8. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The guest wing smells like disuse and regret.
I’ve walked past these rooms a thousand times without thinking about them - they’re for visitors we never have, for the hypothetical children we stopped trying to make, for some future version of our life that never arrived.
Now I’m lying in one of them, staring at a ceiling I don’t recognize, listening to the silence on the other side of the wall.
The sheets are cold. Wrong thread count. Wrong detergent smell. Wrong everything.
Three doors down, my wife is sleeping. Or not sleeping. Probably not sleeping, because I can hear small sounds through the wall - footsteps, the creak of bedsprings, the muffled rhythm of someone who can’t get comfortable in a bed she’s slept in for ten years.
My phone is in my hand. I’ve typed the same text fourteen times:
I’m sorry. I believe you. Please come talk to me.
Delete.
Nina, can we
Delete.
I don’t know what to say except
Delete.
I was wrong. I was scared. I’m still scared, but
Delete.
The cursor blinks at me, patient and accusing. I could send something - anything - that might bridge the distance between this guest bed and our bedroom. But every word I type feels wrong. Too small. Too late. Too much like asking for forgiveness I haven’t earned.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and watch the ceiling go gray.
***
Day One of Living as Strangers in Our Own Home
I hear her in the kitchen before I see her - the clink of mugs, the hiss of the coffee maker, the particular rhythm of her morning routine that I’ve memorized over a decade.
For a moment, standing in the hallway, I let myself pretend everything is normal.
That I’ll walk in and she’ll smile at me over her shoulder and steal my coffee the way she always does.
Then I remember the suitcase. The ultrasound. The look on her face when she said you were going to leave.
I walk into the kitchen anyway.
She’s standing at the counter with her back to me, wearing my old Yale sweatshirt - the one she’d adopted years ago and worn soft. The sight of it hits me somewhere deep. She’s still wearing my clothes. Even after everything, she’s still wrapping herself in things that smell like me.
“Coffee?” she asks without turning around. Her voice is carefully neutral, stripped of warmth.
“Thanks.”
She pours two cups. Sets one in front of me at the island. Takes hers to the breakfast nook, where she sits with her back to the room, spine straight, shoulders set.
She’s wearing armor I didn’t know she owned.
“I have a prenatal appointment this afternoon,” she says to the window.
“Do you want me to come?”
“I don’t know.” She still won’t look at me. “Do you want to?”
The question is a test. I can feel the weight of it, the way my answer will be measured and cataloged and used as evidence for or against me.
“I’ll come,” I say.
She nods once. Doesn’t turn around.
I take my coffee to the study and close the door behind me.
***
Day Two
We meet in the hallway outside the bedroom - our bedroom, where she sleeps alone now. Her shampoo reaches me first. Jasmine, and shadows under her eyes, and warmth coming off her skin from a shower I wasn’t there for.
“Nina-”
“Don’t.” Then, softer, already regretting it: “Not yet.”
She turns left toward the stairs. I turn right toward the guest wing. Our shoulders don’t brush, but they almost do, and the almost is worse than any actual contact would be.
***
Day Three
Betty, our housekeeper, pretends not to notice that I’ve been sleeping in the guest wing. She changes the sheets without comment, stocks the bathroom with fresh towels, leaves a small vase of flowers on the nightstand like she’s trying to make the room feel less like exile.
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Moretti?” she asks, her face carefully blank.
“No, Betty. Thank you.”
She hesitates at the door. “Mrs. Moretti asked me to move some of your things. From the closet.”
My chest tightens. “What things?”
“Just a few items. She said you might want them closer.”
She leaves before I can ask anything else. I walk to the guest closet and open it, and there - hung neatly on the rod, freshly pressed - are three of my dress shirts. A sweater. The cashmere robe she bought me for Christmas.
She’s making space for me in the guest wing.
She’s making this permanent.
***
Day Four
I go to our bedroom while she’s out - some errand she didn’t explain, somewhere I didn’t ask about. The room feels different without her in it. Emptier. Like the life has been drained out of it along with half the marriage.
I open her closet without meaning to. Just looking. Just trying to understand.
That’s when I see it.
My blue shirt. The one she stole years ago, the one she wears to bed, the one that’s more hers than mine now. It’s hanging in my side of the closet. Pressed. Returned.
I stand there for a long time, staring at that shirt.
She’s giving it back. After ten years of sleeping in it, laughing about how she’d never return it, calling it her favorite thing she owned - she’s giving it back.
This is what surrender looks like, I think. This is what giving up looks like.
I reach out and touch the fabric. It’s soft from a thousand washes, worn thin at the collar. It smells like her still - jasmine and something underneath, something that’s just Nina.
I leave it where it is. I can’t bring myself to take it.
***
The doctor’s office is the same one where we spent years chasing a dream that kept slipping through our fingers.
Same waiting room with the abstract art - geometric shapes in soothing colors, designed to distract from the quiet desperation filling every chair.
Same magazines I’ve memorized cover to cover during endless waits for news that never got easier to hear.
Same receptionist with the sympathetic smile, the one who’s seen us at our best and our worst and everything in between.
Nina checks in at the desk. The receptionist - Karen, I remember now - greets her warmly.
“Nina! It’s so good to see you. And congratulations.” Her eyes flick to me. “Both of you.”
“Thank you,” Nina says. Her voice is steady, but I can see the tension in her shoulders.
We sit. We wait. We don’t talk.
The chairs are too small, the way they always are in places like this. My knee is inches from hers, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her body, and I’m hyperaware of the distance in a way that makes my skin itch.
“Mrs. Moretti?” A nurse appears in the doorway. “We’re ready for you.”
Nina stands. Looks at me.
“Coming?”
It’s not a question. It’s a challenge.
I follow.
***
The ultrasound room is small and cold, and Nina lies on the table with her shirt pulled up and gel on her stomach, staring at the screen like it contains the answer to a question I haven’t asked.
I stand beside her, not touching, hands stuffed in my pockets to keep from reaching out.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” the tech says cheerfully, moving the wand across Nina’s abdomen. “First ultrasound since the initial confirmation?”
“Yes,” Nina says. “We wanted to wait until-” She glances at me. “Until we could come together.”
The tech doesn’t seem to notice the weight behind the words. She’s focused on the screen, adjusting angles, searching for something in the gray static.
For a long moment, nothing. Shadows and shapes and my heart climbing into my throat.
Please, I think. Please let this be real. Please let this be the one thing that isn’t broken.
Then: a flicker.
“There we go.” The tech points at the screen, her finger landing on a small, pulsing spot in the middle of the gray. “You see that? Strong heartbeat. Right on track for eleven weeks.”
She presses a button, and sound fills the room - fast and steady and impossibly real. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. A heartbeat. Our baby’s heartbeat.
Nina makes a small sound beside me - half gasp, half sob - and her hand reaches out. Instinctive. Unthinking.
She finds mine on the edge of the table.
Her fingers close around my palm, and she grips hard enough to hurt. Hard enough that I can feel her pulse racing through her fingertips, matching the rhythm on the screen.
I let her hold on.
I hold on back.
Because whatever else is true - whatever happened with Cole, whatever secrets she’s still keeping, whatever damage I’ve done with my suspicion and my silence - this is real. This heartbeat. This baby. This terrified hope that I thought had died with every failed pregnancy before.
“Everything looks perfect,” the tech says. “Strong heartbeat, good positioning. You’ve got a fighter in there.”
Nina laughs - a small, broken sound that’s half joy and half grief - and her grip on my hand tightens. I look at her, at the tears tracking down her temples, at the way her whole body has gone soft with relief.
“A fighter,” she whispers. “You heard her. Eleven weeks, and strong.”
“I know.”
“Adrian-”
“I know.”
She’s crying openly now, and I want to brush the tears away. I want to climb onto that table and hold her and tell her everything’s going to be okay. I want to be the husband she deserves instead of the suspicious stranger I’ve become.
But all I can do is hold her hand.
For now, it has to be enough.
***
The tech prints out the images - three copies, she says, one for the fridge, one for the baby book, one for grandparents - and leaves us alone to get cleaned up.
Nina sits up slowly, wiping gel off her stomach with a paper towel. I stand by the door, suddenly awkward, suddenly aware that the moment of connection is over and we’re back to being strangers.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “For coming.”
“Of course.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did.”
She looks at me then - really looks, for the first time since the foyer, since the suitcase, since everything fell apart. Her eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted, but there’s something else in them too. Something that looks like hope.
“The heartbeat was strong,” she says.
“It was.”