Chapter 1
I AM SO TIRED
The hot water hits my scalp and I almost cry. I can’t remember my last shower. There’s spit-up crusted in my hair and that sour-milk smell has worked its way into my skin and I just need five more minutes where nobody is crying and nobody needs me.
I wash my hair twice. Shave one leg and give up on the other. Stand with my face under the spray until the hot water cools, then kill the water.
Silence downstairs. Audrey isn’t crying. Drew isn’t narrating his way through a diaper change loud enough for me to hear it—Okay, Audrey-bug, let’s get you cleaned up, Daddy’s got it—so either everything’s fine or he’s on his phone and she’s just sitting there.
I towel off fast, pull on sweats, and go down with wet hair dripping cold lines down my back.
And there it is. Exactly what I was afraid of.
Audrey is in the bouncer with a bottle propped against a rolled-up dish towel, angled so formula drips into her mouth when she turns her head.
She’s a little over eight months old. She can’t hold her own bottle.
I asked him to do one thing—just be with her, just hold her for the length of a shower—and he built a contraption so he wouldn’t have to touch her.
Drew is on the couch, thumb scrolling his phone, and he hasn’t even turned the bouncer to face him. My baby has been staring at the blank wall under the window. I want to scream.
“Hey.” I lift Audrey out and the bottle clatters to the floor. “She can’t hold her own bottle yet, Drew.”
“She was fine.” He doesn’t look up. “I propped it for like two seconds—she was fussing and I needed to check something.”
I pick up the dish towel. It’s warm. He rolled it into a cylinder and shaped it to cradle the curve of the bottle—that’s not two seconds, that’s a whole system he engineered so he could get back to his phone.
“What did you need to check?”
“Hm?”
“On your phone. What was so important you couldn’t feed her?”
He finally looks up. Blinks, like the question surprises him. “Just a work thing.”
A work thing. On a Saturday. While I was upstairs taking my first shower in two days.
Audrey’s fingers curl into the collar of my sweatshirt and I press my face into the top of her head—formula and that warm bread smell she gets when she’s been sleeping. My throat burns. I swallow it down because if I start crying I don’t know when I’ll stop.
“I have to run to the office,” he says, and he’s already up, already grabbing for his keys like this was always the plan. Like I was always just the next shift clocking in.
“Drew, come on. I need to prep for Audrey’s pediatrician appointment. I haven’t even started the feeding log—”
“So do it while she naps.” He squeezes my shoulder and presses a dry kiss to my temple. “You’re doing so great with her. Seriously. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
He tells me I’m doing great and then he leaves. The compliment is supposed to be the same thing as staying. It’s not. It’s the door closing behind him again while I stand here with milk-stained sweats and a baby on my hip and no one else coming.
“You said that last Saturday. You were gone all day.”
“That was different. There was a thing at the office.” He jingles the keys. That easy, reassuring smile that used to make me feel safe and now just makes me feel managed. “Couple hours, babe. I promise.”
The front door clicks shut. His car pulls away and something behind my ribs goes tight—this low dull ache that I keep mistaking for exhaustion but might actually be loneliness.
Audrey spits up on my clean sweatshirt. Warm, right down the collar. Of course.
He’s gone all day. Audrey screams through the afternoon and I walk laps around the living room bouncing her until my lower back seizes and my arms shake and I’m crying right along with her because I am so goddamn tired and so goddamn alone in this house and nobody is coming to help me.
When Drew finally walks through the door he’s carrying a pizza box. Holds it up with one hand like a waiter. Like ta-da. Like a pepperoni pizza fixes the fact that I’ve been alone with a screaming infant since he walked out this morning.
“Sorry—got caught up. Grabbed dinner though.”
“She screamed for three hours, Drew.”
“Aw, poor Audrey-bug.” He scoops Audrey out of her high chair—holds her for maybe ten seconds, kisses her forehead, puts her right back. Then his phone is out again. “Pepperoni okay? I got pepperoni.”
He kissed our daughter the way you’d check a box on a form. That’s his parenting for the day—a ten-second hold and a forehead kiss, and he’ll go to bed tonight believing he showed up.
I eat standing over the sink because if I sit across from him I will say something I can’t take back. He’s on the couch with the TV on. Audrey babbles at nobody and Drew laughs at something on the screen and I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste iron.
Later. Audrey is finally down. Drew is beside me on the couch scrolling his phone and the question has been sitting on my tongue all night.
“I want to look for the ring again.”
Drew’s thumb stops. Half a beat. Then he locks the screen and turns to me with his face arranged into something soft and careful.
“We tore the bedroom apart, babe. The bathroom. I checked the car.”
“Then let’s move the dresser. You said you’d move it two weeks ago.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“You said that last time.”
“Sloane.” His voice gets the patient edge, the one that makes me feel like I’m being unreasonable for wanting my own wedding ring back. “We’ll find it. I promise.”
“It was my grandmother’s diamond. And your grandmother’s sapphire. Both of them are gone, Drew. Our grandmothers are gone. That ring is the only—” My voice cracks. I press my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger, hard, until the sting steadies me. “I can’t just let it go.”
“I know. Hey—come here.” He pulls my hand into his lap. Thumb rubbing slow circles across my knuckles. “I know how much it means to you. But can I say something? And don’t take it the wrong way.”
My stomach tightens. “What.”
“I think with everything you’ve been dealing with—the sleep deprivation, the crying, all of it—maybe it would help to talk to someone.
Professionally.” He watches my face. “A guy at work mentioned his wife sees this therapist, Dr. Rhodes. She said it was the best thing she ever did for herself postpartum.”
Dr. Rhodes. He has a name ready. He had it loaded before I even brought up the ring—I can feel it, the way I used to feel when a vendor had their excuse rehearsed before the call started at my old job. My chest goes tight.
“You looked up a therapist for me?”
“I just want you to have support.”
“I have support. I have you. You’re supposed to be my support.”
“And I am. But I can’t be everything, babe. That’s not fair to either of us.”
I want to grab him by the collar and shake him. I bounced his screaming daughter for three hours alone today. I haven’t slept more than three hours straight since she was born. And he’s sitting here telling me he can’t be everything?
But the words come out of his mouth so smooth and reasonable that arguing with them feels crazy. And maybe that’s the point.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll look into it.”
Drew squeezes my hand. Leans over, kisses my forehead. “I’m proud of you.”
He goes to bed. I sit on the couch with the monitor glowing beside me. My back aches. My arms are sore. I should be sleeping—she’ll be up again soon—but I can’t stop pressing my thumb into my bare ring finger, rubbing the groove that’s slowly filling in.
I should call Dr. Rhodes. Maybe Drew’s right. Maybe I do need help.
Maybe I’m just tired.
The house phone rings on a Tuesday and I almost don’t answer it.
Nobody calls the landline. We only have it because the home security system requires a hardwired connection, and the only calls that come through are the alarm company and robocalls about car warranties.
Audrey is napping. The phone is on the kitchen wall, the old kind with a cord, and it’s loud enough to rattle my teeth.
I grab it before it rings again and wakes her up.
“Hi, this is Francis Carlson from Carlson and Son Jewelers. I’m looking for Mrs. Larson?”
“This is she.”
“Great! I just wanted to follow up—your husband brought your ring in a few weeks back for resizing, and we offer one complimentary adjustment within thirty days if the fit isn’t quite right. I wanted to make sure everything’s comfortable.”
Wait. What?
“I’m sorry—a resizing?”
“Yes, ma’am. We took it from a seven down to a five-and-a-half. Your husband mentioned you’d lost some weight, and he wanted it to fit properly. We finished the work about three weeks ago—he picked it up same day.”
The floor tilts. That’s what it feels like—like the kitchen just shifted under my feet.
“He—Drew brought it in? My wedding ring?”
“Yes, ma’am. The custom piece my father designed. It’s in our records from the original commission.”
I pull out a kitchen chair and drop into it because my knees are doing something unreliable.
Seven to five-and-a-half. I wear a seven.
My fingers are still swollen from the pregnancy—I’ve been eating peanut butter from the jar at two in the morning while Audrey cluster-feeds and I haven’t been on a walk in weeks.
I have gained weight, not lost it. And Drew told this man I got smaller?
Drew had the ring. He’s had it this whole time.
Every single night I brought it up—have you checked the car, can you move the dresser, it has to be here somewhere—he sat there with that soft patient face and said we’ll find it, babe.
He watched me cry. He squeezed my hand. He suggested a therapist because I was too upset about a ring he already had.
My eyes are burning. I blink hard and fast because I am not going to cry on the phone with a stranger.
“Mrs. Larson? Are you there?”
“When.” My voice comes out scraped. “When exactly did he bring it in?”
Papers rustling on the other end. “Looks like the drop-off was March 14th, and he picked it up March 16th. Two-day turnaround.”
March 14th. The work retreat. The one he came back from sunburned, telling some story about a guy from accounting falling into a koi pond.
I laughed at that story. I sat on the couch with Audrey on my chest and I laughed while my wedding ring was sitting on a jeweler’s workbench being shrunk down to a size that would never fit me.
He came home and I asked him about the ring and he said we’ll find it and my grandmother’s diamond was already gone.
My hand is shaking so hard the phone cord rattles against the wall.
“Mr. Carlson. You said five and a half?”
“That’s right.”
Five and a half. I have never been a five and a half. I stare at my left hand flat on the kitchen table—my puffy knuckles, the indent where the ring used to sit almost filled in—and this size has never belonged to me. Not before pregnancy. Not now. Not ever.
“Thank you, Mr. Carlson.”
“Mrs. Larson, if there’s anything—”
“Thank you.”
I hang up. The phone cord swings against the wall and I’m gripping the edge of the kitchen table so hard my knuckles go white and I can feel my heartbeat in my teeth.
Why?
A five and a half doesn’t fit me. It’s never fit me. So what the hell did he do with it? What is the point of resizing your wife’s wedding ring to a size your wife can’t wear? He told the jeweler I lost weight. That’s not a mistake. That’s a lie with a story behind it.
Maybe he was getting it resized for Audrey someday. Maybe he mixed up the size. Maybe there’s something obvious I’m missing because I’m tired and my brain is oatmeal and I haven’t slept more than three consecutive hours since my daughter was born.
But he lied to me. Over and over. He looked right at me and lied.
I pick up my cell phone. My hands are shaking but my thumbs work fine.
Kellee picks up on the first ring.
“Hey, what’s—”
“Something is wrong.” My voice is flat and tight. “With Drew. With the ring. I just got a call from the jeweler who made it, and Drew had it this whole time. He took it in and had it resized three weeks ago and never told me. He had it resized smaller, Kellee. To a size I can’t even wear.”
“Wait—what? Slow down. He had your ring?”
“He’s had it. The whole time. Every time I asked him about it, he lied to my face.”
“Oh my God.”
“Something is really wrong and I don’t understand what’s happening. Can you come over?”
I hear her chair scrape back from her desk.
“I’m leaving right now.”
I put the phone down next to the baby monitor. Audrey is breathing in her steady little rhythm, the only thing in this house that sounds true right now.
He had the ring. He lied about it. He had it made smaller.
I don’t know what that means yet. But my hands are shaking and my jaw is locked and somewhere under the confusion there’s a heat building that feels less like sadness and more like the beginning of something dangerous.
I’m going to find out.