24. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
Sunlight came through the studio windows at the perfect angle that morning, the way it only did for an hour after sunrise.
I’d noticed it before, during the renovation, when I’d stood in this space and tried to imagine what it might become.
Killian must have planned for it, calculated the window placement to maximize natural light during working hours.
It was such a him thing to do, engineering the perfect conditions without ever mentioning it.
At the bench, my fingers went over the smooth wood surface. My equipment was arranged exactly how I liked it, every tool in its proper place. The framed papers on the wall caught the light, my name on each one, evidence of a career I’d almost forgotten I had.
I opened the file I’d been avoiding for two years.
It was an old research project, something I’d started years ago and finally abandoned for good about two years back, when the marriage and everything else had crowded it out.
The data was still good, the methodology still sound, but I’d never found the time or energy to finish it.
Every time I’d thought about sitting down to work on it, there had been a diaper to change or a meal to prepare or a husband who needed me to handle something because he was too busy building his empire.
Now I had both time and energy. And a husband who was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, working quietly on his tablet, available if I needed him but not hovering.
“You don’t have to stay in here,” I said. “I know you have your own work.”
“I like being near you.”
“You’re just sitting on the floor.”
“I’m sitting on the floor near you. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“The view.” He glanced up from his tablet with a small smile. “Much better in here.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling too. “Cheesy.”
“Accurate.”
I turned back to my data. The numbers swam on the screen for a moment, my brain rusty from disuse, but then it clicked and I was in. The patterns started to emerge, the story the data was trying to tell me, and I fell into the familiar rhythm of analysis.
This was who I was. Not just a mother, not just a wife, but a scientist. A researcher.
Someone who looked at chaos and found order, who asked questions and hunted for answers.
I’d buried this part of myself so deep I’d almost forgotten it existed, but here in this studio, surrounded by evidence of the work I’d done, I could feel her waking up again.
Hours passed without me noticing. I moved from data analysis to literature review to sketching out new hypotheses, my brain firing on all cylinders for the first time in years.
The work wasn’t easy, but it was engaging in a way that domestic tasks never were.
It demanded my full attention, challenged me, rewarded me with small victories every time I solved a problem.
And then, a little after noon, I found it.
The thing that had stopped me two years ago, the inconsistency I’d never been able to reconcile, cracked open under a fresh pair of eyes.
It wasn’t an error in my data at all. It was an assumption in someone else’s that everyone in the field had been quietly building on for a decade.
My hands actually shook as I worked it through a second time, then a third, and it held. It held.
I sat back, my heart going hard, and did something I hadn’t done in years. I opened my old university email.
There were four hundred unread messages and a login I barely remembered.
I scrolled, half-expecting the hollow feeling of a stranger in a place that had moved on without me.
Then I saw the name. Priya Raman, who’d shared a lab bench with me a lifetime ago and was now, according to her signature, running her own group at Woods Hole. The message was eight months old.
“Sabrina, I don’t know if this address still reaches you,” it read.
“But I was reviewing a preprint that cited your harmonics work, and I realized nobody has heard from you in years. Whatever you’re doing, I hope you know that paper is still the thing I send my students when I want them to understand what elegant looks like.
If you ever come back to this, there’s a seat at my table. There always was.”
I read it three times. A knot in my chest that had been clenched shut for two years slowly, carefully unlocked.
I hit reply. I’m back, I typed. I think I found something. Can I call you this week?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I sent it, and then I sat there in the light-flooded studio Killian had built me and felt the person I’d given up for lost walking back into her own body.
I looked up and found Killian watching me.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just like watching you work.”
“That’s creepy.”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s definitely creepy.”
“Your face does this thing when you’re thinking. Your eyebrows draw together and you bite your lower lip and you look like you’re arguing with someone who isn’t there.”
“I’m arguing with someone who isn’t there. I’m arguing with the researcher who published contradictory findings a few years back and clearly didn’t understand the statistical implications of their sampling methodology.”
“See? That’s exactly what I mean. You’re having invisible academic fights. It’s adorable.”
“You have a strange definition of adorable.”
I didn’t tell him that I’d spent a good part of my supposed data analysis watching the way he chewed the end of his stylus when he thought, or that the sleeves-rolled, glasses-slipping, hunched-over-a-problem version of him had always done something specific and inconvenient to me.
Some things a woman keeps for herself. Most things, lately, I didn’t want to keep from him at all.
“I have a very specific definition of adorable, and it’s you. Specifically you when you’re in full scientist mode, destroying people’s research conclusions with the power of your mind.”
I wanted to keep pretending to be annoyed, but I couldn’t hold back the smile. The banter felt easy in a way it hadn’t in a long time, the old rhythms of our relationship reasserting themselves.
I saved my work and closed the laptop. Then I got up from the bench and crossed the room to where he was sitting.
“What are you doing?”
“Moving.”
“I can see that. Moving where?”
I settled into his lap, straddling his legs, my arms looping around his neck. His tablet clattered to the floor beside us, forgotten.
“Here,” I said. “I’m moving here.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I just realized I feel like myself again.”
He went still beneath me, his hands coming up to rest on my hips.
“That’s… that’s good, right?”
“It’s good. It’s really good.” I pressed my forehead against his.
“For two years I’ve felt like I was disappearing.
Like the person I used to be was buried under all the responsibilities and the exhaustion and the distance between us.
I forgot what it felt like to think about problems that weren’t related to childcare or meal planning.
I forgot what it felt like to have ideas, to pursue questions, to use my brain for something that mattered. ”
“And now?”
“Now I’m here. In this studio you built for me, working on research I actually care about, and I can feel her again. The person I was before I lost myself. She’s still in there. She was just waiting for permission to come back.”
“You never needed permission.”
“I know. But I needed space, and time, and someone to take some of the weight off my shoulders so I could breathe. You gave me all of that.”
“I should have given it to you years ago.”
“Maybe. But you’re giving it to me now. That’s what matters.”
His arms wrapped around me, pulling me closer, and I let myself sink into the embrace.
This was what I’d been missing through all those months of distance and anger.
The closeness, yes. Mostly the way he’d looked at me across that studio, seeing the exact problem I’d spent two years failing to solve and wanting to solve it with me.
We stayed like that for a while, wrapped around each other on the studio floor, not talking, just breathing together. His hand moved up and down my spine, unhurried, and I let myself sink into the comfort of it.
This wasn’t about sex. This was about presence, about connection, about the simple profound joy of being close to someone who loved you without agenda or expectation.
It was better than sex. Or maybe it was the thing that made sex mean something.
The sound of a car in the driveway broke the spell.
“That’ll be Tessa with Ivy,” Killian said.
“Already?”
“It’s past four.”
“How is it past four? I just sat down.”
“You’ve been working most of the day. I watched you fall into a data hole in the morning and not come up for air until after lunch.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Time flies when you’re having invisible academic arguments with researchers who don’t understand statistical sampling.”
I climbed off his lap and tried to make myself presentable as Ivy’s excited voice echoed from outside. The door burst open and she came running in, followed by a more sedate Tessa.
“Mommy! Daddy! Look what Auntie Tessa got me!”
She was holding a stuffed octopus that was approximately the size of her torso, its tentacles dragging on the floor as she ran.
“That’s… very large,” I said.
“His name is Sir Squishington and he’s my best friend now,” Ivy announced. “He has eight legs, which means he can hug eight people at the same time.”
“That’s one interpretation of octopus anatomy.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Tessa said, settling into the chair by the door. “She asked nicely, and you should have seen her face in the store. I’m not made of stone.”
“You’re going to spoil her.”
“That’s my job as the fun aunt. Spoiling is literally in the job description. It’s right there under ‘providing sugar when parents say no’ and ‘teaching inappropriate songs.’”