16. Jenna
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jenna
Three weeks after Sophie was born, I finally felt strong enough, physically and otherwise, to go back to the house for the things I'd need for the next stretch, more clothes, the rest of the baby supplies we'd stockpiled before any of this happened, the bassinet from our own bedroom that would work better than the borrowed one once Sophie outgrew the smaller newborn setup.
Grant knew I was coming and made himself scarce for the first hour, giving me space to move through the house without an audience, which I appreciated more than I said out loud.
Walking back into our bedroom for the first time since the night of the gala did something strange to my chest, a wave of grief and familiarity arriving together, the smell of the room unchanged, the book I'd been reading still on my nightstand with a receipt marking my place, exactly where I'd left it the last ordinary evening of our marriage.
He'd kept the house clean but hadn't turned it into anything performative.
That surprised me a little, if I'm honest. Some part of me had braced for candles, for flowers on every surface, for some overwrought staging meant to remind me of everything I was supposedly walking away from.
Instead I found an ordinary house, lived in by one person managing reasonably well on his own, dishes done, laundry folded, nothing arranged to manipulate me into feeling anything in particular.
There was a stack of mail on the counter sorted into neat piles, bills in one, anything addressed to me set carefully to the side, untouched, which struck me as its own small, unglamorous kind of respect, the fact that he hadn't opened anything of mine even in three weeks of living alone in a house full of my things.
I paused in the kitchen doorway before heading upstairs, taking in the small, unremarkable evidence of a man managing alone, a single coffee mug drying in the rack, a grocery list in Grant's handwriting stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pineapple we'd bought on some trip years earlier, half the items on it clearly meant for a household of one.
There was something quietly devastating about the ordinariness of it, the fact that life had simply kept requiring groceries and clean mugs even in the middle of everything else falling apart.
I checked the mailbox out front on my way in, more out of habit than need, and found a stack of belated baby congratulations cards from neighbors who clearly hadn't heard yet about the complications, cheerful pastel envelopes that felt strange to hold given everything else happening in my life.
I set them on the counter with the rest of the mail and didn't open them that day, unable to summon the emotional energy for the kind of unguarded joy they were clearly meant to deliver.
He came back around when I was in the nursery, pulling clothes out of drawers and folding them into a duffel bag, and Sophie, who'd been fussing in her car seat on the floor, picked that exact moment to work herself up into real crying, the specific frustrated wail that meant she wanted to be held and wasn't interested in waiting for me to finish a task first.
"I've got her," Grant said, already crouching down to lift her out of the seat before I'd fully turned around.
He settled her against his shoulder, bouncing gently in the rhythm that had, over three weeks, become distinctly his own, different from mine, and within a minute her crying dropped to a fussy grumble and then, gradually, to nothing at all.
He kept moving around the room with her while I finished packing, narrating quietly, this is where your books are going to go, your mom picked most of these before you existed, you're going to have opinions about them eventually and I already know I'm going to lose most of those arguments.
He'd left one thing untouched in the nursery, I noticed, a small stack of hospital paperwork sitting on the changing table that I'd forgotten to take with us the day we left, discharge instructions and the paperwork for Sophie's first pediatrician appointment, and instead of filing it away out of sight, he'd apparently left it exactly where I'd set it down, as though moving it felt like erasing something he didn't have the right to erase.
I picked it up and tucked it into the duffel bag without comment, oddly moved by the unspoken respect in that small act of leaving something alone.
I found myself laughing, an easy, unguarded sound I hadn't expected to make in that house, and for a few minutes, folding onesies while Grant walked Sophie in slow circles around the nursery, telling her some meandering story about a supplier problem from earlier that week, it felt almost like an ordinary Sunday.
It felt like the version of our life we'd been building before any of it fell apart, the two of us functioning as a team without either of us having to think hard about it.
He told her, in the same easy, conversational tone, about a chef who'd walked off the job at one of the restaurants that week, twenty minutes before a private dinner for forty guests, and how he'd spent an hour on the phone finding a replacement instead of driving over to handle it in person himself, delegating instead of swooping in the way he once would have.
He didn't say it as a confession or a bid for credit, just told it to Sophie the way he'd tell her any other work story, and I found myself listening closely anyway, cataloguing it as one more small, unremarked piece of evidence.
Then Sophie yawned, and settled more heavily against Grant's shoulder, and I caught sight of the crib again over his arm, the one we'd built together at eleven o'clock at night, arguing cheerfully about which piece went where, and the memory arrived all at once and pulled the floor out from under the easy moment we'd just been having.
I felt myself go quiet, felt something close down in my chest, the familiar heaviness of the hospital room and the photograph and Paige's voice saying you were already supposed to be coming.
Grant noticed. He always had, I'll give him that, some instinct for reading the room that had once made him too available to other people's crises and now, apparently, made him unusually attuned to mine.
He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't demand reassurance that he hadn't caused it, didn't ask me to explain myself, didn't reach for me the way he might have a month earlier, assuming physical comfort was owed to him just because it once had been.
He just kept walking slow circles with Sophie, giving me room, and after a minute said quietly, "You don't have to explain it.
I know where your head just went. I go there too, more than you probably realize. "
"I'm sorry. We were having a nice minute."
"You don't need to apologize to me for remembering something true.
" He shifted Sophie slightly, and she made a small, sleepy sound of protest before settling again.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why an ordinary afternoon in this house can turn into that in about four seconds.
I did that. I don't get to be surprised or hurt when the cost of it shows up unannounced. "
I finished packing in silence for a few minutes after that, grateful for the space he was giving me, moving through the closet methodically, more clothes for me, more onesies for her, the small mechanical rituals of sorting and folding giving my hands something to do while my mind settled back into a steadier place.
When I finally zipped the duffel bag and turned to take Sophie back for the drive to Paige's, he held onto her for one more moment, his eyes on her small sleeping face, before handing her over.
"I want to say something before you go," he said, "and I don't want you to feel like it's asking for anything back.
You don't owe me a decision because I'm sorry.
I know I've said that in different ways before, but I mean it specifically here, in this house, where I know it's harder to hear than it sounds in theory.
Take whatever time you need. Don't rush toward forgiving me because you feel bad for me, or because it would be easier for everyone, or because Sophie's going to grow up faster than either of us wants and there's some pressure to have this settled before that happens.
I'd rather wait as long as it takes for something real than get a fast yes I haven't actually earned. "
"That's a strange thing to hear from a man who spent seven years fixing every problem the second it appeared."
"I'm aware." He almost smiled, though it didn't quite reach all the way.
"I'm having to learn a different kind of patience than the kind I'm good at.
Turns out you can't fix this the way you fix a supplier problem.
You just have to actually become someone different and then wait to find out if it mattered. "
I didn't say anything else, mostly because I didn't trust my own voice in that moment, and I carried Sophie out to the car while Grant stood in the doorway of the house we'd built together, not following, not asking for one more minute, exactly as good as his word about giving me space.
Driving back to Paige's, Sophie asleep in her car seat behind me, I found myself thinking about the absence of pressure more than almost anything else he'd said or done since that night.
Every other man I could imagine in his position, and maybe some earlier version of Grant himself, would have used that moment, the ease of the afternoon, the sight of him holding our daughter so naturally, to push a little, to ask when I thought I might be ready, to angle for some kind of timeline.
He hadn't. He'd let the good moment be good, let the hard moment be hard, and made it clear that whatever came next was mine to decide on my own schedule, not his.
It wasn't trust yet. I want to be honest about that, because I don't think trust returns all at once, in a single afternoon of packed duffel bags and quiet restraint.
But it was, unmistakably, evidence, and I was starting to understand that evidence, collected patiently over enough weeks, was the only thing that was ever going to be able to rebuild what a single night had broken.