Pretend You Love Me (The Rewrite the Ending #1)

Chapter 1

One

The milk has almost dried on the kitchen counter, and I’m staring at it like it contains the secret to eternal youth, uninterrupted sleep, or at the very least the location of my missing sanity.

Milo’s scream cuts through the house before I can decide which one I’d settle for.

He has recently discovered a new pitch that exists somewhere between an operatic soprano and a metal singer’s scream, and honestly, at five months old, I feel like it’s too early to rule either option out completely.

I push myself off the counter and move toward him carefully, like someone approaching a live grenade with surprisingly strong lungs.

The second I lift him from the bouncer, he stops.

Completely.

Not gradually, just sudden silence.

He goes eerily still in my arms and slowly turns his head toward me with a jerky precision usually reserved for horror movies and haunted Victorian children.

For one deeply concerning moment, I genuinely consider whether my son has been replaced by a demon.

Then I remember I’ve slept maybe four consecutive hours total this week and haven’t had caffeine yet, which feels medically relevant.

Across from us, Maisie lies on her playmat quietly trying to eat her own foot with the calm determination of someone pursuing a long-term career goal.

The twins are five minutes apart and somehow entirely different species.

Maisie, technically the oldest, already carries herself like she pays taxes and keeps emergency savings.

Milo, meanwhile, is chaos wrapped in baby skin.

I avoid making direct eye contact with him for a moment too long in case it activates him again. It’s 6:17 in the morning, and I’m already negotiating with two dictators under the age of six months while one of my boobs leaks through a shirt I’m pretty sure I slept in three days ago.

I’m barefoot, under-caffeinated, and dressed like someone who lost custody of her dignity sometime around the third trimester.

My leggings have a hole near the left knee that keeps widening in ways that feel both aggressive and personal, and my hair is twisted into a lopsided knot that I created at four in the morning while half-asleep and being emotionally terrorised by infants.

The kitchen smells faintly of coffee, formula, and whatever substance is currently drying on my shoulder, and somewhere beneath the noise and exhaustion is the growing suspicion that I may never again experience a thought in complete silence.

If this morning had a newspaper headline, it would be: “LOCAL WOMAN DISCOVERS NEW LOW: Tries to Function Despite Being Mostly Brain Dead.”

And it’s only Tuesday.

I’ve been up since 3:45 AM, when Milo decided the concept of “nighttime” was optional.

The spit-up on my shoulder was discovered sometime after four and immediately categorized as Not Important Enough to Deal With Right Now, a label that currently applies to most of my life.

The coffee beside the kettle has been cold since 5:30, abandoned during a diaper explosion that likely violated several international treaties.

The kitchen looks like a bomb went off. The loving kind. Tiny onesies hang from the drying rack beside burp cloths stiff from skipped fabric softener, the nappy bag spills wipes and formula packets across a chair.

I love this kitchen. I love this mess. I just wish loving it didn’t mean living in it, neck-deep in the ruins of my former self.

Then Daniel walks in.

He’s showered, dressed in a pressed blue shirt and tan chinos, smelling like actual deodorant and that fancy cologne he picked out for our anniversary three years ago.

He moves through our domestic war zone with the practiced ease of someone who knows where all the functional adults are supposed to step, pours himself a fresh coffee from the machine I haven’t had the free hand to operate since last Thursday, and pauses to kiss the top of my head on his way past.

The gesture is so casual, that I almost don’t register it as physical contact at all, more like the way a door closes, neutral and so expected it doesn’t need a response. He’s already by the entryway, checking his watch, when he calls over his shoulder:

“Have a good day, Els. Love you.”

“Love you too,” I call back, the words spilling from my mouth like muscle memory. Two babies, two bottles, my arms outstretched in a parody of domestic competence.

I watch him disappear out the front door, his footsteps quick and confident on the front path, and feel the familiar, complex rush of emotions that’s become the backdrop of my existence, love and resentment and exhaustion and a quiet, steady rage that simmers just under my skin, close enough to the surface that I can feel it when I take a deep breath.

We are not having the same morning. We are not living in the same reality.

He walked out of a disastrous kitchen into the daylight, while I’m still standing inside the wreckage, wearing yesterday’s dried milk and holding both ends of a conversation with someone who can’t even hold up his own head yet.

Milo, apparently sensing my attention has wandered, kicks his indignation into a higher gear. The scream that comes out of him is impressive in its commitment, a full-body wail that involves every limb thrashing in coordinated protest.

“Jesus Christ, buddy, it’s right here,” I tell him, jiggling the bottle. “This is literally the only thing you’ve wanted for the past twenty minutes. I’m giving it to you. What more do you want from me? Blood?”

He’s not impressed by my rhetorical skills. His face has gone that alarming shade of red that makes my stomach drop every time, even though I know, logically, that he’s not actually in danger, just really, really committed to being mad right now.

From her position on the floor, Maisie watches this exchange with an expression that suggests she’s taking notes for her future memoirs: “Growing Up With These People: One Child’s Experience of Mental Illness.

” Her eyes are wide and calm, tracking my movement with the focused attention of someone who’s already seen the punchline and is just waiting for me to catch up.

“Your brother,” I tell her, because apparently, I’ve reached the point in motherhood where I narrate our lives to people who don’t speak yet, “is going to be a lot of fun at parties someday. He has strong opinions and absolutely no ability to modulate them.” I lower my voice to a stage whisper. “He gets it from his father.”

The joke lands as intended, which is to say, not at all, but it makes me feel better to say it, to put it out in the air where it exists as something other than a knot in my throat.

I shift both bottles again, trying to find the magical angle that will get Milo to actually take the thing instead of just screaming at it.

My back aches from standing, and I realize, with the dull surprise of someone who’s been too busy to notice their own body, that I’ve been in this exact position for at least fifteen minutes.

The kitchen clock, the one my mother-in-law gave us as a housewarming present, with its aggressively cheerful “Family Makes a House a Home” motto, reads 6:32.

Daniel is already halfway to work by now, probably has the windows down in the car, radio playing something upbeat and uncomplicated.

By the time he gets to his desk, Milo will have finished this bottle and started another one.

By the time Daniel comes home, I’ll have lived an entire day in this alternate universe of chaos and tiny demands, while he’ll have had at least one conversation that didn’t involve bodily fluids.

It’s not supposed to be fair, I guess, or a competition. But sometimes, standing here in my milk-stained shirt while the man I married walks out the door smelling like a department store, I wonder what the hell happened to me.

Not that I’d change it. I just sometimes wish the person looking back at me from the bathroom mirror wasn’t quite so surprised by her own reflection.

With Daniel gone and both bottles finally draining, Milo’s aggressive sucking finally settling into something closer to actual eating, the kitchen switches into a slightly lower register of insanity.

Milo’s still fussing, his tiny body vibrating with the effort of being very unhappy, but at least he’s doing it at a volume that won’t shatter the neighbour’s windows.

On the mat, Maisie’s eyelids are getting heavier, her blinks longer and slower as she drifts toward sleep, the universe’s one concession to my sanity this morning.

The relative quiet gives my brain a moment to wander, something it’s been desperate to do since approximately 4:00 AM, and almost immediately, it lands on Page & Grounds. The café. My other life.

It happens without warning, the way it always does.

One minute I’m counting Milo’s swallows to make sure he’s eating enough (twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

..), and the next I’m there, standing behind the counter, surrounded by the smell of roasted coffee beans and cinnamon and the particular dusty scent of old books that haven’t quite given up on their former lives as trees.

I can see the mismatched armchairs Luca and I found at the estate sale last summer, the faded green velvet one with the questionable stain on the right arm, the navy leather one that probably cost more than our monthly rent before it started to crack, and the way they somehow work together anyway, like old friends who’ve seen each other at their worst. I can hear the soft squeak of the marker against the chalkboard as Luca redraws the menu for the third time this week, changing the font from “fancy but illegible” to “attempt at minimalist that looks like a ransom note” because he got bored between the breakfast and lunch rush.