Chapter 32 #3
“Off,” I say. We move like a two-person tech support team that only handles our own lives.
I open the app with the blue icon that eats hours and tap through the settings.
Comments: Limited → Off. The confirmation pop-up asks if I’m sure.
“Yes,” I tell it out loud, like it’s a bouncer who thinks I’m bluffing.
Riley mirrors me on her phone, then glances up. “DMs?”
“Auto-reply,” I decide, thumbs flying. Thanks for reaching out. I’m focused on my family and team. Contact PR for media. I add a heart and delete it. Add a period. Better.
She grins at my punctuation crisis and posts a single locked-down story: a photo of our kitchen table chaos—bottle, policy packet, two cold coffees—with the caption: Building quiet. See you after eight. Then she sets her phone face-down like it’s a sleeping cat.
“After eight,” I repeat, nodding at the microwave clock like it’s a ref I respect. “Phones in the bowl.” I power mine down and drop it into the ceramic with a clink. She does the same. The room changes shape. Oliver sighs like he approves.
“Help?” she asks, and the question is bigger than chores.
“Yes,” I say, because I meant it at three a.m. and I mean it at three p.m. “Yes to help when offered. Julia’s assistant for calendar triage. Sophie for meals and door duty. Your mom for…select missions under supervision.”
Riley laughs, hand over her mouth like she’s trying not to wake a sleeping dragon. “We’ll give her shifts,” she says. “Short ones.”
I text Sophie from the iPad we keep on the counter for recipes and weather.
Okay to lean on you for a grocery drop + two hours of Riley-nap enforcement this week?
The typing bubble appears before I put the tablet down.
ON IT. Already at the store. Don’t buy diapers—I cleaned you out last night to force the lesson. Love you both.
Riley cackles. “She booby-trapped our supplies.”
“She respects pedagogy,” I say, solemn. “And chaos.”
We stand shoulder to shoulder, scanning the printed Protections With Actual Teeth packet one more time like it’s a piece of gear we need to trust under pressure.
The clauses look back at us with the right kind of weight—hotline, enforcement, signatures that mean something more than public relations.
It won’t fix the world. It will make the next person’s hallway shorter.
“Thank you,” Riley says, not for the paper, but for staying on it when the adrenaline wore off.
“I’m doing it for selfish reasons,” I admit. “I like living with you when you’re not bracing for the next blow.”
She tilts her head. “Selfish looks good on you.”
Oliver stirs and I sway without thinking, the old rink habit translated to a kitchen. Riley leans into my shoulder, and for a quiet minute we are a still life: policy, pen, pacifier. Boundaries in ink and pixels and practice.
The bowl on the counter holds our phones like a lighthouse keeps its own light. After eight, we’ll let the world exist without us. Right now, we exist without it.
By late afternoon the apartment looks like a stage set breaking down—half-packed boxes, a roll of tape that keeps vanishing and reappearing like a trick coin, Post-its that say things like TOILETRIES and WHY DO WE OWN THREE TOASTERS.
Sophie texts a photo of a key on a lanyard with a sparkly hockey puck charm.
New place: keys on hook. I labeled things. Do not fight me.
“Do we have it in us?” Riley asks, eyeing the stroller like it might judge us for ambition.
“We have ten minutes of good energy and a car with a trunk,” I say. “We make the ceremonial run. It’s bad luck to let keys sleep alone.”
She smirks. “Superstition from the man who will tape his stick with whatever’s closest?”
“I’m complicated,” I say, and gather up the diaper bag, the signed policy packet, and the small human who immediately decides my shoulder is an acceptable mattress.
The drive is short enough to feel like a held breath. The new building smells like fresh paint and someone else’s takeout. Our door is the color Riley picked after arguing with herself for an hour and then texting me, This one. It looks like yes.
“Ready?” I ask, stupid, because I’m already reaching.
She lifts her arms like she’s at TSA. “Traditional?”
“Traditional,” I confirm, and scoop her up with a hand under her knees and a hand behind her back. She yelps, laughs, clamps one arm around my neck and the other around Oliver, who grumbles at the jostle then resettles, unimpressed. I nudge the door with my hip. It gives.
We cross the threshold as a unit—ridiculous and exactly right. The lights click on when I bump the switch with my elbow. The place opens ahead of us like a rink under new lights—wide, echoing, full of the kind of silence you can fill.
Boxes everywhere. A taped-off rectangle where a couch will be. Sun catching on the plastic of a floor lamp like a cheap halo. And on the kitchen island, a note in handwriting I could spot across a crowded arena.
Welcome home. Nursery’s ready. —S
There’s a cartoon duck sticker in the corner because Sophie is an agent of chaos and joy.
Riley breathes out a sound that is not a laugh and not a sob. “She didn’t,” she says, already walking it back because of course Sophie did.
“She did,” I say, throat doing that tight thing. I set Riley down carefully; she stays wrapped around Oliver for a second longer, forehead tucked into the soft cap like she’s taking a snapshot with her skin.
We stand there, two people who have outrun and outwaited and out-argued the loud parts of our lives, and look at a sea of boxes that are mostly just tape and possibility. My chest does that expansion trick it learned at the hospital.
The baby monitor on the counter crackles to life—one white noise sigh and a soft, curious coo like the smallest stakeholder is ready for the tour.
Riley meets my eyes. “Nursery?” she asks, a question that holds a year and a promise.
I reach for her hand, for the monitor, for the note with the duck that means you’re not doing this alone, and we start toward the hallway—
—as the monitor sharpens and a new sound threads through the static, something like a mobile chiming from down the hall, already moving.