Chapter Twenty-One
Ryleigh
I change my outfit four times.
“The sweater,” Alexei says from the doorway, coffee mug in hand. He’s shirtless, leaning against the frame, watching me spiral with an expression that’s equal parts amused and gentle.
“You think?”
“I think you’d look good in a trash bag, so my opinion is useless. But yeah. The sweater.”
I pull it on. Check the mirror. It’s fine. It’s a sweater. I’m a person in a sweater going to work at a normal job where I will be fully clothed the entire time, and somehow that thought makes my eyes sting.
“Hey.” He crosses the room and sets his mug down, then puts both hands on my shoulders. “You’re going to be great.”
“What if I’m terrible?”
“You’re not going to be terrible.”
“What if the kids hate me?”
“Kids don’t hate people. They hate naps and vegetables. You’ll be fine. And I’m betting they’ll love you.”
“What if I cry?”
“Then you cry. That’s allowed.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Ry. You’ve kept a baby alive for two months with zero training. You can handle a room full of four-year-olds.”
I take a breath. He’s right. Probably. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He kisses my forehead—lingering, warm—and then goes to get Ella.
She’s in the nursery, awake and kicking, wearing the outfit I picked out last night, a tiny floral-print onesie. Today is her first day in the infant program at the school. She’ll be down the hall from me. In a room with trained professionals who actually know what they’re doing with babies.
I should feel relieved about that. Instead, my stomach is in a knot the size of a fist.
Alexei carries her to the kitchen while I finish getting ready.
By the time I come out, he’s got her in the high chair, feeding her cereal with one hand and drinking coffee with the other.
There’s a travel mug already filled and waiting for me on the counter, plus a granola bar and my keys, arranged in a neat little line.
He prepared a launch sequence for me. Like I’m a rocket and he’s mission control.
“Thank you,” I say, grabbing the mug.
“There’s also a sandwich.” He motions to a brown bag. “Turkey and Swiss. And an extra bottle for Ella. And a change of clothes for her in case she has a situation.”
“You packed all that?”
He shrugs like it’s nothing. Like getting up an hour early to prep a diaper bag and make me a sandwich on my first day of real work is just something that happens. Just a Tuesday.
I look at him — bedhead, bare chest, baby cereal on his forearm — and I think, not for the first time, how much trouble I’m in.
Dropping Ella off at the infant room is fine. It’s totally fine.
The room is bright and cheerful — soft mats on the floor, a wall of cubbies, two women in matching polo shirts who smile warmly and introduce themselves as Miss Tammy and Miss Joanne.
There are three other babies already there, doing various baby things — one sleeping, one gnawing on a block, one babbling happily at the ceiling.
“She usually likes to be held on the left side,” I tell Miss Tammy, who’s reaching for Ella. “And she has a stuffed pig she really loves. I packed him in the diaper bag, along with extra pacifiers and onesies and more socks; you can never have enough socks—”
I’m rambling. I know I’m rambling. Miss Tammy is smiling at me with the patient expression of a woman who has heard this speech from approximately four hundred parents.
“She’s going to be just fine,” Miss Tammy says, settling Ella against her hip. “We’ll call you if she needs anything.”
Ella looks at me. Then at Miss Tammy. Then back at me. Her face scrunches.
Oh no.
The cry starts small — that trembling lower lip, the wet eyes — and then builds into a full wail, arms reaching for me, fingers grabbing at the air between us. It’s the cry that says where are you going and why are you leaving me with this stranger, and it reaches into my chest and squeezes.
“She’ll settle in a few minutes,” Miss Joanne assures me. “They always do.”
I nod. Smile. Walk out of the room on legs that feel like they’re made of wet sand. Make it approximately eight feet down the hallway before I press my back against the wall and breathe through the urge to go back and scoop her up and take her home and never do this again.
She’s fine. She’s in a room full of professionals. She’s going to play with other babies and be stimulated and socialized and all the things the parenting books say she should be.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and keep walking.
The preschool is nothing like the club.
This should be obvious. One is a place where small children learn the alphabet, and the other is a place where grown men pay twenty-two dollars for a beer while staring at bare skin. And yet the contrast is so sharp that it takes me most of the morning to stop marveling at it.
My coworkers — three other teachers, a director named Linda, and an aide named Grace who can’t be older than nineteen — greet me like a regular person. They show me the supply closet, explain the snack schedule, and hand me a laminated sheet with the daily routine and a lanyard with my name on it.
They smile at me, like I belong here.
My classroom is the Pre-K room — twelve four-year-olds who arrive in waves between 7:30 and 8:15, each one louder and more chaotic than the last. They have tiny backpacks, light-up sneakers, and strong opinions about everything.
A boy named Caleb announces within the first three minutes that he doesn’t like circle time, doesn’t like sharing, and doesn’t like Tuesdays.
A girl named Priya shows me a rock she found in the parking lot and tells me it’s magic.
Twins named Jack and Sam get into an argument about whether dinosaurs are real, which escalates until Jack is crying and Sam is hiding under a table.
I love them immediately.
I crouch down to Sam’s level under the table. “Hey. You okay under here?”
He peeks at me from behind his arms. “Jack says T-rexes aren’t real.”
“Well, they’re not alive anymore, but they were real a very long time ago.”
“See?” Sam shouts toward Jack. “TOLD YOU.”
“But,” I add, lowering my voice like I’m sharing a secret, “the important thing is that you and Jack both love dinosaurs. So maybe instead of arguing, you could draw your favorite ones together?”
Sam considers this. “Can I draw a pterodactyl?”
“You can draw whatever you want.”
He crawls out from under the table, grabs Jack’s hand, and they head for the art corner. Just like that. Crisis resolved.
Wow. How did I know how to do that?
Grace catches my eye from across the room and gives me a thumbs-up. I exhale.
I can do this. I can actually do this.
The morning flies. We do circle time (Caleb participates, grudgingly). We paint (Priya’s magic rock makes a cameo). We read a story about a caterpillar, and I do different voices for each character, and twelve four-year-olds laugh so hard that Caleb falls off his chair.
By snack time, I’ve been finger-painted on twice, asked approximately forty questions I don’t know the answers to, and called “Miss Ryleigh” so many times it’s starting to feel real.
At lunch, I practically sprint to the infant room.
Ella is on a mat, chewing on a teething ring, watching another baby with fascinated intensity. She’s not crying. She’s not even fussing. She looks … content. Happy, even.
“She settled about ten minutes after you left,” Miss Tammy tells me. “She’s been great. Took her whole bottle, had a good nap. She’s a sweetheart.”
I pick her up and press my face into her hair. She grabs a fistful of my sweater — her signature move — and babbles something that sounds vaguely accusatory.
“I know,” I tell her. “I left you. I’m a monster. But look, you survived. We both survived.”
She shoves the teething ring in my face, which I take as forgiveness.
I spend the rest of my lunch break sitting on the floor of the infant room with Ella in my lap, watching her interact with the other babies, and eating the turkey sandwich Alexei packed. It’s good. He put mustard on it. Just the right amount.
The end of the day comes faster than I expect.
I say goodbye to my Pre-K kids at pickup — Caleb gives me an unenthusiastic wave, Priya leaves me the magic rock as a gift, and the twins present me with a drawing of a pterodactyl that they both signed. I tape it to my desk.
I collect Ella from the infant room, load her into the car, and sit in the driver’s seat for a minute before starting the engine.
I just worked a full day. At a school. With kids. In real clothes. Nobody called me honey or sweetheart or stared at my chest or left their number on a cocktail napkin. I taught twelve children something today — not much, maybe, but something — and I got paid to do it. A real paycheck. Mine.
My phone buzzes.
Alexei: How was your first day?
I stare at the text and something swells in my chest — not sadness, not relief, something bigger than both. Pride, maybe. The kind I haven’t felt in a long time. The kind that comes from doing something hard and getting through it on your own terms.
I type back: I’ll tell you everything when I get home.
When I walk into the apartment, the first thing I smell is garlic. Alexei is at the stove, stirring something in a pan. There’s a small bunch of sunflowers in a jar on the counter.
“Hey.” He looks up, and the smile he gives me is the one I like best — easy, warm, like just seeing me walk through the door is the best part of his day. “How’d it go?”
I set Ella’s carrier on the floor, walk across the kitchen, and wrap my arms around his waist from behind, pressing my face between his shoulder blades. He smells like garlic and soap and home.
“That good?” He laughs, one hand covering both of mine on his stomach.
“I have a pterodactyl drawing.” My voice is muffled against his back. “And a magic rock. And I made a kid named Caleb do circle time. And Ella only cried for ten minutes. And I didn’t cry at all, except a little in the hallway, but that doesn’t count.”
He turns around in my arms and looks down at me, and his expression is so full of pride — for me, not for himself, just pure unfiltered you-did-it pride — that my eyes start stinging all over again.
“I knew you’d be amazing,” he says.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I keep being right.”
I press my forehead against his chest. “Thank you. For the sandwich. And the sunflowers. And for, um . . .” I swallow. “For giving me the chance to do something that actually matters.”
His arms tighten around me. “You did that yourself, Ry. All I did was make a phone call. You’re the one who showed up, handled a room full of tiny humans, and came home standing. Give yourself the credit.”
I pull back and look at him. Really look. And for the first time since I moved in — maybe for the first time since I met him — I don’t feel like I’m catching up. I don’t feel like I owe him something. I don’t feel like the broke girl who got lucky.
I feel like his equal.
“I’m going to be really good at this,” I say.
He grins. “I know.”
“Like, really good.”
“I believe you.”
“The kids already love me.”
“Of course they do.” He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Everybody does.”
Ella shrieks from her carrier — the happy kind, arms going — and we both look at her.
“She wants to hear about the pterodactyl,” Alexei says.
“Obviously.” I scoop her up, settle her on my hip, and steal a piece of whatever Alexei’s cooking from the pan.
Alexei leans against the counter and listens while I tell him about my day — every part of it — and Ella babbles along like she’s adding commentary, and dinner sizzles on the stove, and the sunflowers sit on the counter in their jar, bright and yellow and exactly right.
This is what I was supposed to be doing. This is who I was supposed to be.
It just took me a little while to get here.