Chapter 3 #3
“Then you shouldn’t have insulted me.”
“I’m frustrated.”
“So am I.”
“I came home. I took Owen. I cooked dinner. I apologized.” He lifted both hands, no longer containing his anger. “I am doing everything I know how to do, and you are acting like I’ve destroyed our marriage.”
Miranda turned from the crib. “You keep listing basic responsibilities as evidence of extraordinary devotion.”
“That is not fair.” His voice was tight, the words clipped as if he’d bitten them off.
Miranda watched his hands, the way they flexed at his sides. “Neither is being congratulated for parenting your own child for two hours.”
“No one congratulated me.” The protest sounded thin even to him.
“You congratulated yourself.” She didn’t raise her voice, but each syllable landed like a stone. “I heard you on the phone with your mother. ‘Handled dinner and the baby all by myself.’”
Garrett took one step toward her, then stopped as if the air between them had grown dense. “What do you want from me?”
“I wanted you to come home at two.” Her gaze dropped to the faint milk stain on her shirt, then back to his face. “Not four.”
“I said I was sorry.” The apology had begun to sound like a reflex, stripped of meaning.
“I wanted you to think of me when you won something beautiful.” Her voice caught on the last word. “To remember I exist outside this room.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I wanted you to tell me my job was being changed while I was gone.” She watched his throat work as he swallowed. “Weeks ago. Not let me find it myself.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“You keep repeating that because you have nothing else.” Her hands were trembling; she pressed them flat against her thighs.
“What else is there?” He spread his hands, a gesture of helplessness she once would have found endearing.
Miranda looked at him for a long moment, taking in the defensive set of his shoulders, the way he held his body angled toward the door. “Understanding.”
Garrett’s face hardened. “I understand that you’re hurt.”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “You understand that I am making your evening unpleasant.” She gestured toward the half-packed diaper bag by the dresser, the burp cloth draped over the rocking chair. “You want to go downstairs where no one expects anything from you.”
“That is not true.” But he didn’t meet her eyes when he said it.
“You want me calm because calm is easier for you.” Miranda folded her arms over her chest, then loosened them when milk leaked again against the fabric. “You don’t care whether I feel safe in this marriage as long as I stop making you feel accused.”
The words finally struck something deeper than his pride. Garrett’s expression changed, and for one second Miranda saw fear.
“You are safe with me,” he said.
“Physically, yes.”
His face closed again. “I cannot believe we are having this conversation.”
“Neither can I.”
Owen began to fuss in the crib. Miranda turned toward him, but Garrett moved first and lifted him before the cry developed.
Their hands nearly touched. Miranda pulled hers back.
Garrett held Owen against his chest and looked at her over the baby’s head. “You need sleep.”
She laughed softly, and there was no humor in it. “There it is again.”
“What?” His voice was low, almost a growl, as if the accusation were a physical object she’d thrown at him.
“The explanation that makes this my body’s fault.” She didn’t gesture toward her milk-stained shirt or the exhaustion carved into her face, but the words hung between them, heavy with implication.
“I am trying to help.” He took a half-step forward, his hands lifting slightly before falling back to his sides, empty.
“You are trying to disqualify me.” Her voice was flat, stripped of heat but not of certainty.
Garrett’s eyes flashed, the color sharpening in the dim light of the bedroom. “That is not what I’m doing.”
“It is what you have done all day.” She held his gaze, her own unwavering. “Every time you listed what you did for your own child as if it were a gift to me.”
Owen’s fussing intensified. Garrett bounced him, but the baby twisted toward Miranda, mouth rooting against the fabric of Garrett’s shirt.
“He just ate,” Garrett said.
“He wants comfort.”
“I can comfort him.”
“Then do it.”
The challenge entered the room between them.
Garrett adjusted his hold and began pacing. Owen cried harder, confused by the familiar body that was not the one he wanted.
Miranda watched for thirty seconds. Then a minute.
Every instinct demanded that she take him. Her breasts tightened painfully at the sound, and her hands curled against her sides.
Garrett kept walking.
“I’ve got him,” he said, though Miranda had not moved.
Owen’s cry became sharp and breathless. Garrett’s face tightened with concentration, and he changed his position, then changed it again.
Miranda could not bear it.
She stepped forward and took the baby from him. Owen quieted almost instantly against her chest, his breathing ragged with leftover grief.
Garrett looked stricken.
Miranda turned away before sympathy could soften her. She carried Owen to the window and rubbed his back while the last cries weakened into hiccups.
Behind her, Garrett said, “That was cruel.”
She turned slowly. “What was cruel?”
“Standing there and letting him scream to prove a point.”
“You said you could comfort him.”
“You knew he wanted you.”
“Yes.”
“And you let me fail.”
Miranda stared at him.
The accusation was so revealing that for a moment she could not answer. Garrett did not hear Owen’s distress and think first of the baby; he thought of being watched while he failed.
“You made that about you,” she said.
His expression shifted, anger giving way to shock.
Miranda looked down at Owen, whose fist had closed around the neckline of her shirt. “That is what you do. You need to be the good man in every room.”
Garrett’s face went pale. “I am a good man.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Miranda’s voice broke, and she hated him for making grief enter the argument. “That is why this hurts.”
Garrett looked away first.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke. The house settled around them, ordinary and intact, while something inside the room altered beyond easy repair.
His phone buzzed on the bed.
Neither of them moved toward it.
The screen lit long enough for Willa’s name to appear, followed by a photograph preview too small to identify. Garrett looked at it, then at Miranda.
“Answer her,” Miranda said.
“I’m not going to.”
“She clearly expects you to.”
“She can wait.”
Miranda pressed her lips to the top of Owen’s head. “How often do you make her wait?”
Garrett’s jaw tightened. He crossed his arms, which put his hands close to the phone without touching it. “I don’t keep records.”
“No, I’m sure she does that for you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means she knows the exact length of your leash.”
“She texts me because we work together.”
“She texts you because you come.”
“So do dozens of people.”
“Do they tell you you’re the sweetest man alive?”
A muscle moved in his throat. He glanced at the phone the way you glance at someone you’ve pretended not to see. “She was grateful.”
“She performs gratitude because you feast on it.”
Whatever she had said before that stung him, this reached somewhere older. His face didn’t harden so much as empty, the way a room looks when someone has just left it. His arms dropped to his sides.
“You think I’m that pathetic.”
“I think you like being admired.”
“Everyone likes being appreciated.”
“Not everyone lets it replace judgment.”
Garrett crossed to the bed and picked up his phone. For one terrible second, Miranda thought he meant to answer Willa in front of her.
Instead, he held it out.
“Read it,” he said.
Miranda did not move.
“Go ahead,” Garrett continued. “Read all of it. Every message. If that is what it takes for you to stop imagining things, then do it.”
The phone rested in his palm between them.
Miranda looked at the screen. The latest message was a photograph of the YSL basket open on what appeared to be Willa’s bed, tissue paper spread around it like petals.