6. Az
— ? —
Az
The couch cushion dips when Eli drops onto his end, and I swing my feet into his lap before I can overthink it. He’s here. Actually here, no screen between us, no midnight voice note, just warm and solid and present for the first time in eleven days.
“This is nice,” I say, and I hate how surprised I sound.
“Told you I’d be back.” His thumb finds the arch of my foot, presses in, and I close my eyes. “How’s my girl?”
“Kicking. A lot.”
“Yeah?” His whole face changes, softens into something I remember from before, before the buses and the stadiums and the calendar that belongs to someone else. “Can I feel?”
I guide his hand to the spot low on my belly where she’s been doing somersaults all morning. We wait. Nothing.
“She’s shy,” I say.
“She’s stubborn. Like her mom.”
“I prefer ‘discerning.’“
He laughs, and god, I’ve missed that sound in this house instead of through a speaker. I’ve missed the weight of him next to me, the way his presence fills up the silence I’ve been drowning in. For a second, just a second, I let myself believe we’re okay.
The doorbell rings.
Eli’s already moving, feet sliding out from under mine, and I know before I hear the voice.
“Hey, you.” Brynn’s heels click across my entryway. “I come bearing gifts.”
She rounds the corner with her arms full, a stack of papers, a shopping bag, something large and navy blue, and her smile is so wide, so performatively delighted to see us, that I want to throw a pillow at her face.
I don’t. I sit up slowly, hand on my belly, and arrange my expression into something that won’t get me a lecture later about being difficult.
“Az! You’re glowing.” She sets everything on the coffee table and perches on the arm of Eli’s chair. His chair. The one I bought him for his birthday three years ago. “I’ve been going crazy planning. This baby is going to be the most organized child in Los Angeles.”
“She’s already organized,” I say. “She kicks on a schedule.”
Brynn doesn’t hear me. She’s pulling out a printed list, laminated, actually laminated, and handing it to Eli like he’s the one who’s going to be pushing a human out of his body.
“Okay, so I narrowed down the name options based on the ones that tested well with the focus group-”
“Focus group?” I sit up straighter.
“Just some fans on Twitter. Totally anonymous poll. And the winner, by a landslide, is Harmony.”
“Harmony Jackson.” Eli reads it like he’s trying it on for size.
“No,” I say.
Brynn’s smile doesn’t waver. “It fits the brand perfectly. Musical, feminine, memorable-”
“Her name isn’t a brand decision. And we already have names we like.”
“Oh, what were you thinking?”
I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to share the list Eli and I made together in this same spot three months ago, before everything got louder and faster and further away from us.
But she’s looking at me with that patient expression, like I’m a child who needs managing, and something in me snaps.
“June,” I say. “For my grandmother.”
Brynn’s nose wrinkles. Just slightly, just enough. “June is so… old. Like, very Boomer energy. You don’t want her getting teased at school.”
“Your grandmother’s name,” Eli says slowly, “is classic.”
“Was classic. Now it’s just-” She waves her hand. “Dated. But we can discuss. I also brought outfits.”
She pulls tiny clothes from the shopping bag, laying them across my coffee table like she’s styling a photoshoot. Designer labels. Coordinated sets. Everything white and cream and photographable.
“For the hospital,” she explains. “And the first week home. I color-coded them by occasion. Here’s the ‘meeting the grandparents’ outfit, here’s the ‘first walk in the stroller’ look-”
“We don’t know what size she’ll be.” My voice sounds distant to my own ears.
“I got newborn and zero-to-three in everything. Bases covered.”
Eli’s examining a onesie with some influencer’s name on the tag. “This is really thoughtful, B.”
“And,” Brynn says, reaching for the navy thing I couldn’t identify, “the pièce de résistance.”
She unzips it. A hospital bag. Fully packed, from what I can see, bottles and blankets and things I haven’t even thought about yet because I’m only eighteen weeks and I thought I had time. I thought I’d pack my own bag, in my own house, with my own husband, when I was ready.
“I made a checklist.” She hands me a laminated sheet. Because of course she did. “Everything’s organized by category. Postpartum supplies, baby essentials, comfort items for the mom. I even included a portable speaker so Eli’s music can be playing when she’s born. How cute is that?”
I stare at the checklist. Her handwriting. Her categories. Her version of what my birth should look like.
“See?” Eli slings an arm around Brynn’s shoulders, casual, easy. “She’s great.”
He doesn’t see my face.
He doesn’t see the way her hand lands on his shoulder and stays there, proprietary, while she walks him through the contents of a bag I didn’t ask for.
I watch them. My husband and his best friend, heads bent together over onesies that cost more than my weekly grocery bill, planning a birth that isn’t hers to plan. She has chosen what my daughter will wear before I’ve even opened the bag, and he calls that helpful.
“I should go,” Brynn says eventually, standing, smoothing her skirt. “Let you two have couple time. Az, take a look at the bag when you get a chance? I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
“Sure.”
She hugs Eli goodbye. A real hug, arms around his neck, and I watch his hands settle on her waist like muscle memory.
“Bye, mama.” She wiggles her fingers at me and she’s gone, heels clicking back across my floor, out my door.
The silence she leaves behind is thick.
“That was nice of her,” Eli says. He’s already reaching for his phone.
“Eli.”
“Hmm?”
“Can you-” I take a breath. Start over. “I need to talk to you about something.”
He sets the phone down. Gives me his attention, or most of it. I can see his eyes flick to the screen when it lights up with a notification. But he’s trying, and I’m so tired of trying being the best I can hope for.
“I’m tired,” I say.
“You should rest. Growing a human is-”
“No. I’m tired of…” I gesture at the coffee table, at the bag and the outfits and the laminated lists. “This. All of this.”
“The gifts?”
“The way she’s everywhere.” I pull my feet up, wrap my arms around my knees as much as I can with a belly in the way. “She just brought a fully packed hospital bag into my living room. I haven’t even decided what I want in it, and she’s made a list.”
“She’s helping.”
“She’s replacing me.”
Eli shakes his head, but there’s impatience in his expression, or maybe the same exhaustion that mirrors mine. “Az, come on. Brynn’s been my best friend since we were kids. She’s excited about the baby. That’s a good thing.”
“She’s at every milestone before I am. She’s in every room before I walk in. She knows your schedule better than I do because she controls your schedule and I’m-” I stop to swallow. “I’m the last to know things about my own pregnancy.”
“That’s not true.”
“The ultrasound.”
He has the grace to look uncomfortable. “I talked to her about that.”
“Did you? Because today she acted as if nothing had happened.”
“She mentioned you were upset.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“I was upset because she was filming something private like she had a right to be there. Because you weren’t there and she was, and that’s becoming a pattern I can’t ignore anymore.”
“Az.” He reaches for my hand. I let him take it, even though part of me wants to pull away.
“I hear you. It’s just a few more months, okay?
Once the tour wraps, I’ll be home all the time.
We’ll figure out the Brynn stuff. But right now I’m juggling a lot and she’s the only reason any of it functions. ”
His phone buzzes again. He glances at it.
“Who is it?”
“Halo. Something about the Rolling Stone thing.”
“Can it wait?”
“Probably not.” He’s already standing, already kissing my forehead, already halfway gone. “Give me ten minutes. We can make dinner after.”
He disappears into his office, and I hear the door close, and I’m alone again in a living room full of someone else’s plans for my baby.
***
The next morning, Abbie’s apartment smells like lavender and spit-up. She opens the door with Eleanor on her hip, takes one look at my face, and pulls me inside.
“Sit. Tea or wine? Wait, no wine. Tea or juice?”
“Whiskey.”
“Juice it is.”
I collapse onto her couch while she settles Eleanor in a bouncer.
The baby kicks her fat legs and gurgles at me, and I feel longing crack open in my chest. Or maybe it’s fear.
In four and a half months, I’ll have one of these.
A tiny person who depends on me completely.
And I don’t know how to do it alone, but I’m starting to think I might have to learn.
“Talk to me.” Abbie hands me a glass and sits close, her knee touching mine.
So I do. All of it. The gifts, the bag, the way Eli said “she’s great” while her hand was on his shoulder. The ten-minute phone call that turned into forty-five. The dinner we never made because by the time he came out of his office, I’d already eaten cereal over the sink and gone to bed.
“The hospital bag,” I say. “She packed me a hospital bag.”
“What the fuck.” Abbie sets down her coffee.
“With a checklist.”
“A checklist.” She says it slowly, like she’s tasting it.
“Laminated.”
Abbie’s quiet for a moment, processing. “Okay. That’s… a lot.”
“Is it? Because when I try to explain it to Eli, I feel insane. Like I’m making something out of nothing. She’s just being helpful. She’s just being thoughtful. She’s just-”
“Inserting herself into every intimate moment of your pregnancy like she’s auditioning for the role of mother?”
I laugh, and it comes out wet. “God. Yes.”
“That’s not nothing, Az. That’s a pattern. A really creepy pattern.”
The front door opens and Wren walks in, a bakery box balanced in both hands. “I brought croissants because Abbie said it was an emergency and emergencies require butter. What did I miss?”
“Brynn packed Az’s hospital bag.”
Wren sets the food down very carefully. “I’m sorry. She what?”
“With a laminated checklist.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
“Get in line.” Abbie opens the box, starts plating. “Also she suggested naming the baby ‘Harmony’ because it ‘tested well with a focus group.’“
“A focus-” Wren pinches the bridge of her nose. “That woman is unhinged. I’ve been saying this for months.”
“Eli doesn’t see it,” I say quietly.
Wren and Abbie exchange a look. The kind of look that tells me they’ve talked about this before, probably more than once, probably about me.
“What?” I ask.
Abbie brings me a plate. Sits down with her own. Eleanor coos in the background, content in her bouncer, and I wonder what it would feel like to have a partner who was actually present for moments like this.
“The seat isn’t the problem,” Abbie says carefully.
“What do you mean?”
“At the concert, the ultrasound video, all of it. Those are symptoms, not the disease.”
“So what’s the disease?”
She holds my gaze. “The problem is he doesn’t think it’s a problem.”
The words land somewhere behind my ribs and stick.
“He says ‘I hear you’ and then nothing changes,” I say slowly. “He says he’ll talk to her and then she’s still making plans for me. He says he’ll do better and then he takes a phone call in the middle of me telling him I’m drowning.”
“Because to him, nothing is wrong.” Abbie tears off a piece of croissant. “Brynn is helpful. Brynn is efficient. Brynn makes his life easier. And you’re his wife, so you’ll always be there. You’re not going anywhere. You don’t require management.”
“Also she’s unhinged,” Wren adds through a mouthful of food.
I stare at my plate. My appetite is gone, replaced by a cold, clarifying calm.
I’ve been fighting the wrong battle. I’ve been trying to get Eli to see individual incidents, the seat, the sonogram, the crib, when the real issue is that he’s handed the infrastructure of his life to someone who wants to be me.
“I need to look at something,” I say.
Abbie raises an eyebrow. “Now?”
“Yeah.” I pull out my phone, open the calendar app.
Eli and I have shared access to the tour schedule, have had it since the beginning, back when he promised I’d always know where he was.
“Brynn manages his calendar. She puts in all his appointments, media stuff, travel. But I should be able to see the pattern if-”
I scroll back. My twelve-week ultrasound. The calendar shows Eli blocked out for a radio interview in Phoenix, added after I entered the appointment.
My sixteen-week appointment. Blocked for a brand shoot, same thing, added after I entered the date.
I keep scrolling. My twenty-week anatomy scan is in two weeks in LA. Eli’s calendar shows him free, but there’s a note in the entry: Hold for potential podcast, B to confirm.
“She’s blocking him out,” I say. “Every single one of my appointments. She schedules something over them after I add the dates.”
“How would she know the dates?” Wren asks.
“Our shared calendar. I put my appointments there so he could keep the dates free.”
“Jesus Christ,” Abbie whispers.
I’m not done. The hospital bag is still at home on my coffee table. I grab my keys.
“Where are you going?” Wren calls.
“I need to check something.”
The bag is exactly where Brynn left it, positioned on the coffee table like a centerpiece. The house is quiet, Eli’s back in his office on another call, and I carry the bag to the kitchen where the light is better.
I unzip it systematically. Go through every pocket, every compartment. The checklist is thorough, I’ll give her that. Nursing pads. Nipple cream. Going-home outfits in two sizes.
My hands are shaking as I keep searching. The main compartments are professionally packed, rolled and organized like a Pinterest board. But when I check the lining of the interior pocket, my fingers brush something hard.
A luggage tag. Tucked into the seam like it was meant to be hidden.
I pull it out.
Brynn Hollister, it reads. Her phone number. Her email.
Like she’s the one going.
I sit back on my heels, holding the tag, staring at her name on a bag meant for the birth of my child.
She packed herself into my hospital bag. She’s been systematically removing my husband from every moment that matters and sliding into the space he leaves behind, and I have been so focused on the individual trees that I missed the forest burning down around me.
I take out my phone. Open the camera app. Photograph the tag and the bag.
Then I go back to the calendar. Screenshot every blocked appointment. Every convenient conflict. Every pattern I was too tired and too pregnant and too gaslit to see.
I create a new folder on my phone. Name it Evidence.
I save the photographs beside the calendar screenshots.