I looked at the phone, felt my daughter turn beneath my ribs, and switched the notifications off.
At eight he came home furious. “Did you block the card?”
I was in the living room folding baby clothes. A yellow onesie. A white beanie. Socks so small they made my throat ache.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it was in my name.”
His face did something complicated. “We’re married.”
“Exactly.”
“You made me look like an idiot in front of vendors.”
“What a shame.”
He stared at me as though the woman in front of him had turned into a stranger while he was not paying attention. “You’ve been acting really weird lately.”
“Must be the pregnancy.”
He came closer and dropped his voice. “Don’t play games with me, Maya.”
I looked up at him. “I’m not playing.”
For the first time in six years, David had nothing to say.
The next day was the family lunch at Alice’s house. I did not want to go. Every part of me wanted to lock the door and protect my daughter from their smiles. But Paige had told me to go, and the particular way she said it made me understand that something was going to be waiting for me there.
She was right.
The dining room had been set for eleven people. Alice had made the roast she made for occasions, and there were flowers on the table, and everyone was warmer to me than they had been in two years. David’s sister asked how I was sleeping. His uncle got up to pull out my chair.
And on the sideboard, in a leather folder, sat a stack of documents.
Alice waited until dessert. She waited until I had a plate of pie in front of me and a room full of witnesses who had all been briefed, and then she put her hand over mine and said, in that syrup voice, “Honey, before you get too far along, we should really take care of that paperwork. My friend Denise is a notary and she came all this way. It’s silly to make her come back after the baby.”
Denise, sitting at the far end of the table, smiled at me and lifted her little stamp.
I looked around that room, and I understood the whole architecture of it in one breath. Eleven people. Warmth turned up to its maximum setting. A notary invited to Sunday lunch. They had built an ambush out of a family dinner, and they had built it for a woman they expected to be too tired, too hormonal, too outnumbered, and too eager to belong to say no with everybody watching.
“Of course,” I said. “Can I see them?”
Alice’s smile faltered by maybe a millimeter. “Oh, it’s all standard, sweetheart. You know how these things are.”
“I’d still like to read them.”
David said, from across the table, in the voice he used for a difficult child, “Maya.”
“I’m reading them,” I said pleasantly, and I picked up the folder and I read every page in front of eleven silent people while the pie went cold.
It took me nineteen minutes. Nobody spoke for any of them. I could hear the clock in the hall.
The document did three things. It converted the apartment from my separate property into community property. It named David as the sole manager of all community assets, with authority to sell or encumber without my further consent. And it contained a waiver of my interest in his company equity, which was interesting, because for two years he had told me the company was struggling, and the schedule attached to the waiver valued his stake at four hundred and ten thousand dollars.
I set it down. I folded my hands on top of it.
“No,” I said.
Alice’s face did something remarkable. “Maya. We’re all family here.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what’s been bothering me.”
Then I looked at my husband, and I asked him, in front of his mother and his sister and his uncle and a notary named Denise, “David, how much is your equity worth?”
The silence that followed was one of the great pleasures of my life.
“That’s not,” he started.
