5. Liv
Chapter five
Liv
The zipper sounds exactly the same going the other direction.
I stand in the center of my bedroom and listen to it — the same hardware, the same metallic slide I have heard a hundred times.
I unzip the hard-shell suitcase all the way around.
The lid falls open. Inside, my packing cubes are still stacked in the order I assembled them thirty-six hours ago: linen sundresses on top, sandals nested in the bottom corner, a leather toiletry case positioned with the zipper facing outward for easy access at airport security.
I lift out the top cube. Sundresses. Linen — packed for outdoor dinners and seventy-degree evenings and fourteen days of not thinking about any of this. I set it on the bed behind me.
I take the toiletry case. The cube beneath the sundresses — dark basics, things I reach for without thinking. Those too.
The sandals stay.
I carry what I’m taking across the hall.
Josh’s guest room is narrow — a full bed pushed against the window, a single nightstand, a closet with a sliding door that doesn’t quite close.
I set my things on the bed and go back twice more — once for my laptop bag and legal pad, once for the suitcase itself, wheels catching on the threshold between the hallway runner and Josh’s hardwood floor.
I park it against the wall beside the closet.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The apartment is quiet now — Iris finally settled, Josh in the other room.
I can hear the low creak of the rocking chair through the wall and nothing else.
I take out my phone. I open the airline app.
The Barcelona flight is still there on my screen, overnight departure at 8:15 PM, confirmation number in bold.
I cancel it.
The refund processes to travel credit. The screen asks if I want to cancel the hotel as well.
I close the app before I can answer that.
I sit with the dark screen in my palm and I do not think about the hotel.
I think about the fourteen days on my calendar, now blank.
Fourteen days I booked because Barcelona was easier to put on a calendar than anything I actually wanted.
Nobody argued or told me I made the right call.
Nobody made me choose. That should make it easier to explain why I did it.
It doesn’t. I made it in a guest room at eleven-forty at night with a suitcase parked against a wall that isn’t mine.
That’s fine, I think. That’s exactly fine.
I open my legal pad.
The shift log takes me eleven minutes. I divide the fourteen days into twenty-eight twelve-hour blocks, assign night feeds by rotation, build in a two-hour overlap window for handoffs, and note Josh’s OR calendar in the margin with a bracket for flex days.
The rocking chair goes quiet.
I look up from the page.
Thirty seconds. The creak resumes.
I smile at the dark bedroom wall. It’s his grandmother’s oak rocker.
I still remember the day he hauled that heavy, claw-footed antique into the elevator and proudly set it in the middle of his modern bachelor pad.
He had looked so triumphant. That chair was too big for his apartment.
I teased him about it. Then he told me his grandmother had read in it every morning for thirty years, and I stopped laughing.
Because that was Josh. He made room for what he loved, even when it didn’t fit.
I had not known until that minute how badly I wanted to be loved by someone like that. I shake my head, picking up my pen again.
I add the supply reorder triggers at the bottom. Formula drops below three cans, we order. Diapers drop below twelve, we order. Wipes are already critical. I look at what I just wrote.
We order.
I cap the pen.
Down the hall, the rocking chair continues its steady rhythm. I picture him in there, waiting for her breathing to deepen.
***
When I get back from my twenty-minute drugstore run, I find one of his dresser drawers sitting on the living room floor.
His clothes piled in a heap in the corner.
Remnants of a yoga mat were discarded next to his pile of clothes.
He's on his knees beside the drawer, shirt sleeves shoved up, pulling a pillowcase tight across a cut-up yoga mat.
“Makeshift crib?” I ask.
He doesn't look up. “It’s flat,” he said. “It works.”
I uncap the pen and add to the bottom of the page: Order Pack-N-Play.
I take the list with me to the kitchen.
The smell hits me as I pass Josh’s bedroom.
Cedar and coffee. It is embedded in the walls of this apartment.
It was there fourteen months ago at the group dinner.
It is here now, at eleven-fifty at night.
And it is the same smell that was on his jacket years before that — when he stopped by my apartment after a double shift and sat down on the sofa next to me while I read case files.
My feet tucked under me. His arm along the back of the cushion, so close the heat of his skin bled through my sweater.
I cross the kitchen to the counter.
The bottles Josh washed are lined up on the drying rack in a loose cluster. I pick up the first one and turn it until the measurement markings face outward. I work through all six until they stand in a single line at exact intervals, each label forward.
I step back and look at them.
I pick up my brass pen from the legal pad and click it once.
From down the hall, Iris makes a sound. The noise she makes when she’s shifting, resettling, deciding.
I wait. The sound stops.
“I can wake up for the two a.m.,” Josh says from the doorway.
He is leaning against the frame in scrub pants and a worn hospital T-shirt, his arms crossed. He is not looking at the bottles. He is looking at the legal pad in my hand.
I set the pen down on the counter. “Unless your chief of surgery can find a replacement your shift starts at 7AM.”
“I’ve had to work on no sleep before.”
“You cannot be running on three hours.” I hold out the legal pad. “I have the two a.m. You have the five-thirty. We rotate from there.”
He takes the pad. He reads it. He does not comment on the margins or the bracketed flex days or the supply reorder triggers, even though I can see the exact moment he finds them.
He turns to the second sheet. The pediatric nurse line, the after-hours pharmacy, the formula ratio in three different measurements.
I am not leaving the math to sleep deprivation.
He hands it back without a word. His thumb is resting on the formula ratio.
Then he opens the cabinet to the left of the refrigerator and pulls out a glass. He fills it with water from the tap and sets it on the counter beside my hand. "Liv, you need to take care of yourself."
I look at him, then pick up the glass and drink half of it.
“The guest room closet door doesn’t close all the way,” he says.
“I noticed.”
“There’s a trick to it. You have to lift the handle while you slide.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
He nods. He takes the legal pad to the kitchen table and sets it in the center, face up. He pulls out the chair facing the hallway and sits.
I rinse the glass and set it on the drying rack beside the bottles.
“Goodnight, Josh.”
“Night, Liv.”
The guest room closet door closes cleanly when I remember to lift the handle. I change into the sleep clothes I hung in the narrow closet, turn off the light, and get into the bed, which is firmer than mine and smells, faintly, of cedar and coffee.
My phone alarm is set for 2:00 AM.
***
The alarm goes off and I silence it and lie still, listening. Nothing. I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.
Minutes later Iris shrieks.