Ginny was asleep in the car when Brynn returned. A string of drool slid down the side of her chin. She jumped upright when Brynn opened the door.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Argh.” She rubbed her belly as she stretched. She shot Brynn a look before she could say anything. “I’m fine. Just some little cramps.”
Brynn knew that Ginny downplayed her pain all the time, just as she often downplayed her emotional pain or stress. She also knew that until Ginny’s baby was out of her belly and in her own hands, and she could hear the baby’s breath and heartbeat, she would be nervous. She would be terrified. And if anything went wrong, she’d blame herself.
When Brynn and Ginny had first met, Ginny told her that she wanted to have what she described as a big, chaotic family. She and her husband tried for years. But before she had her son Sam, Ginny had endured a series of painful, relentless miscarriages. Brynn had been by her side during one of those times, holding Ginny’s hand as she sat on the toilet and watched the red cluster of cells fall into the water, leaving a bloody swirl on the surface, like an oil spill. Ginny had abruptly reached for the handle to flush it away, and then it was gone. The immediate days and hours after, Ginny told her, were the hardest for her because she felt like she was grieving someone she had known intimately, someone she’d loved, and yet someone she’d never actually known. An invisible death, she’d said. Brynn always felt that part of the mourning Ginny experienced was also the mourning of herself. The perceived loss of her ability to do the thing she wanted to do most in life.
Each time Ginny got pregnant and then became unpregnant, she told Brynn that she felt less and less entitled to be sad. Take the pressure off yourself, people would tell her, stress is the worst thing for pregnancy. As if that would make her less stressed. She confided in Brynn that she thought all the miscarriages were somehow her fault.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Brynn would tell her each time. “You’re going to have a baby. A perfect, healthy baby.”
And Brynn had been right. Just before Ginny almost gave up entirely, she became pregnant with Sam. And then with Olivia. Both had been surprisingly uncomplicated pregnancies. And now, she was due to have another baby in just a few weeks. But Brynn knew that Ginny was still on pins and needles, waiting for something terrible to happen, waiting to be told that there was, in fact, something wrong with her. It didn’t help that Ginny’s two experiences giving birth hadn’t exactly been positive. Brynn’s birth story was also traumatic for her, but she hesitated to divulge it to Ginny, who she knew had suffered more.
“Doctors don’t believe me when I tell them I’m in pain because I’m black,” she had told Brynn once, bluntly. “Seriously. The racism is so real. It’s why black moms are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white moms.”
“Jesus,” Brynn had said. She knew that her response was wildly insufficient. But she didn’t know what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”
“I just have to advocate for myself a lot more than you would,” Ginny had said. “If I don’t educate myself and then ask the right questions, no one will tell me anything. Trust me, after two kids, I know. But,” she’d added, “we all have to advocate for ourselves. As mothers, I mean. The system is designed to put us on the back burner.”
Ginny had told Brynn this before Brynn herself had become a mother. At the time, Brynn had secretly rolled her eyes at this, just a little bit. Not at Ginny’s personal experience, facing entrenched racism—that was all too real—but at what Ginny had said about the system. Brynn knew plenty of mothers who’d had great birth experiences, and she’d wanted to look forward to giving birth. It was only once she experienced it herself that she learned just how right Ginny had been. There was more medical follow-up for a sprained wrist than for birthing a human. Mothers were expected to suffer and to simply carry on. Mothers were expected to sacrifice. And if mothers spoke up, or objected, or questioned, they were often silenced.
After one of her miscarriages a few years ago, Ginny had told Brynn that she’d had an abortion right after college. She didn’t regret it, she said, but sometimes she wondered if her miscarriages were some kind of punishment.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she’d said to Brynn, “An abortion was the right choice for me. But … what if … I don’t know. What if I threw off the entire course of my life, or something.”
“I had one, too, you know,” Brynn had told her. She’d gotten one during her sophomore year of college after a night with a lacrosse player named Brian who had been so sweet and affectionate that Brynn had thought fuck it when they searched his dorm room for a condom but couldn’t find one. It was exam week; a bad idea to be making important decisions. She was so distracted that she’d forgotten to go get the morning-after pill the next day, and the day after that. And then, suddenly, a week had passed, and it was too late. And just as she’d feared, a month later, her period didn’t arrive when it was supposed to.
Brynn hadn’t wanted to go to the school clinic, so she took the train into Boston and went to a Planned Parenthood. She went alone. An exceedingly friendly nurse with a Jamaican accent explained her options to her, and when Brynn said that she knew she wanted an abortion, the nurse then walked her through what the process would be like. She would take a series of pills at home, some vaginal and some oral, and she’d experience cramping, fatigue, and possible nausea, but she could put this all behind her very soon.
Brynn had felt such overwhelming relief when she’d left and returned to her dorm. Even in the throes of the abortion, when she was curled up in the fetal position, suffering through the worst cramps of her life—far more pain than she’d been warned of—she was grateful.
“Your abortion has nothing to do with this, Ginny,” she’d assured her.
As they sat in the car together, Brynn knew that Ginny was thinking about her abortion. Thinking about the choices she’d made that led her to where she was now. It was something Brynn wouldn’t let herself do lately. She couldn’t. Otherwise, she’d be filled with regret and longing—which was all she’d been feeling lately.
And so, Brynn didn’t push Ginny on how much pain she was actually in right now, and what kind of cramps she was having, and if she should go to the doctor. Ginny would just shush her and tell her again that she was fine.
Instead, Brynn told her everything that she and Jacob had discussed. How Mauricio had been sleeping with another waitress, and she was his alibi. How Jacob knew about the blacked-out police report but didn’t know what was in it. How Pete had been protecting Henry for decades, and how he might still be protecting him today. But what kind of a person would throw his best friend’s son under the bus for a crime unless he was certain he committed it?
As Ginny drove toward the police station in Edgartown, Brynn started to cry.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I just keep thinking that if I had actually tried to talk to Ross, or tried to listen, then none of this would have happened. Cecelia might still be alive, somehow.”
“Come on,” Ginny said. “We still don’t know if anyone in your family actually has anything to do with Cecelia’s death. Let’s not forget that. This could all be a big mistake. We don’t even know for sure that it wasn’t a drowning.”
“Well, maybe, but Jacob seemed to think that there was some solid evidence to prove otherwise.” She looked out the window as they drove by Morning Glory Farm. Next weekend was their Strawberry Festival, not that Brynn would be going. That life seemed so far removed from her already. “I just feel like I had tuned everyone and everything out the past few months, and maybe if I hadn’t, Ross could have talked to me. We could have figured all of this out together.”
Brynn had stopped asking Ross about work months ago, even before Lucas was born. She had stopped caring. Though she admired Ross’s work ethic and loved his passion for what he did, she found the work itself boring. Another mansion, another pool, another greedy client, another hearing with the zoning board, another feature in Martha’s Vineyard magazine. If she thought about it too much, which she tried not to do, she actually hated the work that Ross did because of what it stood for. On an island with a housing crisis, where local residents were forced to do the seasonal shuffle of finding housing in the winter and separate housing in the summer, Ross’s business of building multimillion-dollar homes for wealthy summer residents epitomized everything that Brynn hated about the island and how it had changed since she was a kid. So, she had stopped asking him about work, and if Ross did talk about it, she had stopped listening. Maybe, she realized in a panic, she had tuned him out entirely. Maybe he had tried to tell her about whatever was going on and she hadn’t listened. Maybe she’d shut him out too much.
“You can’t blame yourself, Brynn,” said Ginny, as she turned right into the Edgartown library entrance. She drove behind the school and past the graveyard, to the police station.
They could see Izzy standing outside the station, looking the part of an island lawyer in cropped white jeans and a blue button-down blouse. She was maniacally typing on her phone. She looked up and waved excitedly when she saw Brynn, as if they were meeting for cocktails. “Oh God,” Brynn said. “What am I even doing?”
“It will be fine. Izzy will know how to respond for now. Basically, I think you’ll want to just say … nothing,” Ginny said. “And, Brynn. I know you don’t totally trust me right now, and that’s okay. But I promise you, I’m not doing anything with this story anymore. Just in case that wasn’t obvious. You are more important to me than anything I’ll ever write.”
Brynn looked at her friend. She knew she could believe her, even though part of her was still mad. She nodded.
“And remember,” Ginny said as Brynn started to get out of the car. “Do not trust the police. Especially not Pete.”
“Yup,” Brynn said.
“I’ll wait here,” said Ginny, reclining the seat back again and rubbing her belly. “Don’t worry, I already took two pee breaks in the woods when you were with Jacob.”
Brynn smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “For the ride, I mean.”