Chapter Forty-Three
ADRIAN
Boston
Things were far from easy as we settled into our lives back in Boston. Sloane had let me continue to work remotely three days a week, and although she protested me babying her, I think Isobel was relieved she had someone else at home to help during the day.
Finley had grown, filling out her once tiny little chicken legs and finally looking more like a healthy infant and less like a tiny preemie. She was still small, but she was thriving.
She just didn’t fuckin’ sleep. Which was wearing on both of us.
I tried to get up as much as possible during the night, often stealing the baby monitor from Isobel’s nightstand after she’d fallen asleep, but there were still nights when neither of us seemed to calm her down.
The pediatrician insisted it was normal—that some babies simply had colicky tendencies—but as we reached the point where we’d be able to take her to the office daycare; I feared she wouldn’t be ready to go.
It’d been four months since she was born, and I was also worried that Isobel would never come out of the funk she’d been in. Sloane had convinced her to take the entire 12 weeks of maternity leave before she started transitioning back to her regular hours, but Isobel was struggling with guilt that her job was pulling too much of the focus from Finley .
As the days wore on, and neither of us had solid sleep at night, we both struggled to find a routine that worked.
The days I went to the office, she was up with me at dawn, even if Finley had finally fallen asleep. By the time I returned at night with dinner, she’d be surrounded by papers on the couch, usually with Finley passed out on her chest, clearly working on days she wasn’t supposed to be.
I had to cajole her into the shower more often than not, and she absolutely refused to try to go places on the weekend where she thought Finley would be exposed to too many people.
When we’d first gotten home, I understood it, because we were still on the tail end of flu season, and she was medically vulnerable. But now we were well into spring, and she rarely left the apartment. We were supposed to move into a new townhouse a few blocks from her current apartment in three weeks, and while my apartment was a sea of neatly stacked boxes, she hadn’t gotten far with packing.
Dr. Reeves had broached the subject of seeing a counselor to talk to Isobel about her fears regarding being a new parent and balancing her time as a working mom, but she brushed it off, throwing away the business card when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I tried to take on as much as I could, but she wouldn’t let me, and I felt helpless as I watched her spiral.
But I was thankful for rare days like today. Finley had sporadically been sleeping longer at night, and last night was one of those nights. Isobel had gotten seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and I’d made her breakfast after we’d showered. The little line between her eyebrows had softened as we went through a seemingly normal weekend routine together. Finley had been in a good mood when she’d woken up, and I hoped we were finally working toward more peaceful nights.
She was lying between us on the bed, milk drunk and content, kicking her little legs into the air as she played with my hands.
Isobel was leaning against the headboard, her laptop perched on her knees while she sifted through the backlog of work emails. I’d tried to get her to stop thinking about work during the weekends, but she worried her projects were going to fall through the cracks while she was only working part-time.
I was tired of fighting her, so I didn’t argue, knowing it gave her the feeling of control that was missing when it came to her daily life right now.
Things were far from perfect, but I knew this stage was temporary. Weeks ago, we’d been trapped in a hospital with no end in sight, and now we had a healthy, mostly happy baby who was starting to thrive.
Pressing my nose into Finley’s hair, I inhaled, thinking that there was no way my life could feel more complete than it did right now. Well, one more thing would make it perfect.
“Marry me,” I whispered to Isobel, looking over our daughter’s head to where she was sitting on the bed beside us.
“What?” Her eyes widened as she froze, her hand dropping to her side. “No. What are you talking about?”
Well, that wasn’t the answer I was hoping for.
“Adrian…”
“Stop. Just stop,” I urged quietly, reaching over to grasp her hand. “Hear me out.”
“Are you insane?”
“Maybe,” I chuckled, but the shell-shocked expression didn’t move from her face as she put her laptop on her nightstand and pulled her hand out of mine. “But I can’t imagine not spending every day like this. Only with a ring on your finger.”
“Only a ring,” she scoffed as she scooted sideways, standing at the edge of the bed for a moment before she started pacing the length of it. “You don’t want to marry me.”
“I…”
Her brow furrowed, and I watched tears spill from the corners of her eyes, tracking down her cheeks. “I’m a mess. You can’t seriously want this forever. I can barely make it through the day under the weight of all this and you’re just over there in la la land thinking about weddings and rainbows while I’m literally falling apart. Every morning, I wake up and wonder if we made a mistake. If having her was a mistake.” She stared at Finley, and her voice caught as more tears fell. “And then I feel like a monster because I love her so much, but she doesn’t deserve a mom who can’t handle taking care of her.”
“Babe.” Gently placing Finley into the cot next to the bed, I walked to where Isobel was pacing, grasping her shoulders. “I don’t care about any of that. All I know is that I don’t want to look back on my life and regret anything. I don’t want to regret telling you how I feel. I know you lo…”
“Loving you isn’t the problem, Adrian. But I can’t imagine getting married right now. Or maybe ever.”
“I just want you to think about it. We don’t have to do it right now. I need to get the ring from Pops still, and I’ll wait as long as you need me to, but I want you to know how I feel.”
“I can’t...”
She tried to pull away, but I held tight, bending my knees to look in her eyes. “Talk to me. Please.”
“Stop. Just stop. Enough. I don’t want to talk about this right now. I can’t. I…have too much on my plate right now and I can’t manage it all. Please don’t add something else for me to fail at.” This time, when she tried to pull free, I released her, watching as she disappeared into the bathroom and locked the door.
The walls she’d seemed to dismantle over the last year came back up in an instant, fortified with abject terror and fucking postpartum depression. I knew I was pushing her, but I also thought we could work through this phase and come out stronger on the other side.
Clearly, I was mistaken.