6. Ryan
CHAPTER SIX
Ryan
Ifound the pills by accident, the way you find most things that end up mattering more than they should.
Courtney had asked me to grab her allergy medicine from the bathroom drawer Sunday morning, the top one on her side of the vanity, and in digging past the tangle of hair ties and old prescription bottles, my hand landed on the familiar plastic compact she kept her birth control in.
I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't thinking about it at all until I had it in my hand and clocked, almost against my will, that the current week's row was punched through right up to Saturday.
Active. Still active, still being taken, on a Sunday in March, four months after we'd sat on this exact bathroom counter and talked about maybe trying again sometime this year.
I stood there a second too long, the allergy medicine forgotten in my other hand, doing the kind of quiet math a man does when a fact doesn't match the story he's been telling himself.
We'd talked about it back in November. Not a firm date.
Never a firm date, we weren't that kind of planners, but I'd walked away from that conversation with the clear sense that we were headed there, that "sometime this year" meant something closer to spring than to some vague, theoretical December.
It was March. The pills were still active.
I brought Courtney her allergy medicine and said nothing, because in the moment, standing in the doorway watching her sort laundry with Melody's socks paired up in a row on the bed, it felt like too big a thing to drop into a Sunday morning.
I told myself I'd bring it up later, when there was actual space for the conversation instead of a load of towels between us.
Later came and went. We had a full day, a birthday party for one of Melody's daycare friends that ate the whole afternoon, complete with a bounce house, a pi?ata that took four adults to finally crack open, and a cake with more frosting than cake.
I watched Courtney chat easily with the other parents, laughing at somebody's story about a home renovation gone wrong, competent and warm and completely unaware of the question sitting quietly in my pocket the entire time.
We did a grocery run on the way home, argued lightly over whether we needed more paper towels, picked up a rotisserie chicken because neither of us had the energy to actually cook, and by the time dinner, bath, and bed had come and gone, the moment had gone soft and awkward in my head in a way it hadn't been that morning.
I kept almost asking. I got as far as *hey, so, I noticed something* twice, and both times swallowed it back down, because I didn't actually know what I was afraid of hearing.
That she'd changed her mind. That there was a reason she hadn't told me.
That asking would turn into a fight I didn't have the energy for on a Sunday night after a birthday party with too much cake in it.
Courtney noticed something was off. She always noticed.
"You're somewhere else tonight," she said, her feet in my lap, some reality show playing that neither of us was actually watching.
"Just tired. Long week coming up."
"The walkthrough went okay though, right? Tom seemed happy last I heard."
"Tom's happy. It's fine." I rubbed her ankle, mostly to have something to do with my hands. "Just a lot on my mind. Work stuff."
She believed me, because there was no reason not to, and took on a little more of the mental load without either of us naming it, offering to handle Melody's dentist appointment that week so I wouldn't have to juggle it around a site meeting.
I let her. I told myself it was fine, that I was just tired, that the pill thing could wait for a better moment, and went to bed that night with the question still sitting unasked in my chest like something swallowed the wrong way.
Michelle noticed the next morning before I'd said a word.
"You've got the face again," she said, handing me a set of drawings I hadn't asked for yet. "The math face. What are you doing math on this time?"
"Nothing."
"Wrong answer. Try again."
I almost didn't tell her. Some part of me, small and quiet, understood this one was different, that it wasn't a work problem or a scheduling headache but something that belonged strictly to Courtney and me.
But Michelle had a way of just standing there, patient, unbothered, waiting you out without making it weird, and by the third silent minute I talked anyway.
"I found Courtney's birth control yesterday.
Still active. We talked back in November about maybe trying for another kid this year, and I guess I'd built up this whole timeline in my head where we were already headed there, and now I don't actually know if that's still the plan or if something changed and nobody mentioned it to me. "
"Did you ask her?"
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
I turned my coffee cup in my hands, same habit as always when I was working something out loud.
"I don't know. It felt bigger than it should, bringing it up out of nowhere.
Like I'd be accusing her of something when maybe there's nothing to accuse.
Maybe she just hasn't gotten around to stopping them yet. Maybe I'm inventing a problem."
"Or maybe you ask her a simple question and find out, instead of standing around at a construction site doing anxiety math with me.
" She said it without any real bite, more like a nudge than a correction.
"For what it's worth, 'this year' is a big window.
It's March. You've got nine months left of 'this year.
' She's not lying to you by still being on the pill in March. "
"I know that logically."
"But?"
"But it still kind of got under my skin.
Like maybe I read more into that conversation than she meant.
" I exhaled, and the tightness that had been sitting in me since Sunday eased a fraction, just from having said it out loud to someone who wasn't going to make it into a bigger deal than it currently was. "I'll talk to her tonight."
"Good. Talk to your wife, not your coworker, about your wife's birth control. Novel concept, I know." Michelle handed me the drawings again, this time with actual purpose behind it. "Now can we deal with the fire door hardware, or do you need another minute to have feelings?"
"I'm good. Let's deal with the doors."
I meant it when I said I'd talk to Courtney that night.
I even had the sentence half-built in my head on the drive home, something easy, something low-stakes, *hey, I noticed you're still on the pill, are we still thinking this year or did the timeline shift.
* Simple. Reasonable. The kind of thing married people said to each other.
But by the time I walked in the door, Melody had a fever, low-grade but enough to make her clingy and miserable, and Courtney was already elbow-deep in Tylenol doses and lukewarm baths and a phone call with the pediatric nurse line, and the sentence I'd built in my head quietly folded itself back up and went into a drawer somewhere, because it clearly wasn't the night for it.
I almost brought it up again Tuesday, catching Courtney alone in the kitchen while Melody napped, the sentence half-formed on my tongue, but she was in the middle of a work call about a patient's insurance authorization, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear while she scribbled notes on the back of a grocery receipt, and the moment slid past before I could catch it a second time.
My sister Kate had us over for dinner that Thursday, one of her semi-regular attempts to keep the extended family from drifting entirely into text-only contact, and I thought, driving over, that it might actually be the moment.
Kate had a way of asking questions that cut straight past the small talk, and if Courtney and I ended up in the kitchen together while Kate wrangled her own kids, it would be as good an opening as any to finally say the thing out loud to the person it actually belonged to.
It didn't happen that way. Kate cornered me by the grill instead, wanting my opinion on a work situation of her own, some interpersonal mess with a coworker that took the better part of twenty minutes to untangle, and by the time we'd finished, dinner was ready and Courtney was already inside setting the table with Kate's oldest, laughing at something the kid had said, and the moment folded itself back into the ordinary noise of a family dinner before I ever found the thread again.
"You're quiet tonight," Kate said, catching me alone for a second on the back steps while the kids ran wild in her yard chasing a soccer ball that had clearly seen better days.
"Just tired. Work stuff."
"You always say that." She studied me for a second, the particular scrutiny of a sister who'd known me longer than anyone. "You good? With Courtney, I mean. You two seem a little off tonight. Nothing big, just a little off."
"We're good," I said, and meant it in the moment, because nothing had actually happened between us that week that I could point to as a problem, only a question I kept failing to ask. "Just a long stretch at work. It'll ease up eventually."
"Okay. If you say so." She didn't push, which I was grateful for, and we went back inside to eat, and the rest of the evening passed easily enough, Melody and Kate's kids negotiating an elaborate, ever-changing set of rules for a board game none of them were actually following correctly, Courtney laughing until she had to wipe her eyes at some story Kate told about a client meeting gone sideways.
Driving home that night, Courtney reached over and rested her hand on my knee, comfortable and easy, and asked if everything was really okay, echoing Kate's question almost exactly.
"Everything's good," I told her, and believed it was mostly true, filing the pill question away yet again for some better, more obvious opening that never quite seemed to materialize on its own.
It wasn't the next night either, or the one after that.
There wasn't always a fever. But once I'd let the first easy opening pass, every later one felt like it needed more setup than it should have, more explanation for why I was bringing it up now instead of then.
I told myself I was waiting for the right moment.
What I actually did was let the question sit, unasked, and let the relief of having already said the worry out loud to somebody stand in for actually resolving anything.
By Friday, I'd stopped thinking about it as an open question I needed to close. I'd started thinking about it, quietly, as something I already understood well enough. She wasn't ready yet. That was fine. I could wait. I didn't need to make her uncomfortable by pushing on it.
It didn't once occur to me that the reason I felt so settled about not asking was that I'd already gotten the only relief I actually needed from somebody who wasn't my wife, and that Courtney, who had noticed I was somewhere else that Sunday night and asked me directly what was wrong, still didn't have the first idea what it was.