The Name We Chose
Later that evening, Elise was brought into the NICU in a wheelchair.
She found me sitting beside the incubator without my jacket or tie.
“You’re still here.”
I looked at her.
“Where else would I be?”
She did not answer. I understood why. Six months earlier, I probably would have been somewhere else.
I told her I had been thinking about the baby’s name. Her grandfather had been named Elias Rowan. He had raised Elise after her parents passed away when she was young. She had spoken about him constantly during our marriage. He had been a carpenter in Oklahoma who believed that promises mattered more than money.
“What about Eli?” I asked.
Elise looked toward the incubator. For the first time that day, she smiled.
“Eli Rowan Redmond.”
I nodded.
“I like it.”
We sat there together. For a few minutes, our divorce no longer mattered.
Then my phone vibrated. It was a message from Tessa.
“Should I cancel dinner with the Denver investors? I can tell them you had a family emergency.”
Family emergency.
I stared at those words. Then something Elise had said came back to me. She had called. Again and again.
I opened the blocked-call settings on my phone. I had barely ever looked at them because Tessa managed most of my communications.
There were dozens of filtered numbers. One appeared repeatedly.
Elise Rowan. Six calls.
My chest tightened.
Then I found the voicemail archive. Three messages had been automatically moved into a deleted folder.
I pressed play.
