Chapter 4 #2
Garrett stopped behind her.
For several seconds, Miranda felt him waiting. She knew what he wanted: permission to help, evidence that he still had a place in the room, some ordinary task that would let them return to being parents instead of two people standing inside a marriage neither recognized.
Owen rooted against her shirt.
Miranda sat in the chair and began to feed him. Garrett remained near the door, his shape dark against the hallway light.
“You should sleep,” she said without looking up.
“So should you.”
“I can’t.”
“I know.”
The answer was quiet enough that she almost believed he did.
Then Garrett added, “This is why everything feels worse right now.”
Miranda lifted her eyes.
He saw the mistake immediately, but not before it had been made.
She looked back down at Owen and adjusted his hand where it pressed against her skin. “Go to bed, Garrett.”
This time, he left without arguing.
Miranda listened to the guest room door close. Owen swallowed steadily against her, his body relaxing as he took what he needed without doubt or apology.
On the nightstand, her phone lit with a notification from the shared banking app.
A charge from a sporting-goods store had cleared from the previous week: forty-eight dollars for a new fishing line Garrett had mentioned needing before summer.
Miranda stared at the amount until the screen dimmed.
In the savings account attached to her name, she had eight hundred and seventy-three dollars set aside for his birthday.
She had been adding to it since January.
She had not thought of the account as secret.
Garrett knew she kept a separate savings account for gifts, emergencies, and the particular household expenses that arrived disguised as surprises.
He knew she transferred money into it when freelance checks came through before Owen was born and when she managed to spend less than expected on groceries, but he did not know what the current balance meant.
The fishing rod had begun as a photograph Garrett showed her in January while they sat on the sofa with Owen moving beneath her ribs.
It was handmade by a small company in Montana, fitted to the kind of river fishing Garrett liked and priced at an amount that had made him laugh before closing the website.
He had said no fishing rod should cost more than their first refrigerator, then reopened the page twice that evening to show her the walnut reel seat and the tiny engraved trout near the handle.
Miranda had remembered.
She had remembered when he stopped at a sporting-goods store during a work trip and sent her a photograph of a cheaper model with a message about behaving responsibly.
She had remembered when his father invited him to a fishing weekend in September and Garrett said he might finally replace the rod he had used since college.
She had found the maker’s website, read descriptions she barely understood, and emailed the company to ask which length would suit the rivers Garrett preferred.
The answer had come from a man named Beau who used the word action in four different ways and signed every message with Tight lines. Miranda had saved his recommendation in a folder beneath Owen’s pediatric records and the confirmation for Claire’s birthday present.
Eight hundred and seventy-three dollars was not enough yet.
The rod cost eleven hundred before the reel, and Miranda had planned to order it in August so it would arrive before Garrett’s birthday in October.
She had assumed she would return to work before then, or at least know when she was returning, and the remaining amount would be easy to cover once she had a salary again.
The confidence of that assumption embarrassed her now.
Owen released her and turned his face against her breast, asleep before he had finished eating.
Miranda lifted him carefully, waited through the small wet burp against her shoulder, and carried him to the crib.
He startled when she lowered him, both arms lifting in surrender, but her hand against his chest kept him from waking completely.
She stood beside him with the banking app open again.
The balance had once made her feel pleased.
It was evidence of attention made visible in small transfers: twenty dollars after she returned a blouse she did not need, forty after Claire insisted on paying her share of their mother’s birthday dinner, twelve dollars and thirty-eight cents after a grocery coupon she had forgotten to use appeared as a credit.
None of the amounts had seemed meaningful alone, but together they had become the outline of something Garrett wanted.
He had given Willa eight or nine hundred dollars in the time it took to carry a basket across a room.
Miranda closed the app and returned to bed. She expected anger to keep her awake, but exhaustion arrived with a force that flattened everything else, and the next thing she knew Owen was crying in the gray light of morning while someone moved in the hallway.
Garrett entered before she reached the crib.
“I’ve got him,” he said, crossing the room in yesterday’s jeans and a clean T-shirt he must have retrieved during the night. He lifted Owen with both hands and tucked him against his chest, murmuring something too low for Miranda to hear.
Owen’s cries softened, though his face remained pinched with grievance. Garrett changed him on the table near the window, speaking in the solemn voice he used when pretending the baby understood procedural explanations.
Miranda sat on the edge of the bed and watched Garrett fasten the clean diaper. He did not look at her, though he had to know she was awake. The careful focus felt less like avoidance than performance, a demonstration conducted for an audience he resented needing.
“I can feed him downstairs,” Garrett said when he finished. “There’s milk in the refrigerator.”
“He may not take it.”
“I’ll try.”
Miranda looked at the clock. It was six forty-seven, nearly an hour before Garrett usually woke on Sundays unless Owen forced the matter.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” she said.
Garrett lifted the baby and faced her. The fatigue in his expression had hardened overnight into something controlled and deliberate. “I’m taking care of my son.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“You said I hold him until he cries and hand him back.”
“That is often what happens.”
“And if I take him now, I’m performing.”
Miranda rubbed the heel of her hand over one eye. “You’re the one keeping score.”
“No, I’m trying to understand the rules.
” Garrett adjusted Owen against his shoulder when the baby began searching for the collar of his shirt.
“If I ask Claire to help, I’m outsourcing.
If I take him, I’m proving a point. If I offer you sleep, I’m blaming your body.
Is there anything I can do that you won’t turn into evidence against me? ”
The question was too polished for this hour. Garrett had been awake composing it, arranging his grievances while Miranda fed Owen and washed pump parts.
“You could stop asking me to grade you,” she said.
His mouth tightened. “I’m not asking for a grade.”
“You want me to tell you this means you’re a good husband.”
“I know I’m a good husband.”
The certainty entered the room before either of them could soften it. Garrett looked startled by his own bluntness, then steadied himself as though he had decided there was no shame in defending something true.
Miranda studied him. “Then why does it matter what I say?”
“Because you’re acting like one mistake cancels nine years.”
“It wasn’t one mistake.”
“You keep expanding it.”
“You keep shrinking it.”
Owen began to fuss between them, turning his face toward Miranda with his mouth open. Garrett shifted him to the other shoulder, but the baby’s impatience sharpened.
“He’s hungry,” Miranda said.
“I know.”
Garrett carried him downstairs.
Miranda remained seated for several seconds, listening to his footsteps move through the hall and descend.
A cabinet opened in the kitchen, followed by the refrigerator and the soft clink of a bottle against the counter.
Garrett knew how to warm milk without asking.
He knew which nipple Owen preferred and how long the bottle could sit once heated.
He knew enough to function, which had always allowed him to believe he knew the whole of it.
She went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Her reflection looked unfamiliar in ways that had become ordinary. Damp hair had dried against one cheek during the night, and a red crease crossed the side of her face from the pillow. The college shirt she wore sagged at the neckline, revealing the edge of a nursing bra that had once been white.
Miranda opened the medicine cabinet and found the mascara she had bought before Owen’s christening. She had worn it once, then pushed it behind infant acetaminophen and a tube of diaper cream Garrett kept bringing upstairs despite never changing diapers in the bathroom.
She unscrewed the cap. The wand emerged dry and clumped with black.
For several seconds, she held it over the sink.
Garrett had said she did not wear makeup anymore as though the change had happened naturally, like a preference she had outgrown.
He had not noticed the conditions required for her to stop.
He had not noticed her sitting on the closed toilet before his company Christmas party, trying to apply concealer while eight-months pregnant and timing her breathing between contractions that turned out to be false labor.
He had not noticed that the last lipstick she bought still lived in her work bag because she had never unpacked it after leaving Halcyon.
Miranda threw the mascara into the wastebasket.
Downstairs, Owen was crying.
She waited.