CHAPTER 3
The Voice Memo
She tried, several times, to write Ryan a letter the way some instinct told her she needed to, and found the page defeating her every time, the specific weight of putting this particular truth into permanent, visible handwriting more than she could manage.
She opened her phone's voice recorder instead, one night, and simply talked, the way she might have talked to him if he'd been sitting across from her instead of at the office past midnight.
Ryan, I'm pregnant. I've known for six weeks. I keep waiting for a version of you that has room to hear this properly, and I don't know anymore if that version is coming back before the round closes, or after, or ever. I'm not sending this yet. I don't know when I will.
She saved the file to the family cloud backup without fully deciding to, an old habit from years of automatically syncing photos, and did not send it, exactly as she'd told the recording she wouldn't.
She thought, recording that first memo, about how strange it was to be more honest with a phone's microphone than with the man she'd married, and understood, replaying it once before saving it, that the honesty itself was real regardless of who ended up hearing it, or when.
She recorded, that same week, a shorter memo meant only for herself, no one's name attached to it at all, simply naming out loud, for her own benefit, exactly how tired she'd become of managing her own disappointment quietly enough not to disrupt anyone else's momentum.
She thought, deleting neither memo despite several moments of impulse to do so, about how strange it was to keep evidence of a truth she wasn't ready to share, understanding, even as she hesitated over the delete button each time, that some part of her wanted the record to exist regardless of whether Ryan ever heard it.
She began, in the weeks after recording the first memo, paying closer attention to Ryan's language during their remaining conversations, noting how frequently his sentences started with we need to think about runway or the board wants rather than anything centered on their actual shared life, evidence accumulating steadily of exactly where his attention had settled.
She thought, recording the third memo some weeks later, about how the recordings had become, without her fully planning it, a kind of parallel diary, tracking not just what she wanted to eventually tell Ryan but her own evolving understanding of what she actually needed from her marriage going forward.
The fourth memo, recorded in her eighth month, ran considerably longer than the others, Emma finally allowing herself to say, out loud to the recording if not yet to Ryan directly, the full shape of everything she'd been holding back.
I don't think I'm angry anymore, she said.
I think I'm just tired, Ryan. Tired of hoping the next milestone will be the one that finally gives us room to breathe.
I don't think there's ever going to be a next milestone that does that. I think I have to stop waiting for one.
She thought, listening back to her own first memo months later while deciding whether to record a fifth, about how much her own voice had changed across the recordings, hopeful and careful in the first, flat and simply factual by the fourth, evidence, played back to herself, of exactly how much ground had eroded during a pregnancy that should have been one of the most supported seasons of her life.
She began, around the fifth memo, no longer rehearsing what she wanted to say beforehand, simply pressing record and speaking whatever was actually true in the moment, a shift in practice that made the recordings considerably more raw and, she suspected, considerably more useful to whoever eventually heard them.
She spent one entire Sunday afternoon, alone, researching apartments near her mother, then researching towns further afield, then closing both browser tabs and simply sitting with the day's fifth memo still unrecorded, unready, that particular day, to make any decision beyond simply getting through the hours until Monday.
She thought, recording each successive memo, about how strange it was to become more articulate about her own needs in a private recording than she'd managed to be in any actual conversation with Ryan, and understood, listening back once, that the practice itself was teaching her something valuable regardless of whether he ever heard the results.
She began, in the weeks after the third memo, keeping the recordings increasingly close, replaying them herself more than she expected to, a private record of exactly how her own understanding of the marriage had shifted month by month, evidence she wasn't ready to share but wasn't willing to delete either.
She began, around the fourth memo, allowing herself small moments of genuine hope within the recordings too, not only grievance, describing, in one entry, the specific way she imagined Ryan's face might look meeting their son for the first time, unwilling, even in her most honest documentation, to fully abandon the possibility of a different outcome.
She thought, recording the sixth memo in her final trimester, about how the practice had become less about eventually telling Ryan and more about simply telling herself the truth consistently enough that she could no longer talk herself out of what she already knew.
I think I already know what I'm going to do, she said into the recording, quiet and steady.
I think I've known for a while. I'm just still working up the courage to actually do it.
She recorded a final memo the week before her due date, shorter than any of the others, simply stating, plainly, that she loved him still and that loving him did not appear to be the thing standing between them and the life she'd once hoped they'd build, a distinction that had taken her the better part of a year to fully understand and articulate even to herself.
She began, listening back through the full collection of memos one evening late in her pregnancy, to notice a pattern she hadn't consciously designed, each recording slightly steadier than the last, evidence, played back to herself in sequence, of exactly how much quiet, private strength she'd built over months she'd mostly experienced as simply exhausting.