Epilogue: Already Home
I lay there and looked at the ceiling.
Mara held my hand.
I cried. Of course I cried. Dr. Lin had warned me I might, even if everything had been perfect. And everything had not been perfect.
But I wasn’t crying because I wanted to keep him. He wasn’t mine. He’d never been mine. I’d known that from the first day.
I was crying for everything else. For the woman who’d sat in Graham’s living room in front of that strange fire and believed every word. For the woman who’d put her husband’s hand on her belly and whispered there you are.
I was crying for her.
Then, after a while, I stopped.
The agreed medical and legal arrangements went forward, after Joan reviewed every document one more time. Graham became the baby’s legal parent.
He named him Thomas. After his grandfather.
He sent me one card, through Joan. It said only, Thank you. I’m sorry. I’ll make sure he knows how he got here. G.
I put it in the drawer with Adam’s vacation list.
Adam moved in with Graham in June.
I came home from the hospital to a quieter house. Quieter than it had ever been. No black SUV in the driveway. No tie slung over the back of a kitchen chair. No phone buzzing on the counter at two in the morning.
And a washing machine that still needed restarting halfway through every load.
In July, I bought a new one.
I went to the appliance store alone on a Saturday afternoon and walked up and down the aisles. A young salesman named Kyle followed me around, explaining the differences between every model in great detail.
I chose a plain white one. Front-loading. Nothing fancy. It was on sale.
I paid with money I’d been setting aside myself, a little at a time from every paycheck since February, in my own account. The one Denise had told me to open on the very first day.
Two men delivered it the following Tuesday. They hauled the old one out of the basement, clunking and groaning, and set the new one in its place. They hooked it up and ran a test cycle.
I stood in the basement and watched it run. All the way through. Wash. Rinse. Spin.
It didn’t stop once.
It wasn’t a victory parade. I knew that.
It was just one thing in my house that worked. Without Adam promising to fix it someday.
One evening in late August, I was on the living room couch matching socks.
Sophie wandered in, in her pajamas with the cats. She’d lost another tooth that week, a bottom one. She kept poking her tongue through the gap.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, bug?”
She stood beside the couch, holding Professor the rabbit by one ear.
“Did Daddy leave because we did something wrong?”
I put the socks down.
I’d been waiting for that question for months. I’d rehearsed the answer with Dr. Lin. I’d rehearsed it in the car.
None of the rehearsing mattered. My heart still dropped into my stomach.
“No,” I said. “No, sweetheart. Not at all. Grown-ups sometimes make choices that change a marriage. Big choices. Grown-up choices. And none of those choices were your fault. Not one single bit.”
She considered that. She poked her tongue through the gap in her teeth.
“Are you leaving too?” she said.
I reached over and pulled her onto the couch. Into my lap. She was getting too big for my lap. Her legs dangled off the side.
I held her anyway.
“I’m right here,” I said into her hair. “I’m not going anywhere. And you’ll always know where to find me. Always. Okay?”
She leaned her head against my shoulder.
We sat like that for a while, saying nothing.
Then she sat up, slid off my lap, and went to the bookshelf. She came back with a big cardboard box.
A jigsaw puzzle. Five hundred pieces. A picture of a lighthouse on a cliff, with the ocean crashing against the rocks. We’d started it in January. Before everything. We’d finished about a quarter of the edges and then stopped. It had been sitting on the bookshelf ever since.
She set the box in my lap.
“Good,” she said. “Because you promised we’d finish this.”
I shoved the pile of socks aside and cleared a space on the coffee table.
“Then we’d better get started,” I said.
Sophie dumped the pieces out of the box. They scattered everywhere. Some landed on the floor. She didn’t care.
She dug through the pile and found one with a straight edge and a little patch of blue sky on it.
She handed it to me.
“Corner piece,” she said. “You start.”
I held that little piece of cardboard in my hand.
For almost a year, I’d been waiting. Waiting for Adam to come home from work. Waiting for him to come home from his weekend shifts. Waiting for him to look up from his phone. Waiting for him to come back to me, the way he used to be.
Waiting in the dark hallway outside the kitchen door.
I set the corner piece down on the coffee table, right where it belonged.
For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t waiting for someone to come home.
I was already there.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
