Chapter 1
TAKEN FOR GRANTED
“Mama. Mama. Mama.”
I peel one eye open. Rosie is three inches from my face, breathing directly into my nostril, her palm flat on my cheek like she’s checking for a pulse. She climbed out of her bed again. Fantastic.
“Mama. My pull-up.”
“Okay, baby. Okay.” I sit up and my back seizes—four hours of sleep, maybe, because Nancy had a nightmare at midnight and didn’t settle until almost two, and every joint in my body feels packed with wet sand.
I scoop Rosie up, twenty-nine pounds of solid toddler, and she grabs a fistful of my hair and yanks.
“Gentle,” I whisper, because Preston is still asleep ten feet away with his back to us. I carry her out, change the pull-up, park her in front of Bluey on low volume, and head downstairs.
Kitchen. Coffee on. Lunch boxes out of the drying rack.
My hands are doing this on autopilot—knife, bread, spread, cut, bag—while my eyes are still mostly closed.
Turkey and cheese for Lily, no crusts. She’ll send it home untouched if there are crusts.
PB&J for Nancy, cut diagonal, because the geometry of a sandwich matters when you’re five and this is a hill she will die on and take me with her.
I catch myself putting the turkey in Nancy’s box and have to swap. Focus, Brittany.
Eggs on. Waffle in the toaster. Banana sliced thin for Rosie because she still pockets chunks in her cheek like a chipmunk and I don’t trust her.
I eat over the sink. Two bites of cold toast, three scrapes of egg from the pan, a swallow of coffee so hot it burns a line down my throat. That’s breakfast. That’s my breakfast every day—whatever fits between tasks, eaten standing up like a raccoon.
Getting three kids dressed is a contact sport.
Lily handles herself—seven going on forty, my little general.
Nancy requires negotiation. She doesn’t want the polo.
She wants the purple shirt. The purple shirt is not a uniform shirt.
“Purple shirt on Saturday,” I say, already pulling the polo over her head while she goes limp-noodle in protest. Rosie has found a marker.
Blue streak on the wall. I wipe it, scoop her up, wrestle her into her outfit while she arches her back and screams.
Everyone downstairs. Everyone eating. Lily’s methodical. Nancy’s lobbying for more syrup. Rosie is smearing banana into her hair with both fists. I’m on my knees wiping syrup off the tile and signing a permission slip for a field trip to the San Diego Zoo when I hear the footsteps on the stairs.
Preston comes into the kitchen in a charcoal suit, silver tie, shoes already on.
He walks past Rosie in the high chair. Past Nancy.
He reaches over me—I’m still on the floor—and picks up the coffee I poured twenty minutes ago.
Black, no sugar. He takes the plate I made.
Eggs over easy, toast, turkey bacon. Sits at the island. Phone’s in his hand before his fork.
I push myself off the floor. My knees crack. “Rosie has a checkup Thursday. Can you take off early and—”
“Can’t.” He doesn’t look up. “Thursday’s the Kepler pitch.”
“The appointment’s at four. You’d only need to leave by—”
“Brittany.” He glances at me. Just a flick of the eyes, up from the phone and back down. “I’m not leaving a client pitch to go to a checkup. That’s your thing.”
My thing. Three kids’ worth of doctors, dentists, parent-teacher conferences, speech evaluations, immunization schedules, prescription refills—my thing.
“Fine. I’ll figure it out.”
He goes back to scrolling. I pull Rosie’s banana-crusted bib off and rinse it at the sink, and he says, still looking at his phone: “There’s a dinner Friday. With your parents. It’s at Juniper.”
I wait.
“I need you to be there.” He lifts his coffee. “Catherine specifically asked about you.”
My mother asked about me. At a dinner my husband is telling me about two days before it happens. “What time?”
“Seven-thirty. Wear something—” He pauses and rakes his eyes over my body and frowns. “See if you have something that fits. You haven’t been out in a while.”
I’m holding the bib under the faucet. The water’s running over my hands. Warm. I watch it move through my fingers.
See if you have something that fits.
“I’ll figure it out,” I say again. Like he didn’t just do what he did.
He’s not even looking at me. He’s already moved on to whatever’s on his screen.
He didn’t say it to wound me—that’s the thing.
He said it like he was suggesting I check the weather.
Like I’m am not his wife, not someone he should be kind or considerate with.
Instead, he treats me like a low-level employee who he finds annoying at best.
How the hell did we turn into this kind of couple?
Nancy spills her milk. It floods across the table and drips onto the floor I just wiped. I grab the towel.
“I’ll be late tonight,” Preston says. To his phone.
I mop up the milk on my knees. Wait. Maybe there’s more—a reason, a time, a thank you for breakfast or a the kids look cute or literally any sentence that proves he sees me standing in this room. That I’m a person here and not a service.
Nothing.
He puts his plate in the sink—the sink, not the dishwasher six inches to the left—and takes his coffee to the front door. His briefcase is where I set it last night. His keys are on the hook where I always hang them.
The garage door opens, the car starts, and he’s gone.
I stay on my knees for a second. The milk towel is soaked in my hand. Rosie’s banging her tray. Nancy’s asking for more syrup. Lily is watching me from across the table, quiet, her spoon paused halfway to her mouth.
“Alright.” I wring the towel out and stand up. “Shoes on in five minutes, everyone.”
“Brittany! Oh my gosh, hi!”
I’m bent into the backseat, fighting Nancy’s buckle—the thing sticks, it always sticks—when Estelle Holloway’s voice hits me from across the parking lot. I don’t turn around yet because this buckle is about to win and I refuse to let it.
Click.
I back out of the car. Estelle’s crossing the lot with her son on her hip, waving, heels clicking on asphalt.
“Hey, Estelle.”
“How are you? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Thursday. PTA meeting. Chair next to mine.”
She laughs like this is the funniest thing anyone’s said all week. “Right, right. This week has been insane.”
Behind me, Lily’s already buckled, reading a book. She walked out of school holding Nancy’s hand, backpack neat, ponytail swinging. She didn’t get that from Preston. Preston can’t find his own keys.
“Mama, I did painting,” Nancy announces, holding up both palms. Electric blue.
“Beautiful, baby. Do not touch the seats.”
Estelle leans against my car door. “So the bake sale—are you doing your lemon bars again? Because Trish Nguyen said if you don’t do the lemon bars she’s going to blacklist you.”
“I’ll do the lemon bars.”
“You’re an angel. Oh, and did you hear about the new music teacher? Apparently she’s fresh out of conservatory. Kindergarten parents are losing their minds.”
“Good losing or bad losing?”
“Unclear. You know how they are.” She rolls her eyes.
I half-smile, half-watch Rosie in the rearview.
She fell asleep on the drive over, cheek mashed against the car-seat pad, and if everyone keeps their voice down she’ll stay out and I’ll get silence the whole way home.
Twelve minutes of it. The closest thing I have to a spa day.
Estelle tilts her head. “Oh! I almost forgot. I saw Preston at the Hopper Hill Gala last Saturday. What a gorgeous event. That venue on the harbor? The one with the rooftop terrace?”
My hand is on the car door. It stays there.
“Jack and I almost didn’t go, but I’m so glad we did.” She shifts her son to the other hip. “And your husband’s colleague—is she new? Tall, dark hair? They were at the same table as us. She seemed so lovely. You two would have loved it. You should come next year!”
Last Saturday. Last Saturday Preston told me the gala was a partners-only thing. He said I’d be bored. He said it wasn’t worth getting a sitter. I was on the couch at nine in sweatpants watching a show I’d already seen.
“Oh, the gala.” My voice comes out exactly right. “Preston mentioned it. Said it was kind of a low-key thing. Lots of handshaking.”
“Low-key?” Estelle’s eyebrows shoot up. “It was black-tie! There was a live band. Jack wore his tux and still felt underdressed.”
The sun is pressing on the back of my neck. October in San Diego, marine layer gone by noon, the asphalt throwing heat. Minivans and backpacks and kids in navy polos. Everything looks exactly the way it looked two minutes ago.
“You know Preston.” I shrug one shoulder. “He downplays everything.”
Estelle says something else. I catch the shape of it but not the words because my ears are full of a flat, high-pitched tone—the sound a machine makes when it’s recalculating.
He was on a rooftop terrace on the harbor in a tuxedo. With a woman. Tall. Dark hair. So lovely. At his table. At his side. Where I should have been.
And Estelle and Jack and whoever else was there—they saw the two of them and didn’t blink. Didn’t wonder where his wife was. Because she looked like she belonged there.
Because maybe, to everyone in that room, she is the wife.
And I’m—what? The woman at home in sweatpants who couldn’t find something that fits.
“I gotta run.” My voice is still perfect. “Rosie’s asleep and I don’t want to push my luck.”
“Let’s grab coffee soon!”
“Definitely.”
I close the door. Seatbelt. Key in the ignition. Pull out slow. Check the mirrors.
My hands are shaking on the wheel.
I grip tighter but they won’t stop—just keep trembling against the leather while Nancy talks about her painting in the backseat. She’s telling me about the colors she mixed. Green and blue made a darker blue, not a green. She’s outraged about it. She wants to know why.
“That’s how paint works, baby,” I say, and my voice sounds normal. It sounds like a mom driving a carpool. It sounds like every other day of my life.
I signal every turn. I check every mirror. I drive the speed limit. I do everything exactly right, the way I always do. The way I’ve done every single day for seven years while he—
See if you have something that fits.
You two would have loved it.
Tall, dark hair. So lovely.
My knuckles are white. The shaking moves up my wrists, into my forearms. It doesn’t stop.
Let’s find out what I missed.