8. Courtney
CHAPTER EIGHT
Courtney
Neither of us slept well that night, and by Monday morning I'd had enough hours lying awake next to him to know exactly what I needed to say and roughly how he was going to try to say it wasn't that bad.
I was right, mostly. He tried the wrong-axis defense first, the way I'd half expected he would.
"I need you to know there's nothing romantic there," he said Monday evening, once Melody was down and we'd finally found a stretch of quiet to actually finish Sunday's conversation. "I've never once thought about Michelle that way. It's not that kind of friendship."
"I know that," I said, and meant it. In eleven years, Ryan had never once given me a real reason to doubt his fidelity in the way people usually meant the word. "I'm not worried you're sleeping with her, Ryan. I'm not worried you want to. That's not what this is about."
He looked genuinely thrown by that, like he'd braced for an accusation that hadn't come and didn't know what to do with the space where it wasn't. "Then I don't understand what the actual problem is."
"The problem is that when something is wrong between us, or feels wrong to you, or scares you, I need to be the first person who knows.
Not the second. Not the person who finds out secondhand at a cookout because Michelle already had more context than I did.
" I made myself hold his eyes. "She cannot know more about what you think is broken in our marriage than I know.
That's the actual line. Not whether you're attracted to her.
Whether I'm still the person you bring things to. "
He was quiet for a moment, working through it, and I watched him try to minimize it before he caught himself doing it. "I mean, it's not like I've been having some ongoing thing with her about our marriage. This was one conversation. One time I was stressed and she happened to be there."
"It wasn't one conversation, Ryan. It was a conversation you had instead of the one you should have had with me, weeks before you ever brought it up.
And now I find out about it because a stranger at a barbecue casually referenced my birth control.
" I kept my voice steady, though it cost something to do it.
"I need you to actually hear that this isn't a small thing just because the individual conversation was short. "
"Okay." He exhaled, some of the defensiveness draining out of him, and for the first time since Sunday I saw something closer to real understanding land. "Okay. I hear it. I do. I should have come to you first. I know that. I'm sorry."
"Will you agree to the boundary? Not as a formality. Actually agree to it."
"Yes. Absolutely. If something's wrong between us, or something's bothering me about us, you get it first. Not Michelle, not Kate, not Tom, you.
" He reached for my hand, and I let him take it, because I believed, in that moment, that he meant every word.
"I didn't even really think of it as a system before tonight.
It just felt like, I don't know, small things that happened to come up while we were talking about work.
I didn't clock that it added up to anything. "
"It added up to something," I said. "I need you to actually see that, not just agree to stop doing a thing you don't think you were doing."
"I see it," he said, and I believed that too, mostly, though some small, wary part of me filed the moment away rather than fully releasing it.
We moved, after that, into the conversation we’d actually been circling for weeks, the one about Baby Two and timing and the pack of pills that had started the whole unraveling.
I told him, more fully than I had in the kitchen the night before, about the fear that had kept me on the pill past the vague "this year" we’d agreed on back in November. My morning sickness with Melody had been brutal, six weeks of barely functioning, and some superstitious part of me hadn’t wanted to walk into that again while the hotel project was eating every spare hour Ryan had.
I’d wanted us to pick an actual month together, deliberately, instead of drifting into it because a conversation months ago had implied a timeline neither of us had actually locked down.
"I get that," he said, and reached for my hand again, more certain this time. "I don't want you white-knuckling a pregnancy alone while I'm buried at a job site either. If we do this, I want to actually be around for it. Not phoning it in from a construction trailer."
"The project's wrapping in what, four months?"
"Give or take. If it goes clean." He hesitated, then added, with a kind of careful honesty I appreciated even as it complicated the plan slightly, "It won't go perfectly clean. Nothing this size ever does. But I can make room for this even with the project running. I want to."
We talked for another hour, the actual, real conversation we should have had back in November, about morning sickness and childcare logistics and whether we wanted another close in age to Melody or more of a gap.
"I keep picturing a boy this time," Ryan admitted, a little sheepish about it. "I don’t need one. I just keep picturing chasing some kid around a backyard with a football, and my brain apparently decided that kid’s a boy."
"You do know Melody can catch a football better than most of the neighbor kids."
"I'm aware. I'm very proud and also slightly afraid of what she's going to do to youth sports in a few years.
" He laughed, easy, some of the week's tension finally draining out of his shoulders.
"I just mean, I don't care what we get. I already know I'll be obsessed either way.
I'm just letting myself daydream a little. "
"Daydream away. I'm not going to hold you to a preference you can't control anyway.
" I leaned into him, some old, comfortable warmth returning to my chest. "I've been picturing a girl, if it matters.
Someone for Melody to boss around the way she already bosses around every stuffed animal in this house. "
"God help that poor kid."
"God help all of us," I agreed, and by the end of it something in the room had genuinely eased. He pulled me into him on the couch, pressed his mouth to my temple, told me he loved me in the low, certain voice he used when he meant it all the way down.
"I'm going to stop the pills," I told him, later, in bed, my head on his chest. "This week. We can actually try."
"Yeah?" He sounded so plainly happy about it that some of my remaining wariness softened despite myself. "I like that a lot."
"Me too." I tipped my face up, and he kissed me, slow and unhurried, and for a while the whole ugly week folded itself away into something that felt, again, like the marriage I trusted completely.
I did stop the pills that week, openly, no more secrets in a bathroom drawer, and Ryan and I fell into a stretch of days that felt almost like a second honeymoon, careful with each other in the particular way people are after a real scare, generous with affection, quick to laugh.
I believed, honestly and without much reservation, that we'd caught the thing early enough to actually fix it.
That the boundary he'd agreed to, the very real conversation we'd finally had, meant the underlying problem was solved along with the surface one.
We told my parents that weekend, over a dinner my mother had been not-so-subtly angling toward for months, and watched Melody, uncomprehending but delighted by the general mood, demand to know why everyone kept hugging for no reason.
"We're thinking about giving you a little brother or sister eventually," I told her, crouching down to her level, and she considered this with the deep, serious skepticism she brought to most major life announcements.
"Will they take my toys?"
"Only the ones you're not using," Ryan said, and she seemed to find this an acceptable arrangement, already moving on to more pressing matters involving her grandmother's cookie jar.
My mother caught me alone in the kitchen afterward, drying dishes while the men argued good-naturedly in the other room about something sports-related. "You two seem good," she said, careful, the way she always was when she wanted to ask something without quite asking it. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's okay," I said, and believed it completely in that moment. "We had a rough patch. We talked through it. I think we're actually in a better place than before."
"Good." She squeezed my shoulder, satisfied, and I carried that reassurance with me for weeks afterward, a small, warm certainty that would only later reveal how much of the actual picture I still hadn't seen.
We went out the following Friday, just the two of us, my mother taking Melody for the night so we could actually finish a meal without narrating it to a three-year-old, and it felt, for the first time in weeks, like dating my own husband instead of managing a crisis with him.
"I keep thinking about what you said," Ryan told me, over a bottle of wine neither of us was drinking quickly. "About being the first person who knows. I want to actually be good at that, not just agree to it and then forget in three months."
"I believe you want that."
"I mean it. I've been thinking about why it was so easy to just mention things to Michelle instead of bringing them to you first, and I think part of it is that work stuff feels lower stakes with her.
She's not going to be hurt by whatever I say about the project, because none of it's actually about her life.
" He turned his glass slowly by the stem, working through it out loud the way he did.
"But that's not really an excuse, is it.
Because the pill thing wasn't about work.
That was ours, and I still took it somewhere else first."
"No, it's not an excuse. But I appreciate you actually looking at it instead of just saying sorry and moving on."
"I don't want to just say sorry and move on.
I want to actually be different." He reached across the table for my hand, and I let him take it, the warmth of the gesture undercut only slightly by the memory of how recently I'd needed to ask for it directly instead of simply receiving it.
"I know I've got to prove that over time, not just tonight.
I'm not expecting one dinner to fix it."
"That's a good instinct to have."
We talked for the rest of the meal about easier things, an upcoming trip his mother wanted to plan, a funny story from one of my patients, the increasingly elaborate mythology Melody had built up around her stuffed rabbit, and it felt, walking out to the car afterward with his hand at the small of my back, like something real had actually shifted between us, not fixed exactly, but moving in the right direction for the first time in weeks.
Ryan had agreed to stop telling Michelle about pills and pregnancy plans. I had no way to know yet what that promise did and didn't actually cover.