Chapter 4
Lucas
Bed rest sounds like a vacation to anyone who’s never had the sentence handed down.
For Bella, it was exile. By week sixteen, she was under house arrest—no driving, no cooking, no walks around the block, nothing that even resembled agency.
The doctor was absolute: risk another bleed and you risk the baby.
Bella, who had built her life on work and motion, crumpled into the shape of the chaise in the sunroom and faded.
I tried to counteract the diagnosis with logistics.
I hired a cleaning service, arranged meal deliveries, had groceries dropped at the door.
I scheduled a visiting nurse, made sure every surface was wiped down with hospital-grade disinfectant, and installed a speaker in the bedroom so she could hear me in the kitchen.
Our world shrank to the square footage of our house.
Even our arguments were on a timer, timed to coincide with her least fragile hours.
“Do you need anything?” I asked one afternoon, standing in the doorway.
She peered over her e-reader, her eyes ringed with fatigue. “I need to not be useless.”
“You’re not.”
“Lucas,” she said, “I haven’t worn real pants in three weeks. I can’t even load the dishwasher.”
I sat next to her, the cushion sinking under my weight. “You’re growing a human. That’s more productive than anything I do all day.”
She rolled her eyes but let her head rest against my shoulder. “You’re supposed to be at work,” she said.
“Victoria’s covering the important stuff.”
I felt her stiffen. “She must be a saint.”
“She’s a machine,” I corrected. “But the kind with good manners.”
She reached for my hand, fingers lacing with mine. “You don’t have to fix everything,” she whispered.
But I did. It was the only way I knew how to exist.
I spent my days split between conference calls from the kitchen and late nights at the office.
Victoria and I became a closed circuit—she anticipated the fires before I noticed the smoke.
When the pressure mounted, she’d order in dinner for the team, a dozen different takeout containers stacked like evidence of our mutual codependency.
Some nights we’d work until the cleaning crew turned off the lights.
Victoria always remembered my coffee order, always handed me a highlighter before I needed it, always spotted the weakness in a presentation before I saw the angle of attack.
There was no intimacy in it, at least not at first, just the intimacy of shared burden, of two people wired for battle.
One Thursday, after a marathon call with the Tokyo office, I collapsed in the chair across from her.
“I think I’ve been at this table more than my own bed,” I said.
She smiled. “I was going to say something, but you’re the boss.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “My wife used to joke that work was my mistress.”
Victoria considered this. “And now?”
“Now I think my mistress is the hospital.”
She laughed, genuinely. “At least she doesn’t send you angry texts.”
I grinned, despite myself. For a minute, the room felt light.
Back home, Bella started sleeping with the window open, the sound of crickets louder than any white noise machine. One night, I found her crying—not the loud, dramatic kind, but the silent leak of exhaustion and grief.
She wiped her eyes before I could say anything. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice raw. “I just… I hate feeling like a patient in my own life.”
I crawled into bed beside her, pulling her close. “I’d trade places with you if I could.”
She snorted. “You wouldn’t last two days.”
She wasn’t wrong. The stillness would have suffocated me.
“You’re not a burden,” I said, but I didn’t add the rest—that I felt useless, too. That all my precision and planning hadn’t bought us any real safety.
She pressed her face to my chest. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I said, and kissed her hair. And with that I held her close.
Days followed.
The expansion project at work was reaching critical mass. Every night, Victoria and I worked side-by-side until the building emptied. After a brutal board review, I lingered in the conference room, running the numbers over and over, trying to make them add up to less risk.
Victoria appeared in the doorway. “You’re overthinking,” she said.
“Can’t help it.”
She sat, folding her arms. “Is it the numbers, or something else?”
For once, I didn’t lie. “Bella almost died last year. I thought if I could just—control things—she’d be safe.”
Victoria didn’t react. She let the silence fill the room, no attempts at comfort or advice.
“You know it’s not your fault, right?” she finally said.
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
She looked at me, really looked, and said, “Most of us are just trying to not fuck up the few things we love. Sometimes that means working late. Sometimes it means letting go.”
I wanted to argue, but there was nothing to say.
She gathered her notes, ready to leave, but stopped at the door. “You don’t have to be a hero all the time,” she said.
I stared at the table, empty but for a ring of coffee where her cup had been.
“Sometimes,” she added, “you’re allowed to just be scared.”
The words sat with me long after she left.
When I got home, Bella was awake, watching shadows crawl across the ceiling. I slid into bed, held her as gently as I could, and for the first time, I whispered: “I’m scared, too.”
She wrapped her arm around me, and in the darkness, I felt something unclench in both of us.
Maybe tomorrow, I thought, I could learn how to let go, if only for a moment.