Chapter Thirty-Three
Ten weeks in, Theo laughed for the first time, a small, surprised bark of a sound at his father blowing air against his stomach, and Elias froze completely still, like a man afraid of breaking something.
“Do it again,” he said. “Wren, did you see that? Do it again.”
?
I filmed it on my phone, the two of them on the living room floor, Elias making increasingly undignified noises to chase one more laugh out of our son, and I understood, watching it through the small rectangle of my screen, that we had built something that hadn’t existed in March.
Not the marriage we’d had before. Something slower and more honest, assembled out of the wreckage of the first one.
?
That night, after Theo was asleep, I asked Jess for the video she’d taken during my labor, the one I’d never let myself watch and never let Elias see either, because some days it had felt like a wound I wasn’t ready to reopen for anyone.
“Are you sure?” Jess asked.
“I think it’s time,” I said. “For both of us.”