Chapter 18 #4
“Positive.” She reaches out, and I transfer Emma carefully.
Emma barely stirs—just a soft, snuffly sigh before she nuzzles into Annie’s neck, her small hand curling into the fabric of Annie’s sweater as if it’s the most natural spot in the world.
I watch them disappear down the hallway—Annie’s steady stride, the way she supports Emma’s weight without thinking—and I feel that familiar ache of longing.
It’s the phantom limb of a partnership. That sudden realization of what it feels like to have someone else hold the other end of the rope. It’s not just the physical labor, but it’s the mental shift. The quiet relief of hearing I’ve got her and actually being able to let go.
Guilt nips at the heels of that, though.
Emma’s mine—my mess, my miracle, my everything.
I’m supposed to be the one-man army. But the truth is, I’m not built that way.
No one is. When she reaches for Annie first sometimes, or lights up at her stories more than mine, that rush of relief hits like a drug, and yeah, it makes me feel guilty for thinking that way sometimes.
But maybe it’s not terrible to need help. Maybe it’s just human.
I peel off my coat and hang it by the door.
The apartment feels too still, the silence amplified by the taunting blink of the answering machine on the kitchen counter.
There’s one message. I’d left my pager on my desk this morning because I forgot to clip it to my belt in the rush of getting out the door.
It’s probably David Huang from the lab, asking about the grant proposal that’s due next week. He’s been on my case about it for days.
I jab the play button, leaning against the counter as the tape whirs.
“Leo, hi. It’s…it’s me. Rebecca.”
The air leaves the room. It’s a physical sensation—a vacuum-seal around my chest. My heart doesn’t just skip; it stalls, like a car engine dying in the middle of an intersection.
“I know—it’s been a while. Months. And I—god, I’m so sorry.
For everything. Leaving. Not calling. All of it.
I can’t…I can’t unpack it all over a tape, but I want to talk.
Face-to-face. About Emma and maybe figuring out some kind of…
arrangement moving forward. Maybe let’s meet Friday?
I’ll be in town, and we can go to that café we always liked—Grounded, on Amsterdam and 83rd?
Ten o’clock? I’ll be there if you…if you decide to come. Okay. Um. Bye.”
The world tilts. My pulse stutters, a cold jolt racing down my spine, freezing me in place like I’ve been plugged into a socket.
Eight months. Two hundred and forty-odd days of radio silence.
Eight months of me learning how to braid hair via trial and error, of watching Emma’s face fall every time the doorbell rang and it wasn’t her mother.
Eight months of nanny roulette, of nights where I stared at the ceiling wondering if I’d ever get it right.
Eight months of scrambling through the wreckage she left behind.
I should be raging—punching a wall, cursing her name. But it’s dread that coils low in my stomach because this upends the fragile balance we’ve scraped together. It drags the past kicking and screaming into the now, threatening to crack open wounds I thought were scabbing over.
The door to Emma’s room clicks shut. Annie appears, making her way back to the kitchen, her hair a bit mussed from the transfer. She’s wearing a soft, weary smile—the one that usually makes me feel like I’ve finally come home. “She didn’t even wake up when I pulled off her boots. Solid knockout.”
I can’t move. I can’t find a smile to give her back.
Her expression falters, her head tilting. “Leo? What is it? What happened?”
I look at her—at this woman who has become the marrow in my bones over the last few weeks—and for the first time, I’m terrified of what the truth will do to the floor beneath our feet.
I rake a hand through my hair, the strands still gritty from the park wind, and jab the play button again, needing to hear it one more time, like maybe it’ll make more sense on repeat.
The machine whirs, static popping before her voice spills out. “Leo, hi. It’s…it’s me. Rebecca.”
Beside me, I hear the hitching intake of Annie’s breath. Her hand flies to her mouth, her eyes going wide.
Hearing Rebecca after all these months—it’s not the sucker punch I braced for.
It’s subtler, more disorienting, like stumbling across an old photo album in the back of a closet.
That familiar lilt, the way her sentences trail up at the edges like questions, how she says my name with this casual ownership that grates now.
The message ends with a final, clinical beep. The silence that follows is heavy enough to crush us.
“Leo,” Annie whispers, her voice barely a thread.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I ask. My voice sounds like it’s been dragged over gravel. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“I don’t know.”
“An arrangement,” I spit the word out like it’s poison.
“She wants to talk about an arrangement, like Emma is a timeshare on the Cape. Like she can just waltz back in after eight months of radio silence and demand—what? Alternate weekends? Spring break? She didn’t call.
She didn’t write. She didn’t even check to see if Emma still remembers what her mother’s face looks like. ”
I’m pacing now, the kitchen floorboards groaning under the weight of my kinetic energy. I can hear myself spiraling, my voice rising an octave, but I can’t find the brake pedal.
“She doesn’t get to do this! You don’t get to opt out of parenthood when it gets hard and then opt back in when you’ve had a nice long nap. That’s not how the world works. That’s not—”
Annie moves into my space, a calming presence that breaks the circuit of my panic. She wraps her arms around my waist, tucking her head under my chin, anchoring me. I collapse into her, burying my nose in her hair.
“What do I do?” I ask into the crown of her head.
She’s quiet for a second, then shrugs against me. “I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer here, Leo. You just have to go with your gut. With what you feel is right for Emma.”
“And if my gut says to ignore the message and pretend she doesn’t exist?”
“Then you do that.”
“But?”
She pulls back just enough to look up at me, her expression a complicated tapestry of empathy and fear. “But maybe…maybe hearing her out isn’t the worst thing. Just to know what you’re up against.”
She looks away then, her gaze dropping to my collarbone, and the sight of it kills me. I know what she’s doing. She’s being the “big” person, the objective observer, while her own heart is likely being squeezed in a vice.
It feels like ancient history now—Rebecca and me, the ring, the half-baked wedding plans, that illusion of forever. How did I ever buy into it? How did I ever think we could build a life together when someone like Annie exists in the world?
Annie is every good and impossible thing that I thought the world had stopped making.
She’s peonies in late spring, smelling of honey and rain, spilling over their vases with too much color, too much life.
She’s the smell of old books and the shimmering brightness of a winter sun.
She’s the warmth of a coffee cup against your palms first thing in the morning.
She is the universe, actually, ablaze; she’s grit and glitter and the mercy of a second chance.
“I don’t want to go,” I say firmly.
“I know.”
“But I probably have to.”
“Probably.”
I pull her back in, resting my chin on her head, her heartbeat syncing with mine in the quiet. “This is a fucking mess.”
“It is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For this. For her showing up now. For—”
“Leo.” She pulls back and looks at me. “You don’t have to apologize for having a past. We all have one.”
“Yours didn’t leave you a voicemail.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
I laugh despite myself. “You think Daniel’s going to call?”
“God, I hope not.”
We stand there in the dim light, the clock on the wall ticking toward a future that suddenly looks very different than it did an hour ago.
“I should go,” Annie says softly. “And give you some room to breathe.”
“I don’t need room. I need you.”
“I know. But you need to decide what you’re doing about Rebecca, and you can’t do that while you’re busy being distracted by me.”
I don’t want her to leave. I want her to stay here, in my kitchen, in my life, so I don’t have to think about Rebecca or arrangements or the fact that my carefully reconstructed world just got a grenade lobbed into it.
“You’re a very good distraction.”
“The best,” she agrees, her smile sad and fleeting.
She stands on her tiptoes and kisses me—a soft, lingering thing that feels like a goodbye we aren’t ready to say yet. Then she’s at the door, pulling on her coat. “Call me? When you know?”
“Yeah. I will.”
She opens the door, pauses, then looks back at me. “For what it’s worth? I think you’re going to do the right thing, Leo. Whatever that is.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re a good dad. And good dads always figure it out.”
The door clicks shut, and I’m left in the empty apartment, the machine’s red blink mocking me, Rebecca’s ghost lingering in the air.
I walk over to the machine and stare at it for a long moment, then reach out and hit delete. The machine chirps—a sharp, digital burial—and then, finally, it’s quiet.