I eased myself off the bed so I wouldn’t wake the baby, and I stood in the doorway of our bedroom, one hand pressed flat against the wall, listening.
“And what happens when she goes back to work?” Diane’s voice again, tight and clipped.
“We’ll figure it out,” Caleb said.
“You told me you’d handle this.”
“Mom. Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping.”
I stopped breathing.
There was a pause — a long one — and then Diane said it a second time, quieter now, like she was folding the words into something small enough to hide.
“She can never know.”
That was enough. I didn’t need to hear anything else. I was already moving.
I don’t remember deciding to go downstairs. My feet just went. I crossed the hallway, took the stairs two at a time despite the ache still living in every part of my body, and walked straight into my own kitchen like I had every right to be there — because I did.
They both went silent the second I appeared in the doorway.
Caleb’s face did something I’d never seen it do before. Guilt, maybe. Or fear. His mother recovered faster than he did, straightening her spine and folding her hands like she’d been caught doing nothing more than discussing casserole recipes.
“What can I never know?” I asked.
Neither of them answered.
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs, the baby monitor clipped to my waistband gave a small crackle of static, and for one terrible second I thought I was about to learn something I would never be able to unlearn.
I had no idea, standing there in my socks with my milk-stained shirt and my hair still flat from the pillow, that I was right.
Three weeks earlier, I had been an exhausted but hopeful new mother, certain the hardest part of my life was learning to function on ninety-minute stretches of sleep.
I did not yet know that the hardest part hadn’t started.
PART 2
“I came over to talk about the baby,” Diane said finally, like that explained anything at all.
“With my husband. While I was asleep.”
“You need help, Jess. Especially once you go back to work.”
And there it was — the same conversation she’d been trying to have with me in different clothes for weeks. She wanted to watch Lily full-time. Five days a week, no daycare, no strangers, no monthly invoice. She’d brought it up at the hospital before we’d even been discharged. I’d told her, gently and then less gently, that Caleb and I had already made our decision.
