7 - BREAKUP
Lacey
I was numb by the end of my shift.
The lights were too bright, the monitors too loud, the parents' questions too sharp.
I moved through rounds like a ghost in scrubs, smiling at families, explaining echo results, writing orders with numb hands.
The afternoon kept coming back, Brad on the couch, the two girls, the easy way he moved.
And every time it came back the pressure came with it, low and shameful and unasked for, and the nausea right behind it, hard enough that I had to grip the counter.
I thought about calling Janice. I couldn't produce a single word I'd say. In the end I drove home, because there was nothing else to do.
The route felt wrong. The lights took forever. My hands shook on the wheel, and I kept checking the mirror as if someone were following me.
The house looked exactly the same. The faded blue shutters. The crooked wreath I'd been meaning to replace for two years. Nothing had changed.
I sat in the car a long minute with the engine off. Torn between wanting to drive away and wanting to go in and pretend I'd seen nothing, because if I never said it out loud maybe it wouldn't be real. No, you fucking coward. This is real. Then I made myself get out.
He was on the couch. The exact spot. Laptop on his knees, typing, like any other evening. It hit me hard enough that I put a hand on the back of the armchair to stay up.
"Hey, Lace." He didn't look up. He was in one of his rare good moods. "Steaks tonight, or do you have something planned?"
I looked at him and saw a stranger wearing my husband's face. Same combed hair, same wire-rimmed glasses, same paunch under the same button-down. None of it was the man I thought I'd been living with.
"Well?" He glanced up. "What's wrong with you? Forget the groceries?"
My tongue felt thick. "I saw you today." It came out small, as if I were the one who should be ashamed.
"Saw me where?"
"On the cat cam." My hands were shoved in my pockets so he wouldn't see them shake. "With the two women. On our couch you're sitting on."
He looked at me a second without understanding. Then his eyes went to the little camera under the television. For one wild second I thought he might cry, or beg, or at least look sorry.
He closed the laptop with a soft click and nodded, slow, the way you'd nod if someone told you the dishwasher was leaking.
"Okay," he said. And then, mild, almost relieved, "Okay. That's good, actually."
Of everything I'd pictured him saying on the drive home, that's good had not once crossed my mind.
"Good?" My voice cracked on it. "Good that I watched you with two girls in our house? How is that good?"
"Lacey. Come on. We both know this didn't come from nowhere." He said. "A man doesn't do that in a marriage that's working. It's a symptom. I've been unhappy for years. I think if you're honest, you have too. I just had the courage to do something about it."
The courage. I opened my mouth and he kept going.
"You were never here. You know that. The hospital, the on-calls, other people's children getting the best of you every single day, and I got whatever was left over, which most nights was nothing.
" He spread his hands but he sounded angry now.
"I waited. I was patient. I kept telling myself it would turn around.
And the whole time you were pouring everything you had into kids that weren't even ours and lying next to me like a shut door.
What did you think was going to happen?"
My mind stumbled.
"I stayed a lot longer than I should have," he said. "If I'm honest, it was mostly pity. You're not an easy woman to love, Lacey. I don't think you can help it. I'd made my peace with it."
He glanced down at the floor, toward the camera. "Anyway. It's out in the open now, thanks to your little setup. The only real question is whether you go or I do."
The room tilted. I kept waiting to feel what I was supposed to feel, the clean fury that anyone on earth would feel, and it would not come. He cheated. He did it in our house. He was sitting on the evidence telling me I'd made him do it. Even now my own body would not hand me the rage I was owed.
"You," I said. It came out with more force than I had left. "You're leaving. Tonight."
"Sure." He nodded. "That's fair. I've got an offer in Florida I've been sitting on. This makes it easy."
Florida.
Not a word, ever. There had been an offer, a whole future with no me in it, and he'd carried it around our house for weeks while I scheduled our sad little Saturdays and worked up the nerve to ask him for one thing.
For a stupid second I panicked about logistics, how I'd find a position in Florida, how I'd pack, before the floor went out from under that too.
There was no Florida for me. There was no us.
He had already been leaving. He'd only been waiting for a reason that let him keep his hands clean, and I'd handed him one on a phone screen.
I sat on the couch, that couch, while he packed. He moved through the house with the same quiet efficiency he brought to everything, his clothes into a bag, the toiletries, the folders out of his office.
At the door he stopped, one hand on the frame, suitcase at his feet, and looked back at me with his head tilted.
"You're taking this well," he said. "Better than I expected. Then again, you always did keep the volume down. On feelings. On the rest of it." A small, regretful smile. "There were years I wondered if something in you was just missing."
I didn't answer. I had nothing to answer with.
He picked up the suitcase.
"You know what I keep thinking about? I get to have a family now. Actual kids. The whole life I wanted." He looked at me, and there was no heat in it anywhere, which was how I knew he meant every word. "That was never going to happen with you. We both know that. At least now it can."
Then he was gone.
It took me a while to feel it. The deep cuts never land right away. The affair was a wound with edges I could find. This one had none.
I waited for the anger. I made myself picture the tilt of his head, the small sorry smile, that's good, actually. I tried to want to scream. The rage flickered somewhere far down and went out like a match held in the rain.
I get to have a family now.
I was the one who finally booked the fertility clinic.
We both went for testing, but I couldn't make myself go back for the results.
So Brad went without me. He came home that afternoon, sat at the kitchen table, took off his glasses, and told me with no softness: The results came back. It's you, Lacey. You're infertile.
Something gave way inside me and didn't stop giving way. I sat staring at the table grain while the whole future I'd been quietly building came apart between one breath and the next. The small hands. The bedtime stories. The crayon drawings held up sticky and proud. Gone, all of it.
He stayed. That is the part I have never been able to explain to anyone who has asked why I didn't leave him years before he left me.
He stayed. My mother had walked out of our house and not left me a sentence, and here was a man who, at the moment I'd just been told I was worth the least I would ever be worth, did not get up and go.
It wasn't love. Some part of me knew that.
I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream. My heart was going too fast and the rest of me had gone cold and far away, and one phrase kept circling with nowhere to land. Never going to happen with you.
I reached for the phone. I needed a voice. I needed to not be the only person on earth who knew.
"Hi, Lacey. What's up, doll?"