Chapter 4
Noah
I look out the window at the passing trees.
Clinton drives without checking his phone. He has made this trip enough times to know it by feel.
"You'll like him," Clint says, somewhere around the forty-minute mark.
"You said that already."
"I know." He changes lanes. "I'm saying it again."
We pull up to a house that sits back from the road on a generous plot of land. The house itself is beautiful from the outside, with window boxes, a porch with two chairs, and a basketball hoop in the driveway with a slightly frayed net.
We are barely at the porch steps when the front door opens. The woman who appears is remarkably small, a smile on her face. She looks at Clinton with the expression of someone who has been waiting to say something funny.
"Honey," she calls back into the house, not taking her eyes off us. "The troublemaker is here again."
Clinton grins. She steps aside and waves us in.
The inside stops me at the threshold. Color is everywhere...
not the curated kind from a magazine, but the real kind that accumulates when people actually live somewhere.
A child's painting is framed next to a proper landscape.
Mismatched cushions sit on the sofa. Books cover every flat surface.
The smell of something savory cooking on the stove fills the air.
Then the noise hits. Three small bodies move at different speeds across the living room floor, none of them paying us any attention, all of them generating an incredible amount of sound.
"Quadruplets," Clinton says, reading my face. He gestures toward the small woman who is already moving toward the kitchen. "Maryann had four."
My mouth opens.
“How do they do it?” I ask already thinking of how hard it is to organize a house with children more grown up then hers.
“Isn’t it hard?” I ask.
Maryann glances back at me over her shoulder.
"Each baby has a nanny during the week," she says, without breaking stride.
"Weekends, the nannies take leave and we do it ourselves.
" She lifts a lid off a pot and stirs. "Once you stop thinking of it as chaos and start thinking of it as family time, it changes. "
I watch one of the children attempt to climb the back of the sofa.
I'm still watching when a voice comes from the hallway. "There he is. My money machine."
Ronny fills the doorway completely, without trying. He looks younger than I expected, with a buzzcut close to his head, wearing a t-shirt and house slippers like a man entirely at ease on a Saturday. He reaches Clinton first, and they embrace with two solid thumps on the back.
Then he turns to me. "Noah." He shakes my hand, then pulls me into a brief, firm hug before I can register it's happening. "Clinton briefed me. I'm glad you came."
He checks his watch, then crosses back to Maryann in the kitchen without ceremony. She looks up, and he cups her face in both hands and kisses her slowly, as though we weren't watching, like there is no one else in the room. She is smiling before he pulls back, her eyes softening completely.
"Go," she says softly. "I'll feed them."
He turns back to us. "Two hours," he says. "Then I'm back with my wife."
We follow him down the hallway, past the noise of the living room, through a door, then another.
The second door opens into a room that feels like it was built specifically to make your shoulders drop.
The light is warm and low, coming from two lamps in opposite corners.
A large plant grows in the far corner, its leaves reaching toward the ceiling.
The quiet here has a completely different quality than the rest of the house.
Something in my chest loosens before I even sit down.
Ronny takes his seat and opens his hands. "I'm slightly unconventional," he says. "Bear with me." He bows his head. "We pray first."
I bow mine.
"Lord, I thank you for your son sitting across from me," Ronny says, his voice low and steady. "I thank you because the answer to his problem has already been given. Speak through me only what you want him to hear. Amen."
"Amen," I say.
He looks up and nods toward the chair across from him. I sit, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees.
"So," he says. "Tell me why you're here."
I exhale, looking at the plant, then looking back at him. "Where do I even start."
"Anywhere. Take your time."
The room holds the silence without discomfort. I stare at my knuckles for a second before the words finally come.
"I was a negligent husband," I say. The word feels clinical, insufficient. "I didn't show her that I loved her. Not in the ways that mattered. And she left."
He writes something in his notepad. "What stopped you from showing her?"
I open my mouth, then close it. The answer comes slowly, the way truths arrive when you've been avoiding them so long that they've finally become simple.
"I got busy," I say. "And I took her for granted. Her presence. Her effort. What she was holding together... all of it."
He nods, his pen moving across the paper again. "Why did you marry her?"
I blow out a long breath, raising both hands to my head for a moment before dropping them to my lap. "Because she is the woman for me."
"And what do you want from this process?"
"I want her to come back."
He looks at me steadily, his gaze unblinking. "If she comes back... how do you know you won't return to the same patterns?"
The question sits heavily in the quiet room. I don't answer it, because the honest answer is that I don't know, and something about this space makes dishonesty feel like a waste of time. I let out a short, uncomfortable laugh.
Ronny closes his notepad.
"Here's what I'm going to suggest," he says, leaning forward.
"You have some understanding of why she may have left.
But it's still blurry. So I'm going to give you an exercise that does two things at once.
" He rests his forearms on his knees. "Stay up at night and think about her.
Think about everything... what you would say if she were in front of you, what you should have said, what you never said. Be intentional. Then write it down."
"Write it."
"Writing organizes what your mind is trying to process," Ronny says.
"It shows you when things started, how, and why.
And once you've written it..." he holds my gaze, "...
send it to her. Not a text. A letter. Make it raw.
Don't perform it, don't edit the feeling out of it.
Whatever lands on the page, send it." He pauses, letting the instruction sink in.
"And at the end... write something that reminds her you still see her as a woman.
Not just the mother of your children. Not just your wife. Her."
I sit with that, the weight of the task settling behind my ribs.
"As many letters as it takes," Ronny says, his voice gentle but firm. "Write and send. That's where we start."
He stands up, and I follow his lead.
"Same time, every day," he says, walking toward the threshold. "You come here."
I nod. "Understood."
"Good." He moves into the hallway, the sound of the children's laughter growing louder as the door opens. "Now come and eat."
***
I'm home by ten.
The house is quiet.
In my room, I sit at the edge of the bed. I open my laptop.
I don't know what makes me search for it.
Maybe it's Ronny's voice still in my head...
think about everything, be intentional...
or maybe it's the image that has been sitting behind my eyes since I remembered at the office that I wasn't with her during her delivery.
Either way, my fingers find the search before I've made a conscious decision, and then I'm watching a birth video...
a stranger's... the closest thing I have to what I missed three times over.
The nurse on the screen is firm and calm. Push. The woman on the bed screams.
I press the heel of my hand against my eyes. The tears come anyway.
I watch the whole thing. I let myself watch it... the mess and the noise and the moment it goes quiet and then the cry... that first sound... and I weep for what I wasn't there for. For Ava, where I arrived when it was almost over. For the two after that, where I didn't arrive at all.
I close the laptop.
I take out a piece of paper and a pen and I begin to write.
Dear Baby,
I smile when the words sprawl out on the page. It's been a while. I went to the counselor yesterday and he says I should craft a genuine letter to you, so I guess here goes nothing...