21. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
A week after the failed grovel, after a week of the shortest, politest handoffs on record, both of us careful as people carrying glass, Eliza spikes her first fever.
It’s late, past midnight, and I’m alone in my apartment, pacing the floor with a screaming baby in my arms, and there is no lonely like this lonely, nothing in the whole catalogue of the last year like being the only adult in a small dark apartment with a sick child and a phone full of nurse lines.
The books all have a chapter for this. None of the chapters mention that your hands will shake.
Her forehead is hot against my palm, her cheeks are flushed, and nothing I do makes any difference.
I’ve tried feeding her, changing her, rocking her, singing to her. Nothing works.
I call the nurse line at the pediatrician’s office with Eliza howling into my collarbone, and a calm voice walks me through it, give her the infant Tylenol, monitor the temperature, watch for lethargy.
If it goes above 102, bring her in. I write 102 on my hand in pen like I could possibly forget it, like the number isn’t already burned across the inside of my skull.
It goes above 102 at 12:40 a.m., and the thermometer beeps its little clinical beep, and I stand in the middle of my kitchen holding my burning daughter and understand for the first time in my life exactly how alone I’ve arranged to be.
I’m in the middle of trying to wrestle her into her car seat one-handed while simultaneously grabbing my keys and wallet when my phone rings.
I almost don’t answer. I’m too frantic, too scared, too focused on getting my sick baby to the hospital. But I glance at the screen, see Griffin’s name, and pick up.
“Hannah? Is everything okay? I had this weird feeling that…”
“Eliza has a fever. I’m taking her to the ER.”
“I’m coming.”
“Griffin, you don’t have to…”
“I’m already in my car.”
He shows up twenty minutes later, bursting through the doors of the emergency room in sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s inside out, which is apparently what panic dresses him in. His hair is a mess, his face is pale, and he looks almost as terrified as I feel.
“Where is she? Is she okay? What did the doctors say?” The words tumble out before the doors have finished closing behind him, and half the waiting room looks up, and he doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, this man who once managed his public image like a stock price.
“They’re running tests. They think it’s probably viral, but they want to make sure it’s not anything more serious.
” My voice buckles in the middle of the last word, and his hand comes up like he’s going to touch my shoulder and then stops, hovering, asking.
I don’t step away. He lets it land, one warm steady weight, five seconds, then takes it back before I have to decide anything.
“Viral. That’s good, right? Viral is better than bacterial?”
“Usually, yeah.”
“Chapter eleven,” he says, mostly to himself. “Fevers and when to worry.” And I remember the paper hedgehog on his shelf, all those flagged pages, and understand that he’s been studying for tonight for months, like other men study markets, because this is the market now. This is the whole economy.
He sinks into the chair beside me, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “I shouldn’t have done the rose thing. I should have known better. I’m sorry.”
“Griffin, I don’t want to talk about the roses right now.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just… I need you to know that I get it now.”
“Can we please focus on our sick daughter?” It comes out sharper than I mean it to, fear looking for somewhere to put itself, and he takes it without flinching, the same way he’s been taking everything for months. Standing still in the weather. Absorbing.
“Right. Yes. Of course.” He straightens up, takes a deep breath. “What do we know? What are they testing for?”
I fill him in on what the nurses have told me, fever of 102.3, no other symptoms yet, waiting for bloodwork to rule out anything serious. He listens intently, asking questions, taking mental notes.
The ER at 1 a.m. is its own strange country, a man asleep upright in the corner, a teenager holding a bag of frozen peas to his wrist, a TV mounted high in the corner playing muted infomercials at nobody.
We sit in the waiting room together, side by side, our knees almost touching.
Eliza is asleep in my arms now, finally worn out from crying, her tiny body radiating heat.
I watch her breathe and try not to think about all the terrible things that could be wrong.
“She’s going to be fine,” Griffin says quietly.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. She’s a fighter. She gets it from you.”
“She gets it from both of us. You’re not exactly a pushover.”
“I folded pretty easily when Julie leaned on me before that speech.”
I look at him sideways. “Is that supposed to be self-deprecating humor?”
“I’m trying out new things. How’s it working?”
“Poorly.”
“Noted.” He almost smiles, and it dies before it lands, because the doors to the back are opening and neither of us breathes right until the nurse shakes her head, not ours, not yet.
A nurse calls us back to a room, and we follow her through the maze of hallways to a small cubicle with a hospital bed and too many machines. They want to keep Eliza for observation, she says. Just until the fever breaks. Probably overnight.
We settle in for the long haul. I sit on the edge of the bed with Eliza in my arms, and Griffin pulls up a chair beside me, and then he quietly does what he does now, makes everything work without being asked.
My phone appears on a charger he apparently keeps in his car.
A bottle of water lands at my elbow. A nurse gets flagged down and returns with an extra blanket, and I never hear him ask for it.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, casting everything in that sickly yellow glow that makes everyone look half-dead.
“You should go home,” I tell him around 2 a.m., because it’s what I’m supposed to say, because the mother handles it, because I’ve spent a year proving I can do all of this alone. “Get some sleep. I can handle this.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Griffin…”
“I’m not going anywhere, Hannah. Our daughter is sick. I’m staying.” He says it the same way he used to announce acquisitions, flat and final and already true, except the thing he’s acquiring is a plastic chair in a pediatric ward, and he settles into it like it’s a corner office.
I don’t have the energy to argue. So I don’t.
Around 3 a.m., Eliza finally falls into a deeper sleep, one small fist uncurling against my chest like a flag of surrender.
Her fever is still high, but the doctors say it’s not climbing anymore, which is good.
The room quiets down to machine hum and hallway squeak, and exhaustion starts doing its underwater thing to the edges of everything.
They’re cautiously optimistic that it’s just a virus and will run its course in a day or two.
Griffin is dozing in the chair beside me when his phone lights up.
I see the name before he does. Richard Myer.
It’s 3 a.m. A call at this hour means something important. Something urgent. Probably the partnership, the one Griffin has spent months keeping at arm’s length, every piece of it routed through channels that keep Julie out of the room.
Griffin stirs, opens his eyes, sees the phone.
He looks at it for exactly one breath.
Then he picks it up, powers it off, and shoves it back in his pocket.
No hesitation. No second-guessing. No quick check to see if it’s really urgent.
He just… turns it off.
He doesn’t announce it. He doesn’t look at me to see if I noticed. He just goes back to watching Eliza, his hand reaching out to brush a strand of hair from her forehead.
“Hey, baby girl,” he murmurs. “How are you feeling? Daddy’s here. Daddy’s not going anywhere.”
I stare at him.
I wait for the follow-up, because there was always a follow-up.
The apologetic grimace, the just-one-minute finger, the whispered it’s-urgent as he stepped into the hallway.
I’ve watched this man take calls at dinners, at funerals, in bed.
I once watched him negotiate a term sheet in the car outside my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party while the cake melted in my lap.
Nothing comes. He’s already forgotten the phone exists.
This is the man who took a call in the shower while I was still trembling from an orgasm. The man who canceled our anniversary dinner for a meeting with Julie Myer. The man who always, always, always chose work over me.
And he just powered off his phone in the middle of a crisis because his daughter is sick.
The ground I’ve been defending for months gives up a few inches.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
He looks up. “For what?”
“For being here. For staying.”
“I told you I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“I know. But… thank you anyway.”
He nods slowly, his eyes searching my face. “You don’t have to thank me for being a dad, Hannah. That’s just… that’s the bare minimum.”
“It’s more than a lot of fathers do.”
“Then a lot of fathers are assholes.”
I laugh, a real laugh, the first one I’ve managed in days. “Yeah. They are.”
We sit in silence for a while, watching Eliza sleep. Her breathing is steady now, her color better. The fever is starting to break.
“I’ve been thinking,” Griffin says eventually, “about what you said. About knowing who you really are.”
“Griffin…”
“No, let me say this. You were right. I never really saw you. I saw what you could do for me, the work you could handle, the problems you could solve, how you made my life easier. But I didn’t see you. The person. What you needed. What you wanted.”
I don’t respond. I just listen.
“I’m trying to see you now. It’s hard, because I have to unlearn all these habits I didn’t even know I had. But I’m trying. I want to know you, Hannah. The real you. Not the version of you that exists to make my life better.”
“That’s… that’s a good start.”
“It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But it’s a start.”
The fever breaks around 5 a.m. Eliza’s temperature drops to 99, then 98.5. She wakes up hungry and cranky, which the nurses say is a good sign. Cranky babies are usually healthy babies.
Griffin falls asleep in the chair with Eliza on his chest, her tiny hand wrapped around his finger. I watch them for a long time, my ex-husband and my daughter, tangled together in sleep.
He murmurs something as he drifts deeper. I lean closer to hear.
My name. He’s saying my name, soft and slurred and completely unguarded, no audience, no strategy, no scoreboard, just my name in his sleep with our daughter on his chest, and it lands in me somewhere old and undefended.
I pull back, my heart pounding.
When Griffin wakes up a few hours later, I’m in the same spot, still watching. He blinks, disoriented, then registers where he is and what happened and the fact that Eliza is drooling on his shirt.
“Morning,” he says, his voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better. The fever’s down. They think we can take her home later today.”
“That’s good. That’s really good.” He shifts carefully, trying not to wake Eliza. “How are you doing?”
“Exhausted. Relieved. Confused.”
“Confused about what?”
I hesitate. “You turned off your phone.”
He frowns. “Yeah?”
“Richard Myer was calling. At 3 a.m. That usually means something big.”
“So?”
“So you didn’t even think about it. You just… turned it off.”
“Our daughter was sick. Nothing else mattered.”
“That’s… that’s not how you used to be.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I know. I’m trying to be different.”
“I noticed.”
“Is that good?”
I look at him, really look at him, at the dark circles under his eyes, the stubble on his jaw, how carefully he’s holding our daughter, how protectively. At the man who stayed all night in an uncomfortable hospital chair because his family needed him.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “That’s good.”
He smiles. It’s a small smile, tentative, careful not to claim more ground than it’s been given, but it’s real, and it reaches his eyes, and for a dangerous second I let myself remember what it felt like to be the reason for that smile every day.
A nurse comes in to check Eliza’s temperature, and the moment folds itself up and puts itself away, and neither of us mentions it.
But driving home that afternoon with my healthy, cranky, drooling daughter in the back seat, I catch myself at a red light with my fingers resting on the phone, and I realize I’m fighting the urge to text him something small and ordinary. A photo. A thank-you. A crumb.
I don’t do it.
But the light turns green, and the urge rides home with us.
We take Eliza home that afternoon. Griffin carries her car seat up to my apartment and helps me get her settled in her crib. She’s still tired and a little fussy, but she’s okay. She’s going to be okay.
“I should let you rest,” Griffin says, hovering awkwardly by the door.
“Yeah. Probably.”
“Call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”
“I will.”
He turns to go, then stops. “Hannah?”
“Yeah?”
“I know I messed up with the roses. I know I still don’t really understand what you need from me. But I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to keep trying until I get it right.”
“I know you are.”
“And I’m not going to give up. Not on you. Not on us.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know what to say.
He nods, accepting my silence, and leaves.
I stand at the window and watch him walk to his car. He sits there for a moment, head bowed, before starting the engine and driving away.
I think about the phone call he didn’t take. The night he spent in a hospital chair. How he looked at me this morning, like I was something precious, something worth fighting for.
Maybe people can change.
Maybe he already has.
The question is: am I brave enough to find out?