4. Adrian #3
She kisses me once more - soft, apologetic - then climbs off my lap and heads for the stairs. I listen to her footsteps fade, listen to our bedroom door open and close, listen to the silence that follows.
Then I pour myself another drink and sit in the dark and try to figure out how to ask my wife if the baby she’s carrying is mine.
The next morning, I find a receipt in her coat pocket.
I’m not looking for it. I’m hanging up her coat because she left it draped over a chair, and the receipt falls out onto the floor, and I bend down to pick it up without thinking.
It’s from a pharmacy in the harbor district. The same direction I lost her in last week.
But it’s not the receipt that catches my attention. It’s what’s written on the back, in Nina’s careful, looping handwriting:
Patient #: 847291063
Next appointment: Monday morning
Call with any questions
I stare at the numbers. At the word “patient.”
And I think: Is this Cole’s information? Or is it something else entirely?
I memorize the number - nine digits, burned in before I can stop myself, a splinter I already know I won’t be able to pull. Then I fold the receipt carefully and put it back in her coat pocket, exactly where I found it.
That afternoon, I call the pharmacy.
My finger hovers over the button for thirty-seven seconds - I count - before I finally press it. The phone rings once, twice, three times.
“Newport Family Pharmacy, how can I help you?”
I open my mouth to speak.
And then I hang up.
Because I realize, in that moment, that I don’t want to know. Not like this. Not by investigating my wife like she’s a suspect. Not by going behind her back to get answers she should be giving me herself.
If I do this - if I become the husband who checks up on his wife, who follows her and photographs receipts and calls pharmacies to verify her story - then I become someone else. Someone I don’t want to be.
The number stays in my phone like a splinter I can’t bring myself to pull.
Sunday Morning
I wake up alone.
Nina’s side of the bed is cold, the sheets thrown back, the pillow still dented from where her head rested. I lie there for a moment, listening, and hear nothing - no water running, no footsteps, no signs of life anywhere in the house.
Then I smell it.
Bacon. Coffee. Something sweet - cinnamon rolls, maybe.
I pull on a robe and head downstairs, and I find her in the kitchen, cooking. Really cooking, not the distracted half-efforts of recent weeks. There’s flour on her cheek and a smile on her face and something like hope in her eyes when she sees me.
“Morning,” she says. “I made breakfast.”
“I can see that.” I cross to her, wrap my arms around her from behind. She leans into me, and for a moment, everything feels normal. Everything feels like it used to. “What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. Just...” She turns in my arms, looks up at me with an expression I can’t quite read. “I’ve been a terrible wife lately. I know I have. And I want to make it up to you.”
“You don’t have to make anything up to me.”
“Yes, I do.” She reaches up to cup my face, and I see the tears building in her eyes. “I’ve been so caught up in... in everything... that I forgot what matters. Who matters.” She swallows hard. “You matter, Adrian. You’ve always mattered. And I’m sorry I made you feel like you didn’t.”
Something in my chest loosens. Not all the way - the doubts are still there, the questions still unanswered - but enough that I can breathe again.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you too.” She pulls me down for a kiss, and it tastes like tears and cinnamon and something else - hope, maybe. Possibility. “Now sit down and let me feed you. We have a lot to talk about.”
I sit. She serves me cinnamon rolls and bacon and fresh-squeezed orange juice. She pours me coffee and then pours herself tea - I notice, I always notice now - and she sits across from me at the kitchen table and takes a deep breath.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says.
My heart stops. This is it. This is the moment everything changes.
“Okay,” I say carefully. “I’m listening.”
She opens her mouth.
And then her phone rings.
I watch her face cycle through emotions - frustration, then worry, then something that looks like resignation. She glances at the screen.
“It’s Cole,” she says quietly. “He’s at the hospital. The port placement went wrong. They need me there before Monday.”
The hope that had been building in my chest collapses like a house of cards.
“Go,” I hear myself say. “He needs you.”
“Adrian-”
“Go. We can talk later.”
She hesitates, searching my face for something - permission, maybe, or forgiveness. Then she kisses me quickly and grabs her keys and she’s gone, leaving me alone at the kitchen table with cold cinnamon rolls and the bitter taste of almost.
Almost. The story of my marriage, lately.
Almost a confession. Almost an explanation. Almost the truth.
I sit there for a long time after she leaves, staring at the empty chair across from me.
Then I pick up my phone and look at the number I saved yesterday - the pharmacy, the patient file, the answers I’ve been too scared to find.
I put the phone down without calling.
But I don’t delete the number.
Some part of me knows I’m going to need it soon.