What My Husband Shared With the Other Woman

1. Courtney

CHAPTER ONE

Courtney

The coffee maker beeped at six forty, which meant I had exactly eleven minutes before Melody woke up and decided the day belonged to her.

I poured two cups from habit before I remembered Ryan had already left for a site walk-through, out the door before dawn with a travel mug and a kiss pressed somewhere near my ear because I hadn't fully surfaced yet.

I drank the extra cup myself, standing at the counter in yesterday's sweatshirt, and watched the sky over our street go from charcoal to the flat gray that passed for a Denver morning in early spring.

By six fifty-one, I heard the particular thump of a three-year-old climbing down from a toddler bed she'd technically outgrown but refused to abandon. Melody appeared in the kitchen doorway a minute later with her hair matted flat on one side and her stuffed rabbit dangling by one ear.

"Is it a school day," she asked, which was how she'd taken to phrasing it even though preschool wasn't school, not really, and we'd stopped correcting her months ago.

"It's a school day."

"Is Daddy getting me."

I checked the calendar taped inside the pantry door, the one with Ryan's site schedule and my clinic hours color-coded in two different systems that only made sense to the two of us.

Tuesday. Ryan had penciled himself in for pickup weeks ago, back when the hotel project still had enough slack in it to promise things.

"Daddy's getting you," I said, and she did a small, satisfied hop that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that Daddy pickup meant a specific kind of afternoon, one with the radio turned up too loud and a stop for a treat that I wasn't supposed to know about and always did.

We got through breakfast, the sock negotiation, the argument about whether rabbit needed a coat, and I dropped her at daycare eleven minutes later than I meant to, same as most days.

The center was decent. The staff liked her, she had a best friend named Ava who she discussed with the gravity of a business partner, and the fenced yard had a wooden train she treated like a throne.

It was also almost thirty minutes from my clinic in the wrong direction, which meant on the days I opened at eight, I spent a chunk of my morning commute doing math about traffic and lights instead of thinking about my first patient.

I made a mental note, the way I did most weeks, to look again at the newer center closer to the highway. Then Melody's teacher intercepted us at the door with a story about glitter and a craft project gone rogue, and the thought went wherever thoughts like that went.

My clinic sat in a strip of medical offices behind a grocery store, unglamorous and a little too beige, but I'd built something real there over nine years, first full-time and then, after Melody, at the reduced schedule Ryan and I had agreed on together over a kitchen-table conversation I still remembered clearly.

Three days. Enough to keep my hands sharp and my caseload interesting, not so much that I missed the parts of her that only happened on a Tuesday afternoon.

My first patient was Mr. Delgado, sixty-eight, four months out from a stroke that had taken most of the strength on his right side and none of his stubbornness.

We worked on buttoning a shirt for twenty minutes, his fingers fumbling and recovering, fumbling and recovering, and when he finally got the second button through the hole without my hand steadying his, he grinned at me like we'd split the atom.

"Look at that," I said. "You're going to fire me soon."

"Not soon enough for my wife," he said, and I laughed, because it was funny, and because that was the job. Not the buttons. The moment a person got a piece of their own competence handed back to them.

Before Jenna caught me, I'd spent the first hour of the morning with a woman named Eleanor, seventy-one, recovering from a hip replacement, who was determined to get back to gardening before the last frost regardless of what her surgeon had recommended about timeline.

We worked on functional reach and balance using a set of props I'd rigged up specifically for her, a mock raised garden bed I'd built out of a folding table and some pool noodles, and by the end of the session she'd successfully "planted" three fake seedlings without losing her balance once.

"You're going to have actual tomatoes by June," I told her, helping her back into her chair.

"I better. I've got a rivalry with my neighbor going back fifteen years, and she does not know I had surgery." Eleanor's eyes glinted with the particular mischief of a woman who considered vegetable competition a serious matter. "This stays between us."

"My lips are sealed."

Jenna caught me in the break room while I microwaved leftover soup, still in her scrub top with the little embroidered otters on it that patients under twelve loved and patients over sixty pretended not to.

She'd started at the practice two years after me and had somehow become the person I told things to before I'd fully decided I wanted to tell anyone.

"You look suspiciously rested for a Tuesday," she said, stealing a cracker off my tray without asking.

"Melody slept through the night. It's a small miracle and I'm not examining it too closely."

"Ryan still buried alive in that hotel?"

"Buried, but surfacing. Four more months, allegedly." I said it the way Ryan had said it, like a countdown that had become a private joke between us. "How's your weekend look?"

"Boring. Yours?"

"Also boring. We might actually be trying for round two of the parenthood experience sometime this year, so enjoy the quiet while we've got it. Diapers again eventually."

"God help you," Jenna said, already halfway out the door with someone paging her name over the intercom. "Tell Ryan I said hi and that he owes me a good excuse for missing book club again through you."

"He's never once been invited to book club."

"That's the excuse I want," she called back, and I was still laughing when my next patient's chart popped up on the screen.

Back at my desk, I answered three emails about insurance authorizations, and by two thirty I was elbow deep in a home exercise plan for a woman recovering from a rotator cuff repair when my phone buzzed with a text from Ryan.

*Leaving site now. Should make pickup with room to spare.*

I sent back a thumbs up and kept working, and by the time I pulled into our driveway at six, Ryan's truck was already there, radio still ticking as it cooled in the driveway the way it did when he'd shut it off two minutes ago instead of twenty.

I found them in the kitchen. Melody was up on the counter stool she wasn't technically allowed to stand on unsupervised, narrating a drawing to Ryan while he pretended to take detailed notes on a legal pad meant for change orders.

He still had his work boots on, laces loose, and a dab of what I hoped was marker on his jaw.

"Mommy," Melody announced, like I'd walked in on state business, "Daddy got me and we got the song loud and we got a donut and don't tell you."

"I would never have guessed," I said, and Ryan looked up at me over her head with the particular grin of a man who knew he'd been fully sold out and didn't care.

"One donut," he said. "Split three ways in my head, mostly eaten by her."

That was the ritual, more or less unchanged since Melody had been old enough to have opinions about music.

Ryan picked her up, cranked whatever station she currently claimed as hers, and let her conduct an off-key concert from the back seat the whole drive home.

Some weeks it was a gas station donut. Some weeks a sticker.

It was never about the treat. It was about the fifteen minutes that belonged only to the two of them, and about the fact that she ran to him at pickup the way kids run toward something they trust completely.

I handed him a beer once she was down off the stool and negotiating the terms of bath time, and he took it with the particular gratitude of a man who'd been standing since five that morning.

"Rough one?" I asked.

"Long one." He rubbed the back of his neck, and I watched the tension sit there, visible, the way it always was on him after a hard day.

"We're at the point in this job where every single decision has three other decisions hanging off it, and if I pick wrong on any of them, it costs somebody money or time or both. "

"Which decision was today's?"

"Elevator shaft coordination with the electrical sub. It's fine. It's going to be fine. It just took four hours of fine that I didn't have."

I didn't ask him to walk me through the technical version, because I wouldn't have understood half of it and he knew that, and instead I asked the questions that mattered to me, which were about him.

Was Tom happy. Was the schedule still holding.

Did he eat lunch or was he going to tell me some story about a granola bar in his truck console from 2019.

He told me enough. Tom was pushing but fair. The schedule had maybe a week of cushion left, if nothing else broke. He had, in fact, eaten an actual lunch, which he presented like a small victory.

We ate dinner standing at the counter because Melody wanted us both in the bathroom doorway narrating her bath performance, and after she went down, after the two stories and the specific song and the third cup of water she absolutely needed, Ryan and I ended up on the couch with the television on and neither of us watching it.

"Come here," he said, and I did, tucking myself against his side the way I'd been doing since before we were married, since before this house, since a studio apartment with a mattress on the floor and more optimism than money.

"You seem tired in a different way tonight," I said, running my thumb along the inside of his wrist, a habit I didn't consciously do anymore so much as simply did.

"I'm tired in the way where I can see the finish line and I hate how far away it still looks." He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. "Four more months. Maybe less if the last stretch goes clean."

"And if it doesn't go clean?"

"Then it doesn't, and I deal with it." He said it easily enough, but I felt something underneath the words, some low current of pressure he was managing more than mentioning. "I don't want to talk about the hotel anymore tonight. Tell me something good."

"Delgado buttoned his own shirt today."

"See, that's a good day. You had a genuinely good day and I made you listen to elevator shafts."

"I like your elevator shafts."

"Liar."

"Complete liar," I agreed, and he laughed, low and real, the sound of it settling something in me the same way it always did.

Later, after the lights were off and the house had gone quiet except for the hum of the baby monitor turned low, he pulled me in against him, and I felt the particular ease of a body that trusted where it was.

"Hey," he said into the dark. "You still thinking about trying again this year?"

I went still for a second, not from surprise exactly, more from the pleasant weight of a conversation we hadn't quite finished having. "I've been thinking about it. Not, like, actively plotting a due date. But yeah. Sometime."

"Good." His arm tightened around my waist. "I like the idea of Melody being a big sister before she's too settled in being an only child tyrant."

"She's not a tyrant."

"She negotiated an extra ten minutes of bath time out of me tonight using pure eye contact. She's a tyrant with excellent instincts."

I laughed against his chest, and for a while neither of us said anything else, and it didn't need filling.

This was the part of the marriage I would have had trouble explaining to someone who hadn't lived inside it.

Not the big declarations. This. A dark room, a warm arm, the particular safety of being fully known by someone and still wanted.

"I love you," I said, mostly into his shirt.

"Love you too." His voice had already gone thick with sleep. "Four more months."

"Four more months," I agreed, and closed my eyes, with no reason in the world to think that number would end up meaning something entirely different than either of us intended.