
The clunk of the garage door opening echoes from the front of the house, and my gaze drops back down to my phone screen.
I have a few minutes—Graham will park the car and grab a beer from the mini-fridge I set up for him in the garage before kicking off his shoes and plodding through the hallway to meet me in the kitchen. I can finish watching Mara’s latest video. ...
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