Four #2
Then I go back to the kitchen, pour another coffee, and wait for the next thing I have to do.
I don’t check my phone this time. I already know there’s nothing there.
Ethan’s absence has become a presence all its own, filling every space in the house and in me.
I have never felt less like a human being and more like a very motivated office assistant than I do in the hours between 9:30 and school pickup.
I move through the house with a checklist in my head, collecting every possible shred of financial evidence as if prepping for an IRS raid, not a divorce.
The study is my next stop. The bottom drawer is the sacred archive of every tax return, warranty, and owner’s manual for every appliance we ever owned, including the lawnmower Ethan insisted on buying even though we paid for a guy to mow the lawn.
I pull out the folders, label by label: “Bank—Joint.” “Bank—Harper.” “Credit Cards.” “Utilities.” Even “Miscellaneous,” which has become a junk drawer for paperwork, contains two years of statements, a birth certificate, and three expired coupons for artisanal pizza.
I carry the entire stack to the dining table and start sorting it by date, then by relevance.
Anything more than six months old goes in the discard pile.
Anything recent gets highlighted, clipped, or scanned.
The scanner is slow, which gives me just enough time to pace around the room and think about absolutely nothing, which is better than thinking about anything at all.
Once, this kitchen was the nerve centre of a functioning family.
I could tell you exactly how many seconds it would take Leo to storm in after school, drop his backpack, and demand a snack.
Today, the only noise is the slow churn of the scanner, the beep of my phone when another notification pops up, mostly reminders for things I don’t want to remember.
Ethan’s silence is now a running theme. He hasn’t texted, hasn’t called, hasn’t even replied to the message I sent at seven this morning: Do you want to see Leo tonight?
Not even a read receipt. The absence of noise is its own form of violence.
After an hour, I have three neat piles: paperwork for Clara, paperwork for myself, and paperwork that will someday be used as kindling when I burn the past to the ground. I make a list, front and back, of what’s missing. I don’t let myself sit down. If I sit, I’ll stop. If I stop, I’ll think.
I open the fridge and stare at the shelves.
We are out of milk and nearly out of hope, but there’s half a loaf of bread and a slab of butter that’s been in the door since before Leo’s last birthday.
I make toast, eat it standing up at the sink.
I only manage half a piece before the taste goes bitter in my mouth.
I throw the rest away, run water over the plate like that erases anything.
At 3:10, I pull up to the school carpool line, one of a dozen parents blinking into the sunlight. Leo walks out of the school doors, backpack slung so low it drags behind him like a parachute. He slides into the back seat, buckles in, and doesn’t say anything until we’re halfway out of the lot.
“You look weird,” he says, not unkindly, just as a fact.
“Thanks,” I say. “You look pretty good yourself.”
He shrugs, then looks out the window. I let the silence ride for a few blocks before I pull over, just past the traffic light where the gas station sells donuts in the mornings.
I twist in my seat. “Hey, bud.”
He looks up, eyes big and a little worried.
“There’s something we should talk about,” I say, and my voice is weirdly steady. I have rehearsed this in my head a hundred times since the call with Clara.
He nods, like he’s braced for a test.
“Dad is going to be living somewhere else for a while. It’s not your fault. It’s not because of anything you did. We both love you more than anything, and that will never change.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds, absorbing what I am saying. Then after what feels like a month, he replies.
“Is it like when Milo and Maisie’s dad went to live at his office?”
“Yes,” I say. “Kind of like that.”
“Will his new house have a garden?” he asks. “Because the snail in our garden is my project, and I need to visit him every day.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “I don’t know, honey. Maybe you can teach Dad how to find snails.”
He’s silent again, looking at the seatbelt buckle, then at me. “Is Dad coming to my assembly next week?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’ll find out.”
He nods, then picks at a loose thread on his shorts. “Did you have a fight? Is that why he left?”
I hesitate. The script says, “We just grew apart,” but I can’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“Something like that,” I say. “Sometimes grownups try really hard to fix things, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
He stares at the dashboard, then says, “He didn’t really want to come to the last assembly either.”
The words land like a punch to the gut. I grip the steering wheel, my knuckles turning white under the pressure. But I can’t deny it. Ethan made his disinterest very clear last time. Tapping his foot and staring at his phone as though it was more important than seeing Leo get a spelling award.
“I know, baby,” I say.
We drive the rest of the way in silence, which is only broken when he asks what’s for dinner, as if this is just another Friday, as if he’s already found a way to slot the new reality into his universe.
“Whatever you want,” I say.
“Can we do pancakes again?”
“Absolutely,” I say, and this time I almost mean it. I would give him just about anything he asked for right now.
He launches into a detailed story about how the teacher’s hair caught on fire last year when she blew out birthday candles, and I respond at all the right intervals, nodding and humming as needed.
My body is on autopilot, while my brain is somewhere far away, replaying the last ten minutes over and over, searching for the moment it could have gone differently.
And hoping I didn’t just scar him for life.
When we pull into the driveway, Leo jumps out and dashes for the front door, calling for the snail with the kind of hope only children are allowed. I let him go ahead, taking my time to head into the house.
Inside, the house is waiting, silent as ever. But Leo is already in the backyard, on his knees by the patch of dirt where the snail lives, narrating a whole adventure to no one in particular.
I sit down at the kitchen table, look at the spread out the folders, and stare at the list. I still don’t cry. There isn’t time for it yet. Instead, I do what needs to be done.
By 6pm, the house has been converted from a silent evidence locker into a full-scale disaster triage unit.
Elsie arrives first, the twins in tow: Maisie riding her hip like a seasoned passenger, Milo attached to her thigh, both legs locked around in a koala death grip.
She has a casserole dish cradled in her other arm, wrapped in a tea towel.
I open the door, and before I can even say “Hey,” she’s already inside, already shoving the dish at me.
“I brought food,” she says. “Also, I forgot plates, but you have plates, right?”
Luca and Liv are next, arriving as a single, kinetic blur.
Luca has two bottles of wine and a brown paper bag so saturated with oil that it could spontaneously combust if you left it near a hot burner.
“We brought carbs!” he shouts, as if it’s a code word for the night’s proceedings.
Liv is dressed in black, including a long-sleeved shirt with a skeletal hand graphic and a plastic dinosaur necklace that is both out of place and perfect.
She is holding nothing except her phone, and the look on her face says she’s already mentally buried Ethan in a shallow grave, possibly twice.
They fill the room immediately, noise and bodies and the kind of energy that makes it impossible to remember you were ever lonely.
Milo makes a beeline for Leo, and within ninety seconds they are both under the dining table, surrounded by a haphazard selection of plastic dinosaurs and what looks like a flashlight, negotiating the terms of a prehistoric trial.
Maisie takes her place on the kitchen counter, legs dangling, and supervises Luca as he plates the casserole in perfect, Instagram-worthy portions.
She watches every movement closely. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if she told him off for his placement.
Elsie wraps both arms around me from behind. She doesn’t say anything, just presses her face against the side of my head and holds on. I stand there, eyes closed, letting the warmth bleed through me.
The kitchen table is reset, wine opened, garlic bread unpacked. Liv hops onto the counter next to Maisie, swings her legs, and says, “On a scale of one to I’ve already Googled how to make it look like an accident, how are you doing?”
I snort. “Somewhere between ‘definitely an accident’ and ‘could be an act of god.’”
She nods, solemnly. “We’ll plead plausible deniability.”
Luca fills the glasses, then raises his own. “To the only good decisions: carbs, wine, and not marrying an idiot.”