Chapter 6
Nora
A delivery truck blocked Rachel’s driveway at nine in the morning.
By the time I reached the porch, two men had lowered a white crib onto the sidewalk. A tower of boxes waited behind it: mattress, linens, changing station, nursing cart, all from a baby store where the least expensive rocking chair cost more than Rachel’s first car.
“Please stop,” I called.
The man holding the tablet checked the name on his screen. “Delivery for Nora Mercer?”
“I’m refusing it. The purchaser doesn’t live here.”
Sophie began crying through the monitor clipped to my waistband. Rachel had her upstairs, but every cell in my body still turned toward the sound.
“I’ve got her,” Rachel said through the speaker.
My milk let down anyway, dampening the nursing pad inside my bra. I crossed one arm over my chest and stayed on the porch rather than accept furniture I had already refused.
The driver checked his tablet. “I can mark this refused, but the custom pieces need the account holder’s authorization. Two more deliveries are scheduled.”
Of course there were.
I called Julian.
He answered before the second ring. “Is Sophie okay?”
“A delivery truck is outside.”
Silence.
“Tell them not to unload anything,” he said. “I’ll call the store.”
“You’ll come here and cancel the entire order in front of me.”
“Nora, I can handle it by phone.”
“I said not to arrange my life. I’m done trusting that you and I mean the same thing by handled.”
He arrived twelve minutes later.
I stayed inside while he spoke to the driver and then a manager on the phone. The crib went back into the truck. Each box followed. Julian canceled the remaining deliveries, requested written confirmation, and forwarded it to me before he came through the door.
He had done exactly what I asked.
It did not make the order disappear from the sidewalk in my mind.
“I bought those before your email,” he said.
“You had already been told to take back everything except the diapers and wipes.”
“The crib was part of a separate order. I didn’t realize it had shipped.”
I folded my arms beneath my breasts, careful of the soreness. “Then you should have canceled it when I refused the other boxes.”
“I should have.”
Rachel carried Sophie downstairs and gave her to me. Julian’s attention followed every step until our daughter was settled against my chest.
“This isn’t sustainable,” he said.
“What isn’t?”
“You sleeping in a guest room. Rachel rearranging her house. You doing feedings every two hours when you can barely sit down.”
“That’s why you researched night nurses?”
“A night nurse, a postpartum doula, meals, a driver. I can rent a larger place close by so Rachel can still be here. Or you can come home and I’ll stay somewhere else.”
“I told you no.”
“You told me not to arrange it without you. I’m asking now.”
“No.”
His gaze dropped to Sophie’s dark head. “You shouldn’t have to be exhausted to prove you can live without me.”
“I’m not proving anything. I’m recovering from childbirth.”
“And refusing help because it comes from me.”
“I accepted the diapers. I accepted your time with Sophie. I’m refusing a new house and a staff I didn’t ask for.”
“You need support.”
“I have support. Rachel makes dinner. She takes Sophie after the first morning feed so I can sleep. My doctor answers when I call. The lactation nurse is coming Thursday because I asked her to. Help is not the problem.”
“Then tell me what would help.”
“Listen when I tell you what won’t.”
He pressed his lips together. “I’m trying to fix the conditions that made that night possible.”
“A smaller house did not make that night possible.”
“Serena made Ellie’s situation sound more dangerous than it was.”
The blame had shifted again, this time toward Serena.
“She lied to you?”
“She exaggerated. She hadn’t called everyone she claimed she called. She acted as if Ellie had disappeared when she was safe at a friend’s house.”
“Her lying tells me what kind of person she chose to be.” I shifted Sophie higher. “Ellie was safe, and you stayed. That tells me what kind of husband you chose to be.”
Julian looked away.
“I know I stayed too long.”
“You knew then.”
“I knew I needed to leave. I did not understand how fast your labor was moving.”
“You keep changing the measurement. How scared Serena sounded. How long first labor usually takes. How many doctors were with me. You had the one piece of information that mattered.”
“I knew you wanted me there.”
“I said I needed you.”
He looked back at me. “I have always cared about what happened to your body. I went to every appointment I could. I learned what you could eat, what medication was safe, how you needed to sleep. I cared about you and Sophie every day.”
For one sharp second, I was eight months pregnant again.
It had been late on a Sunday. I had come out of the shower in one of Julian’s T-shirts, restless beneath my own skin. Sophie had spent the evening pressing her feet beneath my ribs. My back hurt. My ankles were swollen.
I still wanted my husband.
Julian was reading in bed, glasses low on his nose. He looked up when I took the book from his hands.
“What do you need?” he asked.
I climbed onto the mattress and pushed the sheet away from his hips. “You.”
Surprise warmed into hunger across his face. He set his glasses on the nightstand and reached for me, then stopped with his hands at my waist.
“No cramping,” I said before he could ask. “If something hurts, I’ll tell you.”
“Clear enough.”
I took his hand and slid it beneath the shirt, over the curve of my stomach and between my thighs. His laugh broke low against my mouth when I kissed him.
Pregnancy had made my breasts heavy and sensitive. Julian remembered that only after his thumb crossed my nipple and pleasure came almost too bright.
“Lighter.”
His touch changed at once. I pulled off the shirt, and his mouth followed his hand. He cupped the weight of my breast while his tongue moved over the nipple, watching me closely enough to catch the moment I wanted more pressure.
I caught his hair in my fist and drew him back to my mouth. “Lower.”
He built pillows behind me, but one slipped beneath my shoulder as I leaned back. I swore, he laughed, and we rearranged it together until I could breathe without Sophie’s weight pressing into my lungs.
Then his mouth traveled down the center of my stomach, around the curve he could not cross, and between my open thighs.
The first stroke of his tongue lifted my hips.
Julian put one hand beneath my thigh, supporting rather than pinning me, and found the firm upward pass he knew made my legs shake.
His fingers pressed inside me. When I shifted, he followed the movement instead of forcing my body back into a position that had worked before pregnancy.
“There,” I said.
He stayed there.
There was nothing self-conscious in the way he wanted me pregnant. He held my gaze while his mouth moved, letting me see his pleasure in mine. The orgasm gathered without hurry, then broke through me with his name against my palm. He eased away only when my thighs relaxed.
I reached for him. “Come here.”
He stripped while I turned onto my side. When he lay behind me, I guided his hand beneath my thigh and changed the angle until the first slow push fit the body I had now.
His palm opened beneath my stomach. I covered it with mine.
“More.”
His next thrust went deeper. His mouth found the side of my neck, and I pushed back against him, setting the rhythm with my body. When I tightened my hand around his wrist, he gave me the stronger stroke I wanted without taking the pace away from me.
Pleasure ran through me in a clean, hot line. My words broke apart. Julian listened to what remained—my breathing, the movement of my hips, the way my grip changed when he found the right angle.
The second orgasm caught me hard enough to pull him out of his careful rhythm. He held me through it, then lost the last of his control with my name against my shoulder.
Afterward, he drew the sheet over us and settled behind me, one hand spread over Sophie where she shifted beneath my skin.
For several minutes, neither of us spoke.
“When the baby comes,” I said, “I need nights to be ours.”
His hand moved once over my stomach. “They will be.”
“I mean Serena’s calls too. If it isn’t about someone being hurt or in danger, I need you to stop answering every time.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
He kissed my shoulder. “I said okay.”
His phone lit on the nightstand.
Serena.
Julian reached across me for it.
“You just said—”
“I’m checking whether it’s an emergency.”
He read the first lines of the message.
“Her kitchen sink is leaking again,” he said. “She wants the plumber’s number.”
“At eleven thirty?”
“I can send it in ten seconds.”
His thumb moved across the screen. I watched the attention I had held so completely move into his hand.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s fine.”
He sent the number, then put the phone facedown.
“Done.”
He settled behind me again, ready to return to the quiet we no longer had. I closed my eyes and made my body relax against him because explaining why ten seconds mattered felt less reasonable than letting them go.
He did not hear the difference.
The memory released me in Rachel’s living room with Sophie warm against my chest.
Julian stood near the door, waiting for me to answer a claim he thought proved his care.
“You could understand every breath when you wanted my body,” I said. “But when I told you I needed you to drive me to the hospital, you asked me to prove it.”
His face emptied.
“Nora.”
“I know you wanted me. I know you cared whether I was comfortable in bed. That does not make me safe with you outside it.”
“I thought checking whether her message was urgent was the boundary you asked for.”
“I asked you to stop answering nonemergency calls at night. You turned the request into a test Serena’s messages got to take. Then you decided whether my boundary applied.”
“You said it was fine.”
“Because I had learned that if I couldn’t produce enough harm, you would keep negotiating.”
Sophie made a small sound against me. I lowered my mouth to her hair, waiting until her face relaxed.
“Then what can I do?”
It was the first question he had asked without supplying his own answer.
“Respect the divorce. Follow the visitation plan. Be Sophie’s father without using her to reach me. Cancel what I refuse. Stop making the injury larger.”
“And there is nothing I can do for us?”
“There is no task that earns another marriage.”
I shifted Sophie into one arm and picked up the envelope from the side table. My lawyer had sent the documents that morning: the divorce petition, financial disclosures to begin, and a notice proposing mediation.
Julian took the envelope.
“This is formal,” I said. “It is not a threat, and it is not leverage.”
“You filed?”
“My lawyer filed the petition this morning. The mediation request gives us a way to settle parenting and property without turning every decision into a fight.”
“You did this without one conversation with me.”
“I told you at the hospital. I told you here. You heard the words and treated them as an opening offer.”
He opened it where he stood. His eyes moved across the first page, then the second. He turned to the final signature page.
My name was already there.
Nora Mercer, in blue ink.
“I’m not asking you to give me space,” I said. “I’m ending this marriage.”