Chapter 10
The silence was the worst part.
I’d expected something. A text, a call, a knock on my door at an unreasonable hour.
Flowers delivered to the lab, a handwritten letter, some grand gesture from the Buchanan repertoire — the instinct of a man with unlimited resources confronting a problem he couldn’t solve with money but trying anyway.
I’d prepared for it. I’d rehearsed my responses — the cold refusal, the returned gift, the door not opened. I’d armed myself against the siege.
There was no siege.
A week passed. Then ten days. Nothing. No texts, no calls, no flowers.
No messages through the foundation. No contact through Kinsey, who checked her phone every four minutes with the hypervigilance of a woman waiting for an attack that wasn’t coming.
Nothing from Liam at all. The silence was louder than anything he could have sent.
I moved through the days the way I’d moved through the first months after the divorce — on mechanical rhythm, the routine carrying me when the engine behind it was cold.
Wake up. Fern. Cereal. Stroller. Daycare.
Bike. Lab. Data. Samples. Coffee. Desk. Laptop.
Presentation. Bike. Daycare. Stroller. Dinner. Bath. Bottle. Crib. Dark.
The routine worked. It had always worked.
The routine was the scaffolding that held the rest of me up when the internal architecture failed, and it did not fail now.
I went to the lab. I ran my team. I built the grant presentation slide by slide, each one clean and sharp and grounded in data that did not lie and did not cheat and did not book hotel rooms the night before charity galas.
But underneath the routine, the grief.
It came back on the first Saturday. The Saturday without him.
I hadn’t told Fern — she was seven months old, she didn’t understand schedules or cancellations or the concept of a father who existed and then didn’t.
But at two o’clock, the time Liam used to knock, she crawled to the door.
She sat in front of it and held out the green block and waited.
She waited for twenty minutes. I sat on the couch and watched her wait and felt something inside me break so quietly that it didn’t make a sound.
Kinsey was there. She saw it too. She picked up Fern and redirected her to the play mat and said nothing about it, not then and not later, which was how I knew it had hurt her as much as it had hurt me.
It came back in the layered way grief always came back for me — not a single wave but a tide, rising slowly, filling spaces I thought I’d sealed.
The first few days after the Saturday it was manageable.
I could feel it in the mornings, the heaviness between waking and rising, the extra second it took to swing my legs out of bed.
It lived in the gap between Fern’s bedtime and my own, the hours I used to fill with work but now filled with staring at a presentation I couldn’t focus on.
By the end of the first week it was worse.
The grief had found the old channels — the ones it had carved during the divorce, the ones I thought had dried up and closed.
It moved through them now with the ease of water following a path it remembered.
I caught myself reaching for my phone to tell Liam something — not anything important, just a reflex, the ghost of a habit that had died but hadn’t decomposed — and the reflex itself was a small devastation.
I listened for his footsteps in the corridor of the institute before remembering he’d never walked that corridor, he’d never belonged in my world, the footsteps I was hearing were Theo’s or Rosa’s or the maintenance worker who swept the leaves.
The lab was the only place it didn’t reach.
When I was at the bench or at my desk or in the data, the grief went quiet — not gone, just muted, drowned out by the louder signal of work that mattered.
I leaned into it. Stayed late. Came in early.
Rosa watched me with the silent, assessing attention she brought to everything and said nothing for a week.
Then, on the eighth day, she set a cup of tea on my desk — not coffee, tea, which she’d never done before — and said, “Whatever you’re outrunning, it’s faster than you.
You might have to stop and let it catch up. ”
I drank the tea. I didn’t stop.
Joanna texted on day six. A simple message: Heard the blog noise.
You okay? I typed and deleted three responses before settling on: I’m fine.
How’s your data set? She responded with a paragraph about her machine learning model that was exactly what I needed — someone treating me like a scientist instead of a story. I saved the text and read it twice.
I caught myself, late at night, looking at the space on the living room floor where he’d sat with Fern.
The carpet was the same. The play mat was in the same spot.
But the space held his absence now, the specific shape of a man who’d been there twice and wouldn’t be there again, and Fern — Fern, who couldn’t understand absence in any abstract way but who felt it in the concrete way of a baby whose world had included a person and now didn’t — reached for that space sometimes.
Held out the green block to the empty floor.
Made the sound she’d made at the doorway when he left after the first visit, the sound that wasn’t quite a word.
The worst night was Thursday. Fern wouldn’t sleep.
She was teething — the first tooth pushing through the gum, the misery of a body doing something necessary that hurt — and she screamed.
Not the normal crying, not the protests or the announcements.
Real screaming, the kind that came from a pain she couldn’t understand or escape.
I walked the floor of the apartment for two hours.
I held her against my chest and hummed and rocked and tried the teething ring and tried the cold washcloth and tried everything the books said and everything Kinsey had told me and nothing worked.
Kinsey came at midnight. She must have heard through the wall — her apartment was two floors up, the building was old, sound traveled. She appeared in my doorway in a bathrobe and took Fern from my arms without a word and walked the floor with her while I sat on the couch and shook.
Not my hands this time. My whole body. The fine, uncontrollable trembling that came when the adrenaline and the exhaustion and the grief all converged and the body gave up pretending it was fine.
I sat on the couch and shook and listened to Kinsey humming and Fern’s screaming diminishing to whimpers and then to sniffles and then to the hiccuping aftermath of a baby who had raged against the world and lost.
“She’s down,” Kinsey said, coming back from the bedroom. She sat beside me on the couch. Close enough that our shoulders touched. “Hallie.”
“I know.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I know.”
She pulled the blanket off the back of the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders.
The blanket was old, soft, one of the first things I’d bought for the apartment — a target clearance item, twenty dollars, the kind of purchase that felt like building a life and also like admitting the old life was over.
“Talk to me,” Kinsey said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking on the couch at midnight and you haven’t slept more than four hours a night in ten days. You’re not fine. Talk to me.”
I pulled the blanket tighter. The apartment was warm — I always kept it warm for Fern — but the cold was inside, the kind that didn’t respond to thermostats.
“I started packing boxes in June,” I said. “After I found them. I packed for three days. One box at a time. The books first, then the clothes, then the kitchen things. I labeled everything. I used blue tape because the house had brown tape and I didn’t want to use anything of his.”
Kinsey was quiet. She knew this. She’d been there for parts of it. But she also knew that I was telling it again because the telling was the point, not the information.
“I was eight weeks pregnant. I didn’t know yet — not consciously.
My body knew. I was nauseous every morning and I thought it was the grief.
I thought the grief was making me sick, and in a way I was right, just not the way I thought.
” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I found out at the doctor’s office.
I went because the nausea wasn’t stopping, and the doctor — a woman I’d never met, a new patient visit because I’d left the Buchanan family physician and started over — she asked when my last period was, and I counted back, and the number didn’t work, and she said, ‘Let’s do a test.’”
“I remember.”
“You remember me calling you. You don’t remember the twenty minutes between the test and the call.
I sat in that exam room and looked at the ceiling and thought: I am sitting in a medical office that doesn’t know my name, in a city where I don’t have a home yet, and I am pregnant with the child of a man who booked a hotel room with another woman while I was giving a speech about his legacy, and I am going to have to decide what to do about that in the next few weeks, and I am alone. ”
Kinsey’s hand found mine under the blanket. She held it. Not a squeeze — a hold. Steady, warm, present.
“And now it’s a year later and I have Fern and I have the lab and I have you and I have this apartment and I built all of it from nothing, and it’s good, Kins.
It’s really good. And for two weeks I let myself think that maybe the building could include him.
Not the old him — the one who booked hotel rooms and said it didn’t mean anything.
The new one. The one who sat on the floor and hummed and sent three sentences and left the door in my hands. ”
“And then the receipt.”