Chapter 15
Fifteen
Daniel
I stayed because leaving felt like admitting the marriage was over.
Not legally or technically. Not in whatever careful language solicitors used when they wanted to turn your life into paperwork and billable hours. Actually over.
The type of over that meant packing a bag, walking out the front door, and knowing Elsie wouldn’t ask me to come back.
So, I stayed. I hovered in doorways. In the kitchen. In the hallway outside the nursery after both twins were down, listening to the soft hum of the monitor and the tiny restless noises Milo made in his sleep.
I stayed because the house still smelled like them.
Baby lotion, laundry powder, coffee, formula, Elsie’s shampoo when she actually had time to wash her hair.
I stayed because my toothbrush was still beside hers in the bathroom.
Because my shoes were still by the door.
Because my jacket still hung on the hook near the entryway.
Because if I was still physically inside the home, some stupid, desperate part of me could pretend I had not already lost it all.
Elsie moved around me now. Not toward me. Never toward me. That was the part that made something in my chest twist so sharply that it hurt to swallow.
She didn’t slam doors. She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw things or cry in front of me or give me the sort of explosive grief I could meet with apologies and explanations and promises. She was calm. Too calm.
She fed Maisie. Changed Milo. Answered messages.
Spoke to me about nappies and formula and schedules with a polite, exhausted voice that made me feel like a neighbour she was forced to coordinate bins with.
I hated it. I hated that she could do it.
I hated myself more because I knew that I had taught her how.
The keys hit the bowl by the door harder than I meant them to when I came home from work on Wednesday.
Elsie was standing at the sink washing bottles, her sleeves pushed up, hair twisted into the same loose knot she wore when she was too tired to care what it looked like.
Milo was asleep in the bouncer beside the table, one fist curled near his cheek.
Maisie was in the bassinet near the window, silent and watchful even in sleep.
I had rehearsed the words in the car. I had spent the whole drive building them into something reasonable. Something that might make her see how badly she had handled it.
But when I saw her standing there, so still and small inside the wreckage of their life, anger broke out first because anger was easier than shame.
“You should have come to me,” I said.
Elsie did not turn around. That made it worse. She kept washing the bottle, the soft squeak of the brush against plastic impossibly loud in the kitchen.
“Not announced it in front of everyone,” I continued, moving toward the bench because standing still felt unbearable. “My family. Our family.”
Elsie rinsed the bottle and placed it on the drying rack. Carefully. Like the bottle deserved more emotional attention than I did.
“Do you have any idea what that did to me?” I asked, and even as I said it, some part of me knew it was the wrong question.
The worst question. But I just could not seem to stop.
“Mum is devastated. Sophie sent one text saying she needed space, which is apparently what people say now when they want to cut you out politely.”
Elsie finally turned. Her face was tired. Not angry. Not harsh. Just tired in a way I had no defence against.
“Your family being embarrassed is not the worst thing that happened here.”
The words might as well have smacked me in the face.
No raised voice. Just the complete truth.
I looked away first. I hated that too. Because I wanted to argue.
Wanted to say she had made it public, she had turned my family against me, she had humiliated me in a room full of people who had known me since I was a child.
But underneath all that was the thing I could not make disappear.
She had not lied. She had exposed me. There was a difference, apparently. A brutal one.
“You should have come to me,” I repeated, quieter now. “Alone. We could have talked about it. We could have figured something out.”
Elsie’s mouth moved slightly, not quite a smile. Not amusement either.
Something worse. Almost like disbelief.
“I did figure something out,” she said. “Just not with you.”
For one strange second, I couldn’t breathe. Then Milo stirred in the bouncer and made a small, dissatisfied noise, and Elsie turned away from me immediately.
Like the baby’s smallest sound had more claim to her than my entire collapse.
A flash of resentment moved through me so fast and ugly that I nearly flinched from it.
Of course she turned to Milo. She always turned to Milo.
To Maisie. To nappies and bottles and laundry and the thousand tiny disasters that had become the shape of our life.
The thought came sharp and bitter, and then shame followed so closely it was almost enough to make me nauseous.
They were babies. My babies. I loved them.
God, I loved them so much it frightened me sometimes.
Milo with his furious little face and impossible lungs.
Maisie with her solemn eyes that made me feel judged by someone who couldn’t yet sit up properly. I loved them.
And still, some dark, rotten part of me remembered the months before they were born and thought, everything changed because of them.
Then I hated myself for thinking it. Because it wasn’t their fault.
It wasn’t Elsie’s fault either. She had been drowning.
I knew that now. Maybe I had known it then. Maybe that was worse.
She had been swollen and sore before they were born, exhausted in a way I didn’t fully understand. Then came the NICU, the fear, the monitors, the wires, the plastic chairs, the pale hospital light that made everyone look half-dead.
Afterward, home had become crying and bottles and alarms and Elsie moving through rooms like she was being held together by caffeine and muscle memory.
And me. What had I become? A man standing at the edge of it all, feeling useless. Unwanted. In the way. A man who had taken a pay cut three months before the twins were born and never told her how badly it had gutted me because it sounded pathetic.
A man who had watched my title change at work in all but name, watched younger men with louder voices get the accounts I used to handle, watched the managing partner call it “a restructuring” with the sympathetic expression of someone sliding a knife in gently.
I had come home that day wanting Elsie to look at me like I was still someone that mattered.
But she had been thirty-two weeks pregnant with twins, sitting on the bathroom floor crying because her hips hurt so badly she couldn’t get her leggings on.
I had helped her up. I had told her it was okay.
I had never properly told her what happened.
Because her pain was bigger than mine. Everything was bigger than me then.
And I had hated myself for wanting space to matter.
The first message from Jasmine hadn’t felt like betrayal. That was the lie I had told myself at the beginning. It was just attention. A way of destressing without adding pressure to my wife. The app didn’t seem bad at first. A joke after work. A compliment. A picture that made me smile.
Then another woman on the app. Then Snapchat. Then messages I should have deleted before they could become anything. Then hotel rooms. Then lies. Then the particular high of being wanted without being needed.
With them, I was not the man who had taken a pay cut. Not the husband who couldn’t fix my wife’s exhaustion. Not the father of two fragile newborns whose crying made panic crawl up my throat.
I was just Daniel. Attractive. Funny. Desired. A man someone looked at like I was a choice instead of a responsibility. And that had been the thrill. Not love. Not even really sex, though that was part of it. It was the escape.
The doorway out of a life I had chosen and then somehow felt trapped inside. That was the part I could never say to Elsie. Because it sounded monstrous. Because maybe it was.
“I don’t even know why I did it,” I said instead.
Elsie stopped moving. Milo had settled again, one tiny fist pressed to his mouth.
I looked at my wife, really looked at her, and saw how worn down she was. How grief had changed her face. How the woman who used to fill whole rooms with noise and wild commentary now stood so carefully, as if every word had to be measured before it came out.
I had done that. The thought was unbearable.
“I don’t,” I repeated, because silence felt like it was too much. “I don’t know why I couldn’t stop.”
Elsie stared at me for a long moment. Then she said, “That’s not comforting.”
“No. I know.”
“Do you?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Because the truth was, I didn’t know anything anymore. Well not the things that matter.
I knew I loved her. I knew I had betrayed her. I knew I wanted my life back.
I knew I had been angry at her for exposing me and furious at myself for giving her something to expose. I knew the twins had changed everything and that I hated myself for ever thinking that like it was an accusation.
I knew I missed Elsie.
Not as the twin’s mother. Not as the person organising bottles and court papers and everyone’s emotional fallout.
As Elsie.
The woman who had once proposed to me with a ring pop because we were in our twenties and broke and she said waiting for me to “get my act together romantically” was ruining her life.
The woman who cried laughing at terrible puns. The woman who built Page & Grounds with Luca because she said books and coffee were the only two legal addictions she personally respected. The woman who used to look at me like I was her home.