Chapter 16
Molly
I wake up to the sound of beeping and the feeling of cotton stuffed inside my skull.
The hospital room is bright. Too bright. I blink against it, trying to remember how I got here, and then it comes back in pieces. The fever, Taz's face, the truck, Clem's little whimper.
Clem.
I try to sit up, and my whole body protests.
"Easy," Taz says. "I've got her."
Taz is in the chair beside my bed, and he looks terrible. Stubble on his jaw, dark circles under his eyes, hair flattened on one side from the chair. He's wearing the same flannel shirt he had on yesterday, and there's a coffee stain on the collar.
"Where—" I croak.
"Right here." He wheels the bassinet closer so I can see. Clem is sleeping, her tiny fist pressed against her cheek, and she looks... fine. She looks perfectly fine.
"Her fever?" I ask.
"Broke around six this morning. They've been monitoring her all night. She's settling, but they're still waiting on her tests." His voice goes rough on the last word. "You're the one I've been worried about."
"I thought I was just tired," I say. "And sore. Everything's been sore for weeks."
"Tell the doctor exactly that when he comes back," he says, his voice going stern in a way that's mostly fear. "Don't make it sound smaller because I'm sitting here."
"I wasn't trying to prove anything," I say. "I didn't know."
His face changes. "You didn't. That's on me. I'm frightened, and it's coming out like a lecture. I'm sorry. They've started treatment. They're watching both of you. Let them explain it instead of me making you listen to every terrible possibility I thought of overnight."
"I'd appreciate that," I tell him. "My own imagination has been working double shifts."
He moves the water within reach. "I'll ask the nurse when the doctor is due. You can make a list of questions if you want. I'll write."
I sink back against the pillows, exhaustion washing over me. "How long have you been here?"
"Since we got here," he says.
"That was yesterday afternoon," I say.
"Yes," he says, like it's obvious.
"Have you slept at all?" I ask.
He shrugs one shoulder. "Couple hours in the chair."
I want to be angry at him. I want to tell him he doesn't get to do this, doesn't get to swoop in and save me and sit by my bedside like a devoted husband when he's not my husband anymore. He isn't really, not the way he used to be.
But I'm too tired to be angry. And the truth is, I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't shown up when he did. I was so out of it I didn't even realize how sick I was.
"Thank you," I say, and the words taste strange in my mouth.
Taz holds my eyes a second longer. Then he nods.
"Can I get you anything?" he asks. "Water? The nurse said you should try to eat when you wake up."
"Water," I say. "Please."
He pours me a cup from the pitcher on the bedside table, helps me sit up enough to drink it. His hands are careful, and I hate how much I notice that.
"There's one more thing," he says when I've finished the water. "The letter my lawyer forwarded. You don't have to read it because I'm here."
I look down at my hands. The envelope is still in my nightstand at home.
"What did you put in it?" I ask.
"Everything I should have said before. Everything I did wrong, everything I'm sorry for." He meets my eyes. "No excuses and no explanations. Just accountability. You deserve to know that I understand what I did."
I think about the envelope for a moment.
"Okay," I say.
"You don't have to read it now," he says. "Or ever, if you don't want to. But it's yours."
"Okay," I say again, because I don't have words for anything else right now.
They keep us another night. By the following afternoon, my treatment is working and Clem's team is satisfied with her tests and feeding.
We leave with follow-up appointments and instructions to call if either fever returns.
Taz loads me into the truck like I'm made of glass, and I'm too tired to argue about it.
While Maggie sat with us earlier, he went to the farm to lock up and pick up supplies for Clem.
He's texted Miguel so I won't have to explain where I've been.
For once, the practical things don't fall to me.
I catch myself watching him in the side mirror while he checks Clem's straps a third time, and I look away fast, annoyed at my own eyes.
The drive back is quiet. Clem sleeps in her car seat, and I watch the familiar landscape roll by: the brown hills, the oak trees, the glimpses of the ocean in the distance, and try not to think about how many times we've made this drive together.
How many times I sat in this exact seat, his hand on my thigh, making plans for the future.
"Would you like me to stay while you recover?" he asks when we pull into the driveway. "Guest room. I can take the night feeds and help with whatever you need."
"I need that," I admit. "But ask me before you reorganize anything. I don't want to wake up and find you've turned the kitchen into a command center."
"I made a chart," he confesses.
"Of course you did," I say. "Did the chart survive without lamination?"
"It's a whiteboard," he says, a little defensive. "Medication times, feeds. Things neither of us should have to remember when we're tired. We can change it."
"Fine," I say. "No assigning me a performance score at the end of the day."
He breathes out, almost laughing. "I'll keep the comments about management to myself."
"And let me do what I can," I add. "Ask before picking me up or taking a thing out of my hands. Being ill hasn't made me furniture."
"Understood," he says. "Do you want my arm getting out?"
"Yes," I say. "That would help."
He comes around to my door and waits until I reach for him.
That first night home, after he's gone to the guest room, I finally open the envelope.
I read it twice. Once fast, looking for the excuse.
There isn't one. Then again slowly, the way you'd read a map of somewhere you used to live.
Every year is in there. Every dinner I ate alone.
The morning I told him I was lonely and he looked at his phone.
He doesn't ask me for anything, not once, in all those pages.
I fold it back along its creases and put it in the drawer of my grandmother's nightstand. No tears come. I lie awake until three, which is worse.
For two days after that he keeps cool washcloths within reach and brings my medication when the reminder sounds. The fever stays down, and at the follow-up the doctor is satisfied with my progress.
By the third evening, the whiteboard on the refrigerator has medication times on one side and Clem's feeds on the other. Taz has left space for me to add things, and I have used it to write Stop asking whether I need water while I am drinking water.
I finally feel human enough to get out of bed. I shuffle into the kitchen in my sweatpants and one of his old flannel shirts that I stole years ago and never gave back, and I stop dead in the doorway.
Taz is standing at the stove, wearing my grandmother's floral apron, the one with the ruffles that I've always thought was ridiculous but couldn't bring myself to throw away.
Clem is on his shoulder, her face pressed against his neck, and there's spit-up running down his entire right arm, soaking through his sleeve and dripping onto the floor.
He's patting her back gently, murmuring to her too low for me to hear, and with his other hand he's stirring a pot of soup.
"Dinner's almost ready," he says without turning around. "Go sit down, you shouldn't be on your feet yet."
I snort. I can't help it.
He turns then, and I can see the exact moment he realizes how he looks. The apron. The spit-up. The domestic absurdity of it all.
"She waited until I'd put the clean shirt on," he says. "I respect the timing."
"Turn the stove off and hand her over," I tell him, "before dinner gets a new ingredient."
He kills the burner, then brings Clem to me, supporting her head. Our fingers brush, and I concentrate far too hard on adjusting her against my shoulder.
"There's a clean towel in the bathroom," I tell him. "Use the large one. This looks like a regional event."
"She seems pleased with herself," he says, holding his dripping arm away from his body like evidence.
"She has emptied the contents of her stomach onto somebody who can do laundry," I say. "That's an excellent decision at her age."
He glances at the ruffled apron. "Your grandmother would have had an opinion about this."
"She'd have told you the apron was doing its job," I say, "then made you wash it before anything set. You'd better move. I can feel her disapproval gathering."
He goes red to the ears again and disappears down the hall. I hear the bathroom sink running, then silence, then him cursing quietly when he presumably discovers how far the spit-up actually traveled.
Clem blinks up at me, all big green eyes and tiny rosebud mouth.
"Your father," I tell her, "is ridiculous."
She makes a small sound that might be agreement.
He brings dinner to bed. I could probably make it to the kitchen, but he insists, and I let him.
It's the soup, which turns out to be actually good. Some kind of chicken thing with vegetables and herbs, probably from a recipe Maggie gave him. There's crusty bread too, and butter, and a glass of the ginger ale I like that he must have picked up at the store.
We eat with Clem in her portable bassinet at the foot of the bed, her little chest rising and falling in the rhythm of sleep. The room is warm, the food is good, and Taz is telling me about his first attempts at solo diaper changes.
"So I'm standing there at three in the morning," he says, waving his spoon, "and she's just looking at me like I'm the stupidest person she's ever seen, which is fair, because I am holding the diaper backward. I don't even know how it's possible to hold a diaper backward, but I found a way."
"How long did it take you to figure it out?" I ask.
"Longer than I want to admit," he says.
"Did you call anyone for help?" I ask.
"I watched a video on my phone," he says. "Very calm woman, very cooperative baby. I suspect both were paid."
"You should have shown Clem," I tell him. "She might have picked up some professional standards."
"She kicked the clean diaper onto the floor," he says gravely. "Her notes were clear."
I laugh, and it hurts; my body is still sore and exhausted, but I can't stop. The image of him standing over a changing table at three in the morning, defeated by a diaper, is too perfect.
"And then," he continues, "she peed on me. Right when I thought I had it figured out. Just... fountained. All over my shirt."
"That's what you get for not being fast enough," I wheeze.
"Nobody told me babies were pressurized," he says, deeply wounded.
I'm laughing so hard now that tears are streaming down my face, and Taz is grinning at me like making me laugh is the best thing he's done all week.
It probably is.
The laughter fades eventually, and we finish eating in companionable silence. Clem sighs in her sleep. The lamp on the bedside table casts everything in a warm golden glow.
I look at the three of us in the lamplight, the soup and the bread and the baby, his boot hooked around the bed leg like he belongs here, and the thought arrives before I can stop it: this is the life I asked him for. My throat closes so fast I have to set my spoon down.
It takes me a minute to find my voice.
"Taz," I say.
He looks up from his empty bowl. "Yeah?"
"We need to talk about what this is," I tell him.
His face goes carefully neutral. "Okay."
"You're Clem's dad," I say. "That's not going to change. I want you in her life. I want her to know you, to have you, to grow up with both her parents there for her."
"But," he says for me.
"But that's what this is. Co-parenting. You and me taking care of our daughter together." I meet his eyes. "That's all it is."
He's quiet for a long moment. I watch his jaw work, watch him swallow his answer down.
"Then let's make it workable," he says. "Tell me when you need me here. I'll put the times in and keep them. If you want me to leave after a feed, say so. I won't turn it into a discussion about us."
I pick at a thread on the quilt. "I don't want every handoff to feel like a test I'm grading."
"You shouldn't have to grade it," he says. "I'll learn what she needs."
"And you won't use her to ask about me?" I ask. "No asking whether Mommy misses you while she can't even hold her own head up?"
He looks down at the bassinet. "She doesn't need to carry messages between us. I'll talk to you myself, when you're willing."
"Good," I say. "She's already responsible for keeping us both permanently short of sleep. Her workload is full."
I unblock his number before putting my phone down. We need a direct way to talk about Clem.
His mouth lifts. "I can take Tuesdays and Fridays overnight once you're better too. If that helps. Midnight to six. We can work around what Nina's doing."
"I'll think about it," I tell him. "Right now I can only plan as far as the next cup of tea."
"Then I'll make tea," he says. "No decisions due with it."
He stands up and collects our dishes.
"Get some sleep," he says. "I'll take the first shift with Clem."
He's gone before I can answer, and I'm left alone with the weight of everything I didn't say.