Beautiful Sacrifice Chapter 22: Suddenly, A Baby

Previously, Falyn told Taylor they should go on a break and think about their future as a couple. Taylor thought they were broken up, got drunk, and slept with someone else. But – get this – Falyn thought they were still together! The truth comes out at Taylor’s brother’s vow renewal ceremony, and they agree they want to try to be adults about it and work through it and communicate openly and stuff.

Beautiful Sacrifice: Chapter 22

So, naturally, this chapter starts with a hilarious misunderstanding.

“I can’t do this.”
I heard him say the words, but thirteen weeks of work and forgiveness wouldn’t allow me to believe it. […]
“I’ve worked on this. I’ve spent hours and weekends trying to make things better, working it out in my own head that you’ve had your hands… and other things… on another woman. I’m here, taking a chance on everything, ignoring the images in my mind that haunt me every single time we’re in bed. And you’re just going to quit on me? No,” I said, shaking my head, realizing that I was pacing but not stopping myself. “You can’t just say it’s over. It’s not over.”
“I didn’t,” he said, amused. “But this… this is good. I’m liking this. […] I can’t keep living apart. I want to at least be in the same city.”
I fell to the bed, holding my middle. “I thought you were ending it.”

Can they please, though? Taylor makes a vague and ominous statement, Falyn assumes he’s breaking up with her (which is a little ironic when you reflect on how they got here in the first place), and then Taylor just… is amused she misunderstood him? None of this is charming. If they’re this bad at talking with each other, what are they even holding onto?

As it turns out, this is not a chapter about how they talked about moving in together.

“The desk clerk said that a woman is waiting for me in the lounge. Alyssa Davies.”
I shrugged and shook my head, having no recollection of the name.
“It’s the woman I… from San Diego.”
“She’s here?” I asked, standing. […] “Why?”

Well, I guess she’s pregnant with Taylor’s child. There’s no other conceivable reason why a one-night stand from out of state would show up out unannounced. Everyone pretend this is a surprising plot development.

Alyssa (who you might remember as Agent Davies from Beautiful Redemption, whose only character trait was that everyone thought she was a huge slut – again, subtlety isn’t Beautiful Fill-In-The-Blank‘s strong suit) apologies for how surprising this is and for not calling first. She hesitates to start talking in front of Falyn, but Taylor immediately explains she’s his girlfriend and she knows what happened, so Alyssa goes ahead with the totally extremely surprising news.

“Well, she doesn’t know this,” Alyssa said, raising her eyebrows. She pulled a folded paper that looked like it had been wadded up a few times and pushed it across the table to Taylor.
He opened it, read it […] He was so still that I wasn’t sure if he was still breathing.
“Pregnant?” Taylor said, swallowing.
All the air was knocked out of me

Believe it or not, the story only goes more off the rails after this point. So, uh, I’m just gonna copy/paste their conversation without weighing in on anything quite yet, and you buckle the fuck up.

Alyssa sighed. “Fifteen weeks tomorrow. I scheduled an abortion for Thursday.”
“You… do you want me to go with you?” Taylor asked.
Alyssa breathed a laugh, unimpressed. “No. I canceled it.”
“So…” Taylor began. “You’re keeping it.”
“No.”
I rubbed my forehead and then looked down, trying not to scream. This wasn’t happening to us, to that baby.
“You’re giving it up?” Taylor asked.
“That depends,” Alyssa said, putting the paper back into her purse. Her cool demeanor was maddening. “I’m not in the position to raise it. Are you?”
Taylor touched his chest. “You’re asking me if I want to keep it.”

So Ariel and I had, like, one or two things to say about this development.

Ariel:
oh my god I read the next chapter of beautiful sacrifice, and I’m like are you fucking kidding me

Matthew:
YEAH UH IT’S A LOAD OF HORSESHIT, RIGHT?
This is going to be a hard post to write. It’s just so insanely bad. This woman just falls out of the sky to offer to carry a baby for this stranger for… why? What is her motivation? I don’t even know where to begin with how bad this is.

Ariel:
I know, it’s actually so bad and contrived it’s difficult to think of where to start. This book is really laying the ~it was fated~ bullshit on way too thick.
And don’t get me wrong I can be a sucker for that sort of thing. I’m not made of stone. But between Olive living next door to Taylor and hanging out with Travis all the time and this… it’s just too much. And it speaks to this pathological need to be like BUT WITHOUT BIOLOGICAL FAMILY
I know Falyn felt bad about adopting, but what a more interesting story to wrestle with than “oh a baby fell from the sky and alyssa will give up full rights and fade away so they can raise Taylor’s baby together in harmony and Falyn will not be biologically related but irrefutably the mother”

Matthew:
It’s iNsAnE. It’s like Juno, but if Juno went to Michael Cera first and asked him if he wants the baby. And also if the main character were Michael Cera’s shitty prom date who doesn’t have any lines.
I just can’t wrap my head around this whole, “hey, do you want this baby? *I* don’t want this baby, but I’ll go through nine months of pregnancy on the off chance you, a total stranger, might want it, idk,” like A HUMAN BABY is a free side salad that came with your meal or something.
What kind of people act like this?

Falyn’s own reaction is its own brand of heartbreaking, because it really speaks to Ariel’s point about this story’s regressive “being a woman and being in love means MaKiNg BaBy” messaging and how little interest this story has in actually exploring what it’s trying to say about that.

She’s beautiful, confident, pregnant with Taylor’s baby, and a lawyer? Could she surpass me in any more ways?

And, understandably, Falyn has some thoughts on giving up a child.

“Stop,” I said. “You need to think about what you’re doing.”
She glared at me. “Excuse me. I respect that you’re here for Taylor, but I’m not asking for your opinion.”
“I understand that,” I said. “But I’ve been in your position. This is not a business transaction. It’s a baby.”
“You’ve—”
“Given up a child, yes. It’s not something that ever goes away. Just… I guess I’m hoping that you make sure it’s truly what you want before you decide.”

But then the conversation just ends because I guess Agent Davies realizes this isn’t a level of agency the story actually wants her to have.

she trained her eyes on Taylor. “I’m leaving it up to you.”

Girl can’t get any agency in this story and her job is literally agent.

Falyn decides this isn’t her decision to make and leaves Taylor and Alyssa to have an actual conversation about this. Beautiful Sacrifice is really worried someone is missing the subtle themes here.

sad stories had a funny way of ending the way they’d begun, and the irony of our situation wasn’t lost on me. I had given up my child and couldn’t have more. Taylor was going to stay with me anyway, and by a snowball of events that had started with me, Taylor would have a child of his own after all.

…because a character who was just the slut in a different book showed up out of fucking nowhere to be like, “hey, want a baby?”

Falyn starts walking home to try to process what just happened, and things somehow get worse as her mother happens to drive past and offers her a ride wherever she’s going. She assures Falyn they don’t have to talk, and Falyn (either in a moment of weakness or in a moment of forgetting literally everything we know about how relationship with her mom) gets in the car, and then she immediately starts telling Falyn what a disappointment she is.

After just a quarter of a mile, Blaire sighed. “Your father hasn’t been well. I don’t think this campaign is good for him.”
I didn’t respond. […]
Blaire parked in one of the many empty spots in front of the Bucksaw. “You have to come home, Falyn—or at least let us move you into an apartment and your father can get you a decent job.”
“Why?”
“You know why,” she snapped.
“It’s always about appearances, isn’t it? You couldn’t care less about me.”
“That’s not true. I’m appalled that you live up there in that filth”

The only thing making this surprising at all is that I kinda forgot Falyn’s mom was in this story too.

Blaire continues to have such underdeveloped motivations that all she can do is assert that they’re important.

“Don’t you see where keeping up appearances has gotten our family? Your husband is sick. Your daughter wants nothing to do with you. And for what?”
“Because it’s important!” she hissed

Ok, this is a boring enough motivation that it’s time for…

• “But why did Voldemort try to kill me as a baby?” Harry asked.
  “Because it’s important!” Dumbledore explained.
• “The entire castle is yours to explore, except for the West Wing.” The Beast stated.
  “What’s in the West-” Belle began to ask before he cut her off with a roar.
  “IT’S IMPORTANT.”
• “Why are you doing this to us?” Violet shouted at Count Olaf.
  “Because it’s important!” Count Olaf/Neil Patrick Harris laughed.

My point being that if we got literally any word other than important, this might have actually shown us something about Blaire. Even if she just said “because that’s what you’re supposed to do”, that’d at least flesh out how lost she is in societal expectations. And “it’s important” kind of does that, but “it’s important” mostly sounds like the sort of motivation you give a character too unimportant to have anything more interesting to do.

“you can’t keep omitting the ugly parts. You can’t just erase a pregnancy. You can’t hide a baby. You can’t pretend your daughter isn’t a waitress who doesn’t want to be a doctor. Our life is not a highlight reel. It’s time you stopped pretending it was.”
She inhaled through her nose. “You have always been supremely selfish.”

See, even this is way better! “Selfish” is such a weird insult that the reader can feel how hard she’s projecting her own issues at her daughter!

They part ways acrimoniously, with Blaire saying that “If your father loses this campaign because of you, we won’t offer to help you again.”

The chapter absolutely refuses to end and then we get another scene where Falyn oversleeps and her coworker who doesn’t talk wakes her up. It’s weird even in context; who is this character?

Pete touched his thumb to his lips, lifting his pinky in the air.
“No. I wasn’t drinking. The girl Taylor was with in San Diego? She’s pregnant.”
Pete’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline

She tells all her coworkers without Netflix what happened with Taylor and Alyssa. Chuck tries to give her some advice.

“You should let him decide if you’re his priority or not.”
“It’s not that I don’t think he would choose me,” I said over my shoulder. “It’s just that I couldn’t live with myself if he did.”

You tell me what that means. I’m genuinely not sure anymore. What is happening in this book?