34. Unexpected Responsibilities Too Long #2
I stare at the dark window over the sink, my reflection a faint outline. “I’m fine,” I say automatically, then force myself to try again. “I’m… stretched. That’s probably more accurate.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I can hear it.”
I want to lean into that, let myself unravel a little, tell him how every new responsibility feels like another weight thrown on a rope that’s already fraying. Instead, my laptop dings from the table—a Slack notification flashing in the corner of my eye.
“You can ignore that, right?” he asks, like he can see it too.
“I should,” I say. “We pushed a hot-fix earlier and Eric’s probably just following up. It can wait.”
I mean it when I say it. I really do. I move into the living room, put my phone on speaker, and sink onto the couch.
“Tell me something that isn’t stressful,” I say. “How was practice?”
He starts talking—about a new play they’re trying, about a teammate who wiped out dramatically during drills, about the professor who keeps saying “in the real world” like the rest of them are pretend.
I listen, laugh in the right places, tease him when he admits he almost fell asleep in the library.
Bit by bit, my shoulders loosen. This is what I miss most when we’re off—this easy stretch of normal, where we’re just people in each other’s orbit instead of two project managers trying to coordinate our entire lives.
Then the laptop dings again. Then again.
My brain flicks toward it like a magnet.
“Want to check it?” Reid asks. He’s trying to sound neutral, but there’s a thread under the words I can’t miss.
“I’ll just glance,” I say, already reaching for the trackpad. “Two seconds.”
I flip the screen open. Three new messages in the deployment channel. Eric: “Anyone else seeing latency spikes?” Another teammate: “Could use Amelia’s eyes on this.”
Reid keeps talking while I read, his voice a soft hum I’m half holding onto. I pull the phone off speaker and back to my ear.
“Sorry,” I say. “Say that last part again?”
There’s a pause. “Never mind,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“Just some performance stuff,” I say. “It’s probably nothing serious. I can look after we’re done talking.”
“Or you can look now,” he says. “Because you’re already halfway gone.”
The words land harder than I expect. I sit up. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m not trying to be an ass,” he says, exhaling. “I just… I know that voice. The one you get when you’re reading something and pretending you’re not.”
He’s right, which makes it worse.
“I’m trying to do both,” I say quietly. “Be here with you and not let my team down. I’m not… choosing work over you.”
“I didn’t say you were,” he says. “I know you’re juggling a lot. I just… sometimes it feels like I only get what’s left after everything else takes its piece.”
That sinks in low in my chest, because it’s exactly how I’ve felt about him when school eats his time. I press my thumb into the bridge of my nose.
“Reid,” I say. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“I know,” he says immediately. “I’m not saying you’re not. I just miss when we saw each other and neither of us had fifty other things on fire in the background.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “those days disappeared around the time we brought a whole human into the world.”
Silence stretches. I regret the edge as soon as it’s out, but I’m too tired to smooth it.
“I should let you go,” he says finally. “So you can fix whatever’s going on.”
“That’s not what I want,” I say. “I wanted this. Talking to you.”
“But you also need to respond to your boss,” he says. “And you need to sleep. And you need to take Mom to the doctor. I get it, Amelia. I really do. I’m not mad, I just…” He trails off.
“Just what?” I ask, softer now.
“Just wish I wasn’t always the thing that gets postponed,” he says.
The honesty in it makes my eyes sting. There’s no accusation in his tone, just a tired truth we’ve both been circling.
“I don’t want you to feel that way,” I whisper.
“I don’t want to either,” he says. “But feelings don’t exactly ask for permission.”
We sit in that for a moment—two people who love each other, both holding more than is reasonable for one pair of hands.
“I’m going to check this one thing,” I say finally. “Twenty minutes. Then I’ll call you back. Can we do that?”
He hesitates. “I’ve got an early lab,” he says. “If I wait up, I’m going to be dead tomorrow.”
So the answer is no, even if he doesn’t say the word. My throat closes around an apology. I don’t know which part I’m sorrier for—needing to work, or needing sleep, or needing him to understand both.
“Okay,” I say. “Then… I’ll text you after Mom’s appointment? Let you know how it goes?”
“Yeah,” he says, quieter now. “Do that. Kiss Liam for me.”
“I will.”
“I love you,” he adds, and it sounds frayed around the edges.
“I love you too,” I say.
We hang up. The call screen disappears. My home screen lights up with Slack notifications like a reminder of everything I haven’t touched yet. I stare at them for a second before opening my laptop fully and logging in.
The rest of the night becomes a blur of graphs and logs and patch notes.
I fire off suggestions, test a fix, watch the latency numbers stabilize while the clock crawls past midnight.
When everything finally calms, I close the lid and sag back against the couch, my neck aching.
My phone sits dark beside me. No new messages.
I think about calling him anyway, just to hear his voice again and prove to both of us that he’s not at the bottom of my list. But when I picture him, I see the bags under his eyes, the pile of textbooks on his desk. He needs sleep. So do I. We both need things neither of us can easily give.
The next few days follow the same pattern, each one a little more crowded than the last. Mom has a dizzy spell in the waiting room, so I stay longer than planned.
I answer work emails from a plastic chair while she gets labs drawn, trying not to let her see the panic sitting behind the calm face I’m wearing for her.
Liam catches whatever cold is making the rounds in daycare again, so I burn through sick days faster than HR would prefer.
I join a team meeting with my camera off and a sleeping toddler drooling on my shirt, nodding at architecture diagrams while silently praying he doesn’t wake up hacking in the middle of someone’s presentation.
Reid and I keep rescheduling calls. “Tonight?” turns into “tomorrow?” which turns into “this weekend for sure,” which dissolves under another wave of life. We text, but the messages get shorter. Check-ins instead of conversations.
How’s your mom? How’s Liam? Rough day. Thinking of you.
Miss you. Talk soon. Soon keeps moving. One night, I’m at Mom’s place helping her organize her medications into a labeled pillbox when my phone buzzes but I ignore it.
I look at the kitchen table—bottles spread out, Mom’s careful handwriting on sticky notes, the pill chart the nurse sent home.
She’s on the couch, TV on low, pretending she’s not eavesdropping every time my phone lights.
I want to answer. I also need to finish this so I don’t lie awake tonight wondering if she took the right thing at the right time. I’m starting to have doubts—about him, about us, about the way responsibilities have layered themselves over everything until love has to squeeze into the gaps.
“You and Reid okay?” she asks.
I keep my eyes on the labels. “We’re… busy,” I say. “Life is loud right now.”
She hums, that thoughtful sound she makes when she’s deciding how much truth to hand me. “Busy doesn’t fix lonely, baby.”
I glance up. Her expression is soft but knowing.
“I’m not lonely,” I say automatically.
She raises a brow. “You sure?”
I’m not, but I nod anyway. She lets it go, at least for now, and switches the subject to Liam’s latest daycare art project.
I finish the pillbox, hug her goodbye, and drive home with the radio off.
I’m lost in thought at a red light. When the light turns green, I press my foot on the gas and ease forward, the words still glowing in my hand. We’re both trying. We’re both tired.
We’re both pulled in a dozen directions that feel urgent and important. None of that changes the fact that somewhere along the line, our marriage slipped from center stage to something we’re fitting in around the edges. And I don’t know how many edges we have left before something starts to tear.
By the time we get home from Mom’s house, the sky is already streaked with late-evening blue, and my entire body feels like it’s been wrung out. I drop my keys on the counter, listen to them clatter, and rest my palms against the cool surface just long enough to breathe.
Liam runs straight to his toy basket, already pulling out trucks and lining them up like he hasn’t spent the entire day shadowing me between pharmacies, phone calls, and reassuring my mother that she’s “fine, just sore.” I should clean.
Or start dinner. Or answer the six unread emails lighting up my phone.
But I don’t move. I just stand there for a minute, letting the silence stretch.
Reid calls once I finally make myself start on dinner.
The timing is almost cruel. The knife is in my hand, the onions half chopped, and the exhaustion hits me so sharply I have to close my eyes before answering.
His face appears on the screen, shadowed with overhead dorm lighting, lab coat still on.
He looks tired too, but it doesn’t soften the tight coil inside my chest.
“Hey,” he says. “I tried texting earlier.”
“I know,” I say, wiping my hands on a towel. “I was with Mom. She’s still sore, and her blood pressure was all over the place. We had to go back for follow-up scans.”
Concern flashes across his face. “Is she okay? You didn’t say it was still bad.”
I take a slow breath. “It’s not bad. It’s just… a lot. And she needs help for a few days.”