CHAPTER 5
Eli
°°°
Eli flinched at the raised voice before Wren even registered there was a raised voice to flinch at.
They were standing in the Little Sprouts lobby, the same day as the phone call, Wren having decided to pick him up in person to see the plumbing damage for herself and maybe negotiate a few extra days before the closure actually started.
Another parent — a harried-looking father juggling two kids and a diaper bag — had snapped at his older child for touching something on the shelf, voice sharp and sudden in the small space, gone as quickly as it came.
Eli went rigid against Wren's leg. Not crying. Not making a sound at all, which was somehow worse — just a full-body stillness, shoulders up near his ears, eyes fixed on some middle distance like his whole small system had gone into a holding pattern it knew from somewhere before.
She crouched down immediately, put her hands on his shoulders, low and steady. "Hey. Hey, bug. You're okay. That wasn't about us."
It took him a few seconds to unspool, a few seconds too long for something that hadn't, on its face, been directed anywhere near him.
He leaned into her instead of answering, forehead against her collarbone, and she held him there and breathed slow and even, the way she'd taught herself to do for him even when her own pulse wasn't cooperating.
She knew where that flinch came from. She'd catalogued it a hundred times over the last eighteen months without ever quite finding a way to undo it — Eli had been not quite two when things with Dean got bad enough that she'd finally left, young enough that she'd told herself, hopefully, foolishly, that he was too young to remember any of it.
But bodies remembered things minds were too young to file properly.
A raised voice in a grocery store. A door slammed too hard somewhere in an apartment building.
A stranger's irritated tone in a daycare lobby.
None of it was Dean. All of it, apparently, still spoke his old language to some wordless part of her son that had learned it before he could talk.
"I'm sorry, hon," Renata said, coming over. "I should've said something to him sooner, I saw that happening—"
"It's not your fault." Wren straightened up, kept a hand on Eli's shoulder. "It happens. He's okay."
She wasn't entirely sure that was true, but it was the sentence a person said in a daycare lobby, and sentences like that had their place.
They left twenty minutes later with a box of Eli's things from his cubby — extra clothes, a half-finished art project, the little bear he napped with — and the closure confirmed for two full weeks starting Monday, no negotiating that away.
Renata handed over her backup list with an apologetic look that suggested she already knew how thin it would turn out to be.
It was thin. Wren sat in the parked car outside the daycare, Eli buckled in the back seat already halfway back to his normal self, working through the six names on the list on her phone while he narrated an elaborate and mostly incomprehensible story about a dinosaur to nobody in particular.
Three centers full, no waitlist openings before the following month.
One that could take him but only mornings, which didn't help a woman who worked nights.
One that quoted a weekly rate that made her actually laugh out loud in the driver's seat, a short, humorless sound that startled Eli mid-dinosaur-story. The last one didn't pick up.
She called Dana next, already knowing the shape of the answer before she got it.
"I want to help," Dana said, and meant it, Wren could hear that she meant it.
"But I've got the Henderson audit all week, Wren, I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm pulling twelve-hour days through Friday.
I can maybe take him Thursday night if you're desperate, but two full weeks of days? I can't. I wish I could."
"I know. It's fine. I'll figure it out."
"You always figure it out," Dana said, gently, in a tone that Wren took as a compliment and landed instead like a low, familiar weight settling back onto shoulders that hadn't had a chance to set it down in a while.
She drove home with Eli chattering in the back seat, oblivious, and ran through the list again in her head on a loop that produced nothing new.
Ask a coworker — but her coworkers all worked nights too, that was the whole reason they were her coworkers.
Cut her hours — and lose the only income stream currently funding the storefront deposit, the thing she'd been building toward for eight months, the actual proof to herself that her life belonged to her now and not to anyone else's schedule.
Take Eli to work with her — the mental image alone was enough to make her laugh again, that same short unhappy sound.
She put him down for a bath, made dinner out of whatever was in the fridge, read him his two books with the hallway light on a crack, and lay awake a long time after he was asleep, staring at the water stain on her ceiling that she'd meant to ask the landlord about for six months now, running the numbers on a problem that didn't have numbers, just hours in a day that refused to multiply no matter how she arranged them.
She thought, at some point past midnight, unbidden and unwelcome, of a man with an unhurried walk who'd left cash under a glass and asked for nothing.
She didn't let herself finish that thought either.
But it was still there in the morning, sitting quietly at the edge of everything else, when she got up and started the whole exhausting calculation over again from the beginning.