Chapter Thirty-Five
Three months after the glovebox, Elias moved back into our bedroom properly, no longer a guest in his own house, and we marked it with nothing more ceremonial than him hanging his coat on the hook by the door where it had always belonged.
“No speech?” I asked.
“You banned gifts and grand gestures four months ago,” he said. “I’m choosing to interpret ‘no speeches’ as an extension of the same policy.”
I laughed, and it came easily, the way laughing with him used to come before any of this happened, and I understood that was its own kind of milestone.
?
He went back to Cascade Orthopedic Partners part-time that month, on his own terms this time, three days a week instead of six, with Tuesdays and Thursdays reserved permanently for Theo, written into his contract the way other men write in vacation days.
“You didn’t have to negotiate that,” I said.
“I did, actually,” he said. “I spent eight years thinking my worth was measured by how much of myself I could give away to other people’s emergencies. I’d like Theo to grow up watching his father measure it differently.”