30. Az
— ? —
Az
The drive from the hospital takes forty-seven minutes, and June sleeps through every single one of them.
I keep twisting around in the passenger seat to check on her, even though Eli’s driving slower than my grandmother used to drive and the car seat is so padded she looks like she’s floating in a cloud.
Three days old. My daughter is three days old, and we’re bringing her home, and I can’t stop crying, which the nurses assured me is hormones but feels like a door in my chest cracking open that’s been sealed for years.
“She’s still breathing,” Eli says, glancing at the rearview mirror for the hundredth time.
“I know she’s breathing. I can see her breathing.”
“Then why are you-”
“Because I want to look at her,” I say, which isn’t an explanation but is the only truth I have. “She’s so small.”
“She’s perfect.”
“She’s so small, Eli.”
He reaches over and takes my hand, and I let him, and we drive the rest of the way to Juniper Hill with my fingers laced through his and my eyes on our daughter and neither of us saying anything because there’s nothing left to say.
We’ve done the hard parts. The contractions and the pushing and the moment where I screamed at him that this was his fault and he just kept holding my hand and agreeing.
The part where they put her on my chest and I forgot how to breathe.
The part where he cried so hard he had to sit down.
Now we’re just driving home.
The gates come into view, and I blink, because there are people. A lot of people. Mateo and three of his friends, and Marco from the feed store, and Carmen who runs the bakery, and what looks like the entire staff of Dahlia & Thorn, and…
“Did you-”
“Wasn’t me.” Eli slows to a stop. “I swear it wasn’t me.”
“Then how do they all-”
The car door opens, and Lupe is there, and she’s crying, and I’ve never seen Lupe cry in the entire time I’ve known her, not even when her husband died, not even when I told her I was pregnant.
“Allergies,” she says, wiping her face with her apron. “The ragweed is terrible this year.”
“It’s November.”
“The November ragweed.” She’s already reaching for the car seat, unclipping it with the practiced efficiency of someone who’s done this a thousand times. “Let me see her. Let me see this baby.”
June blinks awake, her tiny face scrunching up at the light, and Lupe makes a sound I’ve never heard her make. Soft. Broken. “She has your grandmother’s chin.”
I start crying again.
The next hour is a blur of faces and foil-covered trays and people who keep saying she’s beautiful and you look wonderful and when can I hold her, and Eli stays close, his hand on my back, steering me through the crowd without ever making me feel steered.
When I start to flag, he’s there. “Az needs to rest. June needs to eat. Thank you all for coming.”
The crowd disperses like he’s Moses parting the sea, and I’d be annoyed about it if I weren’t so grateful.
“Roz and Hank,” I say, as we walk toward the farmhouse. “Did they-”
“Bunkhouse. They said they’d stay a week.”
“A week?”
“Or however long we need.” He opens the door for me. “Mom’s already stocked the fridge. Dad fixed the squeaky step on the porch. They wanted to be useful.”
“They’re always useful.”
“Yeah, well.” He follows me inside, and the house smells like lavender and something baking, and the crib is right where we put it, the maple one I chose and he assembled with my permission, and June is awake now, making small noises that mean she’s hungry. “I think they just wanted to be here.”
The black duffel Eli packed that night is still by the front door. We never grabbed it, there wasn’t time, just Cody’s arm and the dark, and June came anyway, at the hospital, with nothing but us. Neither of us can bring ourselves to unpack it.
I settle into the rocking chair, the one that belonged to my grandmother, and Eli hands me a pillow for my back and a glass of water and then just… stands there. Watching. His eyes are wet and his throat works, and whatever’s crossing his face is too big for words, so I don’t make him explain it.
“You can sit down,” I say.
“I know.” He doesn’t sit.
“You’re hovering.”
“I know that too.” He still doesn’t move.
“Eli.”
He sits. Cross-legged on the floor next to the rocking chair, close enough to touch but not touching, and watches our daughter eat like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen.
“You keep staring.”
“I’m observing.”
“You’re making it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird. I’m just-” He stops. Swallows. “I didn’t think I’d get to see this.”
I look down at June, at her tiny fingers curled against my skin, at the way her eyes keep drifting shut and then snapping open like she’s afraid she’ll miss something. “What do you mean?”
“When you left.” His voice is quiet. Careful.
“When I was standing in our empty house and you were gone and I didn’t know where you were or if you’d ever talk to me again, I thought about all the things I was going to miss.
Her birth, her first smile. First this.” He gestures at June, at me, at the rocking chair.
“I thought I’d ruined everything so badly that I’d never get to sit on the floor and watch you feed our kid. ”
“You almost did,” I say. “Ruin everything.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Eli. You were so close.”
“I know.” He leans his head back against the arm of the chair. “I wake up sometimes and I don’t know how I got here. How you let me be here.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know.”
June makes a satisfied sound and unlatches, milk-drunk and heavy-lidded, and I shift her to my shoulder to burp her, and Eli reaches up without asking and takes the burp cloth from where I left it and hands it to me, and it’s such a small thing but it’s everything.
The first week is a blur.
Nights bleed into days, and days bleed into nights, and June eats every two hours like clockwork and screams like a banshee when her diaper is wet and sleeps in twenty-minute increments that feel like gifts from God.
Eli takes the night shifts without being asked.
I hear him in the dark, pacing the hallway, singing under his breath.
Not songs I recognize. New ones. Soft and low and just for her.
“What is that?” I ask, one night when I can’t sleep and find him in the nursery, June cradled against his chest, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Nothing. Just something I’ve been working on.”
“In the field?”
He nods. “When I was staying in the bunkhouse. Before you… when I was trying to figure out how to be someone you could trust again.” He keeps swaying, the motion automatic now. “I’d walk out to the dahlias and I’d think about her. What I wanted to tell her. What I wanted her to know.”
“Sing it again.”
He does. And I stand in the doorway of my grandmother’s house, watching my husband sing a lullaby to our daughter, and I think about all the versions of this moment I imagined. The ones where he wasn’t here. The ones where I did it alone because I’d learned a long time ago that alone was safer.
This is better.
Roz and Hank stay for ten days. They cook and clean and hold June for hours so Eli and I can sleep, and when they leave, Roz hugs me so hard I feel my ribs creak.
“You’re a good mother,” she says. “And he’s trying so hard. I’ve never seen him try at anything the way he’s trying at this.”
“I know.”
“He loves you so much it scares him.”
“I know that too.”
She pulls back, studies my face. “And you? How are you?”
“Tired,” I say. “Happy, scared, all of it.”
“That’s motherhood.” She kisses my forehead. “Call me if you need anything. Day or night.”
And then they’re gone, and it’s just us. Eli and me and June and Whiskers, who has decided the baby is his personal responsibility and sleeps under the crib like a furry guardian.
***
That night, June goes down at eight, and Eli and I end up on the porch with the baby monitor between us and the stars coming out over the dahlias. It’s cold, but neither of us moves to go inside. This porch again. All our important conversations happen here.
“We should talk,” I say.
Eli doesn’t flinch. “Yeah. We should.”
“I’ve been putting it off. Waiting until I felt less raw.”
“And?”
“I still feel raw.” I pull my cardigan tighter around me. “But I think I’m going to feel raw for a while. And I don’t want to keep waiting.”
“Okay.” He turns to face me, one knee pulled up on the swing, his face half in shadow. “What do you want to say?”
Everything. Nothing. All the things I’ve been holding in my throat for three years, choking on them, swallowing them down because I didn’t know how to say them without it sounding like blame or bitterness or both.
“I need you to tell me,” I say, slowly, “what you thought you were doing. Not the money, not the career. The leaving. The choosing everything over me. I need to understand what was in your head.”
“I thought I was building something,” he says at last.
“Building what?”
“A life. For us.” He blows out a slow breath.
“I grew up with nothing, Az. You know that. And then I met you, and you were everything. And I wanted to give you everything. I wanted you to have a house that didn’t leak and a car that started on the first try and a ring that actually meant something.
I wanted you to never have to worry about money again. ”
“I wasn’t worried about money.”
“I was.” His voice cracks. “I was worried about it all the time. Every day. What if the next album tanks? What if the label drops me? What if I go back to being the kid from Bakersfield who couldn’t afford to take his girlfriend to dinner?”
“I never cared about dinner.”
“I know. But I cared.” He looks at me, and his eyes are wet. “I thought if I worked hard enough, if I built something big enough, you’d be safe. You’d be taken care of. And I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“Eli.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I hurt you. I know I left you alone in a life you never wanted because I was too scared to stop and ask if it was what you wanted.” He swallows. “That’s my worst sin. Not the fame. Leaving you alone inside it.”
“Yes.” The word comes out sharp. “You did. You left me alone in rooms full of people who knew my face and didn’t know my name. You left me alone at parties and premieres and that stupid hotel bar where Brynn-” I stop. Breathe. “You left me alone so many times I stopped expecting you to be there.”
“I know.”
“And then you chose her. You gave away my seat to the woman who’d been trying to take my place for years, and you didn’t even notice what you were doing. You didn’t even see me anymore.”
“I saw you.” His voice is raw. “I always saw you. I just… I convinced myself you were fine. That you understood. That the sacrifice was worth it because look at what we’re building, look at all the things we’ll have.”
“I didn’t want things, Eli. I wanted you.”
“I know that now.”
“You should have known it then.”
“I should have.” He reaches out, slowly, and when I don’t pull away, he takes my hand. “I was scared of the same thing you were scared of. For three years. And I never said it.”
“What thing?”
“Losing you.” His grip tightens. “I was so afraid of losing you to some future where I wasn’t enough that I lost you in the present trying to become more.”
I close my eyes. The tears are back. They’re always back these days, lurking under every emotion, waiting for permission to fall. “I was afraid you didn’t love me anymore.”
“I never stopped loving you. Not for one second.”
“I know. But love isn’t enough if you’re not here.”
“No. It isn’t.”
We sit there, hands clasped, the baby monitor crackling with June’s soft breathing, and I let myself feel all of it.
The anger, the grief, the years of loneliness.
The way he’s held me through labor and learned to burp a baby and sang lullabies in the dark, and the way it doesn’t erase the past but it builds something on top of it. Something new.
“I forgive you,” I say.
Eli goes completely still.
“Not because you earned it.” My voice is steady now.
Certain. “Because I’m choosing to. I’m choosing to let go of the years I spent waiting for you to come home.
I’m choosing to believe you when you say you’re different now.
I’m choosing to trust that we can build something better than what we had. ”
“Az-”
“You’ve still got a long way to go. Years.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.” I look at him, this man I married five years ago and almost left for good four months ago and somehow love more now than I did on our wedding day.
“This isn’t a free pass. This is me saying I’m willing to walk with you while you figure out how to be the person you should have been all along. ”
“I mean to prove it.” He lifts my hand to his mouth, presses a kiss to my knuckles. “My calendar is yours to see. My team knows no one agrees to anything for us without both of us. And I’m learning to stop and ask myself what I’m avoiding before you have to ask me. You don’t have to manage me, Az.”
“Good.”
“Because I will. I’ll prove it every day. For the rest of our lives if that’s what it takes.”
I hold out my hand. He takes the ring from the pocket where he’s kept it since that night on the street, and lays it in my palm. I know what I want to do with it now.
I slide it on myself. My finger, my choice, my husband.
“You booked anything lately?” I ask.
Eli’s mouth drops open. “What?”
“Shows, tours, recording sessions.” I wiggle my fingers, watching the ring catch the light. “You’ve been home for more than three months. That’s the longest break you’ve taken in… ever.”
“I wasn’t going to book anything without asking.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”
He stares at me. “Grayson’s been… there’s some interest. One show. Same arena. The one where-”
“Where you gave away my seat.”
“Yeah.” He winces. “Poetic irony. Or something.”
I think about it. The arena full of people. The noise. The lights. Everything I hated about his life for three years. But it’s not his life. It’s our life. And if we’re going to build something new, I can’t keep him in a box out of fear.
“Book it,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“One show. We’ll see how it goes.” I lean back against the swing. “Play Doorstep.”