Chapter 3
Downstairs, cabinet doors opened and closed as Garrett began dinner. The sounds were ordinary and competent, proof that he was still here, still her husband, still the man making food while she fed their child.
Miranda looked down at the bottles filling slowly beneath the pump. For the first time, she wondered whether Garrett’s habit of being everyone’s hero depended on someone else quietly handling the life he returned to afterward.
Miranda disconnected the pump before the cycle finished.
The bottles were not full, and she would pay for that later, but the sound had become unbearable. She set them on the nightstand with more force than necessary, pulled the flanges away, and reached for Garrett’s phone before she had time to reconsider.
The screen had already gone dark.
She did not know his passcode because Garrett had never needed one she knew. He used his thumb, his face, whatever the phone required, and Miranda had never imagined a day when she would stand in their bedroom wanting access badly enough to resent the obstacle.
She picked up her own phone instead.
The Halcyon photograph was still open beneath the company’s caption. Garrett’s hand rested beneath the weight of the basket while Willa looked at him as though he had presented her with a key to a new life.
Miranda read the comments again, though this time they did not blur into a general impression.
She deserves it.
Garrett is the best!
He’s such a sweetheart, he knows exactly how to make a girl happy.
That one had been posted by Beth from social media, followed by three laughing emojis. Willa had replied with a heart.
Miranda’s anger arrived cleanly then.
It was no longer diffuse enough to blame on sleep or isolation. It had a shape, and the shape was her husband standing in a room full of people while they joked about him belonging to another woman.
She stood so quickly that the pump tubing caught around her wrist. One bottle tipped and rolled across the nightstand before landing on the carpet, spilling milk into the fibers.
Miranda stared at the spreading stain.
For months, she had treated every ounce as something precious. She had refrigerated half-empty bottles, measured leftovers, labeled freezer bags, and cried once when Garrett poured out milk Owen had refused because he thought it had been sitting too long.
Now she watched it soak into the carpet and felt nothing but fury.
She left the equipment where it was and went downstairs.
Garrett stood at the stove stirring pasta sauce with one hand while checking a skillet with the other. Owen sat in the bouncer beside the kitchen table, awake and content, chewing on a cloth ring while music played softly from the speaker near the sink.
The scene looked domestic enough to be used in an advertisement. A good husband cooking. A healthy baby nearby. A wife coming downstairs after being given time to rest.
Garrett glanced over his shoulder and smiled before he saw her face.
“What happened?”
Miranda held out her phone. “Read the comments.”
He wiped one hand on a towel and took it from her. His eyes moved over the screen, pausing where hers had.
“Beth is an idiot,” he said.
“Willa replied with a heart.”
“It’s a joke.”
“Is it?”
Garrett returned the phone, his expression tightening. “Yes.”
“Would you be laughing if someone at the office said those things about me?”
“There’s nothing to be upset about.”
“She called you a sweetheart.”
“With laughing emojis.”
“Those do not make words disappear.”
Garrett turned down the burner. “Miranda, come on.”
The phrase broke whatever remained of her restraint.
“No,” she said. “You come on.”
Owen stopped chewing and looked toward her voice. Miranda lowered it, but the effort sharpened every word rather than softening it.
“You gave another woman an eight-hundred-dollar basket while your coworkers stood around taking pictures. They called her your bestie, then they called you her sweetheart, and she put a heart under it. You came home and told me it never occurred to you that your actual wife might want any of it.”
“I already said I was sorry.”
“You keep saying that as though the sound of the words should erase what you did.”
“What exactly do you think I did?” Garrett asked. “Because right now you’re making this sound like I slept with her.”
Miranda stared at him.
There it was. The boundary Garrett trusted because he had never crossed it.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t sleep with her. Congratulations.”
His face changed. “That’s not fair.”
“Neither was any part of today.”
“I went to a company event.”
“You went to our company event.”
“You’re on leave.”
“And you gave my replacement a luxury gift in front of the people I’m supposed to go back to work with.”
“She is not your replacement.”
“She is doing my job, using my title, managing my clients, standing beside my husband in company photographs, and accepting gifts from him while everyone jokes that he belongs to her.” Miranda’s voice trembled, and she hated that it made her sound wounded when anger was the truer thing. “What word would you prefer?”
Garrett glanced at Owen, then reached down and unfastened the bouncer straps. “We are not doing this in front of him.”
“He is five months old.”
“He can hear us.”
“He hears me cry every day.”
Garrett froze with one hand beneath Owen’s arm.
Miranda had not meant to say it. She had not planned to give him that piece of information, especially not now, when it would sound like ammunition.
Garrett lifted Owen from the seat and held him against his chest. “You cry every day?”
“That is not the point.”
“It is absolutely the point.”
“No, Garrett. The point is that you do not get to take one sentence out of everything I just said and turn yourself back into the concerned husband.”
His expression closed. “I am concerned.”
“Then where have you been?”
“I have been here.”
“You have been in this house.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you come home, hold him until he cries, hand him back, ask what’s for dinner, and tell me about Willa.”
“That is not what happens.”
“It happens often enough.”
Garrett’s grip shifted around Owen, protective now. “I work all day.”
“So did I.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Miranda stepped closer, then stopped when Owen’s face tightened at the tension between them. “You think I stopped working five months ago. Everyone does.”
“I have never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. You looked at that basket and decided I wasn’t the kind of woman who would want it because I don’t wear makeup now. You know why I don’t wear makeup now? Because most mornings I cannot put Owen down long enough to brush my teeth.”
Garrett’s jaw tightened. “I offered to take him this morning.”
“For ten minutes while you made pancakes.”
“I asked Claire to come.”
“You outsourced helping me.”
“That is not what I did.”
“It is exactly what you did.” Miranda gestured toward the bouncer, the bottles drying beside the sink, the stack of bibs folded near the refrigerator. “You knew I needed someone, so you found someone else. Then you left for the day and stayed late because Willa needed you more.”
“She didn’t need me more.”
“Then why were you there?”
“I was helping with the event.”
“Why were you the one she kept texting?”
“Because we were coordinating.”
“Why does she tell you that you are the sweetest man alive?”
The kitchen went silent except for the sauce beginning to bubble against the sides of the pan.
Garrett looked at her for several seconds. “You read my phone.”
“The message was on the screen.”
“You picked it up?”
“I didn’t need to. It lit up beside me.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Miranda laughed once, without humor. “You want to make this about privacy?”
“I want to know whether you’re going through my messages.”
“I want to know why another woman is telling my husband he is the sweetest man alive.”
“She was thanking me.”
“She has thanked you all day.”
“Because I did something nice for her.”
“That is what you keep saying.”
“Because it is true.”
Miranda took her phone back from the counter and opened Willa’s contact in her messages. Their most recent exchange was from two weeks earlier, a photograph of Owen in a onesie Willa had bought before the birth. Willa had replied with three hearts and asked whether Miranda was sleeping at all.
Miranda had written, Not really, but we’re surviving.
Willa had never answered.
“She didn’t even ask whether I wanted to attend today,” Miranda said.
Garrett frowned. “Who?”
“Willa.”
“She didn’t organize the guest list.”
“She organized everything else.”
“It was employees only.”
“So I heard.”
“You are on leave,” he said again, frustration flattening the words. “What did you want her to do, change the policy?”
“I wanted my husband to notice I had been excluded.”
“You weren’t excluded.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Because you’re not currently working!”
“You cannot keep repeating the technical explanation as though it answers the human one.”
Garrett looked away. Owen had begun rubbing his cheek against Garrett’s shirt, seeking comfort from the vibration of his chest.
Miranda watched him soothe their son without thought. Garrett was good at that when he was present. His body knew the right sway, the right pressure between Owen’s shoulders, the exact moment to turn him so he could see the room.
It made her angrier.
“You knew about Willa’s title change,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You knew my name had been removed from the website?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“But you knew enough to understand something had changed.”
“I knew Dennis dropped the word ‘interim.’” He said it the way someone reads from a document, precise and contained. “That is not the same thing.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
Garrett’s free hand moved to the back of his neck. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
“You didn’t think I mattered.”
Something crossed his face and he turned toward her sharply enough that Owen’s head lifted from his shoulder. “Do not say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t true.”
“Then explain the difference.”