10. Jenna
CHAPTER TEN
Jenna
The two days after Sophie's birth exist in my memory as a strange, disjointed mix of the most tender moments of my life and a grief I hadn't fully let myself feel yet, running side by side without ever quite touching.
I nursed her for the first time at four in the morning, a nurse guiding my hands with patient, practiced instructions, and something about the total dependence of it, this tiny person who needed nothing from the world except me, steadied something in my chest that had been shaking since the moment I read Grant's text in an empty living room.
Paige stayed most of that first night, dozing in the recliner by the window, and woke every time Sophie fussed, not to help, just to watch me do it, like she wanted to witness every version of me becoming a mother.
A lactation consultant came by the next morning, a brisk, kind woman named Carla who adjusted my hold twice and told me Sophie had a good latch already, better than most first-timers managed, and I found myself absurdly proud of that small piece of praise, clinging to it the way you cling to any evidence, in the middle of an otherwise devastating week, that you might actually be doing something right.
Grant came back the next morning with coffee for Paige and a stuffed animal for Sophie that was, technically, too big for a newborn, a soft gray elephant nearly as large as she was, and I watched him set it carefully in the corner of the bassinet like he needed some physical way to say I thought about you before I got here even though the thing itself was almost useless.
He held her again that morning, and I let him, because whatever had happened between us, whatever I still needed to work out, none of it was Sophie's fault, and I wasn't going to let my daughter's first days be shaped by keeping her father at arm's length.
I watched him hold her against his chest, his eyes closed, his whole body curved protectively around her small weight, and I felt the specific ache of loving someone's fatherhood completely while feeling something entirely different about his marriage.
"She's got your nose," he said, quietly, not looking up.
"She's two days old. She doesn't have anyone's nose yet."
"She's got your nose," he said again, with such simple certainty that I almost laughed, and for a second, just a second, it felt like it might have felt if none of the rest of it had happened, two exhausted new parents arguing gently over whose features a newborn had inherited.
A hospital photographer came by that first full day, part of a package the hospital offered new parents, and Grant and I posed together with Sophie for a handful of stiff, exhausted photographs neither of us quite knew how to arrange our faces for, both of us aware, without saying so, of the strange dissonance between the occasion and the reality sitting underneath it.
I kept one of those photographs anyway, months later.
It wasn't a happy memory exactly. It was simply true, two people who loved their daughter completely while carrying something unresolved and painful between them, and I didn't want to pretend, later, that the two things hadn't existed in the same frame.
My own mother called that morning from the coast, where she and my stepfather had retired two years earlier, too far to make it in for the birth itself but already making plans to fly in the following week.
She asked, carefully, how Grant was handling everything, and I gave her the short version, that he was here, that he was attentive, that we'd talk more when she visited, and she let it go without pressing, though I could hear, in the pause before she changed the subject, that she'd caught something in my voice she wasn't going to force out of me over the phone.
The photograph found me that afternoon.
I wasn't looking for it. I want to be clear about that, because afterward there was a version of the story, mostly in my own head, where I imagined myself scrolling through social media specifically hunting for evidence, and that isn't what happened.
Paige had gone to get food, Grant had stepped out to call his parents with the news, and I was lying in the hospital bed with my phone propped against my knee, mindlessly checking messages from friends who'd already heard, when I saw it.
Someone had posted it from the Loom House opening, tagged with the venue's name and a string of congratulatory comments about the new property, and buried in the middle of a dozen party photos was one of Grant with his arm around Tessa Monroe's shoulders, her face turned into his chest, clearly crying, clearly comforted by him.
The timestamp sat right there under the image, the way timestamps always do, unglamorous and factual. 9:47 p.m.
I did the math without wanting to. That was after my call.
That was after he told me he was already in his car.
That was, as close as I could reconstruct it, sometime in the middle of the exact window when I was calling him over and over from Paige's car, getting nothing, while my body did something none of us had planned for.
It wasn't the physical closeness of the photograph that undid me, if I'm honest. Grant's arm around a crying colleague, in isolation, on any other night, wouldn't have meant anything to me at all.
It was the time. It was the unbearable arithmetic of it, that in the exact minutes I needed him most, he had been standing in that spot, comforting her, instead of on the road to me.
I zoomed in on the timestamp three separate times, as if it might somehow change on the fourth look, as if some kinder version of that night might reveal itself if I just looked hard enough.
Grant walked back in a few minutes later, phone still in his hand from the call to his parents, and found me staring at my screen with tears running down my face that I couldn't seem to stop.
"What happened, is it Sophie, is something wrong..."
"I saw the photo." I turned the phone around so he could see it. "From the party."
He went very still. "Jenna."
"You told me you never touched her. I know you never touched her, Grant, I never once thought you did."
"I know, I just, I want you to understand, nothing happened between us, nothing has ever..."
"I didn't say you did."
The room went quiet in a way that felt almost physical, and I watched something shift across his face, confusion first, and then, slowly, the beginning of a different kind of understanding.
"I never accused you of touching her," I said, my voice steadier than I expected it to be, exhaustion and grief flattening it into something almost clinical.
"I never once thought you wanted her. That was never the fear.
The fear was always that when it mattered, you wouldn't know where you belonged, and you'd choose the loudest problem in the room instead of your family.
And I was right. That photo isn't proof you cheated on me.
It's proof you already decided where you needed to be, hours before you actually told me you were coming home. "
"I turned around because I thought I had time."
"I know why you turned around. I'm not asking you to explain it again. I've heard the explanation. What I need you to understand is that you're still trying to defend yourself against something I never accused you of, which tells me you still don't fully understand what you actually did wrong."
He sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed, his face doing something complicated, and for a long moment neither of us said anything, the only sound in the room Sophie's small, snuffling breaths from the bassinet.
"I don't know what to say to you that doesn't sound like an excuse," he said finally.
"Then maybe don't say anything yet. Maybe just sit with the fact that I'm going to see that photograph every time I close my eyes for a while, and there isn't a version of an apology tonight that's going to fix that, and you don't get to rush me through it because it's uncomfortable for you to sit in a room with what you did. "
He nodded, and he didn't try to explain again, and I gave him that much credit, that he heard the actual substance of what I was telling him even if he didn't yet understand its full weight.
But I could see, underneath the shame on his face, that some part of him was still holding onto I never cheated like it was a life raft, like the absence of physical betrayal was going to be enough to keep us afloat.
A different friend of mine from college, someone who'd met Sophie's arrival on social media the same way half the world apparently had, sent a message that afternoon gushing about the party photos, unaware of everything else the same album contained, and I stared at her cheerful, oblivious congratulations for a long moment before typing back a brief thank you, unable to summon the energy to explain, and unwilling to let a stranger's misplaced enthusiasm make me feel worse than I already did.
I understood, in that small, strange moment, that the rest of the world was going to keep congratulating us, keep assuming the ordinary, happy version of this story, for a long time before anyone outside our closest circle understood what those photographs actually meant.
Paige came back a while later with food neither of us ended up eating much of, and she took one look at both our faces and didn't ask what had happened, just quietly busied herself rearranging the flowers someone had sent, giving us room without making either of us explain ourselves out loud a second time.
Grant left not long after, gently, without pushing to stay longer than I seemed to want him there, and once the door closed behind him I let Paige see the photograph too, watched her jaw tighten as she looked at it, watched her hand it back without a single word of the outrage I half expected from her.
"You don't have to decide anything about it tonight," she said instead. "You just have to get through tonight. Everything else can wait until you've slept."
It wasn't going to be enough, whatever he offered in the days ahead.
I knew that with a certainty that surprised even me, lying in that hospital bed with my newborn daughter asleep three feet away and my husband gone for the night, my sister sitting quietly beside me instead.
He hadn't needed to cheat. He'd left me exactly as alone as if he had, without ever touching another woman at all.