9. Courtney
CHAPTER NINE
Courtney
The second-honeymoon stretch lasted long enough that I let myself relax into it completely, and it was in the middle of that ease, three weeks after the boundary conversation, that I started actually researching daycare options for real, not the vague someday version I'd been carrying around for over a year.
The trigger was small. Melody's current center called to say they were raising tuition again in the fall, the third increase in two years, and while we could absorb it without real strain, it was the kind of nudge that made me finally open the browser tab I'd been meaning to open for months.
Little Sprouts sat less than ten minutes from my clinic instead of thirty, had better reviews, a shorter waitlist than I'd expected, and, critically, a sibling discount structure that would matter a great deal if Baby Two actually happened this year the way we were now planning.
I mentioned it to Jenna over lunch that same week, mostly because she'd been through her own version of the daycare hunt with her nephew and had opinions about most of the centers within a twenty-mile radius.
"Little Sprouts is the one with the good infant room," she said, around a mouthful of salad. "My sister looked at it for my nephew. Pricier than some, but you get what you pay for. You should go look before somebody else snaps up the spot, they only had the one opening last I heard."
"I’ve been meaning to for months. I keep telling myself Ryan and I will go together, but between the hotel and my schedule, we’ve never found a day that works."
"So go without him. It's not like you're signing a lease." Jenna waved her fork for emphasis. "You can always bring him back for a second look before anything's actually decided. Nobody needs both parents in the room to ask a director about nap schedules."
"That's fair." I turned it over for a second, and it did feel fair, reasonable, the kind of small administrative task that didn't require ceremony. "I'll see if they've got anything open this week."
They had a single opening for a preliminary tour that Thursday, mid-morning, a slot that happened to line up perfectly with a gap in my clinic schedule.
I almost texted Ryan about it. I actually had my phone out, thumb hovering over his name, before I talked myself out of it.
It was just a look. Not an application, not an enrollment, not a decision of any weight.
I could screen it in twenty minutes on my own and tell him about it that night, the same way I'd tell him about any other errand I'd knocked out during a work gap.
The tour went well. Better than well. The director, a brisk, warm woman named Marcy who'd clearly given this exact walkthrough hundreds of times and still managed to make it feel personal, walked me through bright, well-organized classrooms with actual natural light instead of the fluorescent buzz Melody's current center ran on.
She explained their infant program in enough detail that I found myself already imagining a hypothetical newborn there, asked good, specific questions about Melody's personality and interests, and pointed out, almost as an aside, that siblings got automatic priority placement in the same building once one child was enrolled, which would matter enormously if Baby Two actually arrived on anything like the timeline we were now discussing.
"She sounds like she'd do well here," Marcy said, once I'd described Melody's particular blend of bossy and sweet. "We get a lot of strong personalities. We're built for them."
By the time I left, I had a genuine, uncomplicated excitement about it that I couldn't wait to share, a whole mental list already forming of things I wanted to tell Ryan: the natural light, the sibling priority, the way Marcy had actually laughed at my description of Melody's Go Fish rule innovations instead of just nodding politely.
I told Ryan that night, over dinner, casual, the way I'd mention any other errand.
"I finally toured Little Sprouts today. The place I've been meaning to check out forever."
He looked up from his plate, and something moved across his face that I didn't immediately place. "You went today?"
"I had a gap between patients and they had an opening.
I just wanted to actually see it instead of going off reviews forever.
" I kept going, not yet noticing the shift in him.
"It's so much closer, Ryan. Ten minutes from the clinic instead of thirty.
And their infant room is genuinely impressive, way better than I expected for the price. "
"Oh." He set his fork down. "You went by yourself."
"It was just a preliminary look. Nothing to decide yet." I studied him, finally clocking that something had actually gone wrong. "Did you want to come? I didn't think it was a big enough step to need both of us there. It's not like we were signing anything."
"No, it's fine. I just, I don't know, I guess I pictured us doing that kind of thing together when the time came." He picked his fork back up, and I watched him visibly work to make his voice sound lighter than his face looked. "It's smart, though. Cheaper, closer. Makes sense."
Something about the way he said *cheaper* caught oddly, and I backtracked slightly. "It's not about the money, if that's what you're worried about. I know finances are fine. I just liked that it was also more affordable on top of everything else being better."
"I didn't think you were worried about money." He said it a beat too fast, and I let it go, chalking the whole exchange up to him being tired, or maybe genuinely disappointed to have missed something that mattered to him more than I'd realized.
"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it. "I honestly didn't think a first look mattered enough to pull you away from work for it. Any real next step, the application, the actual decision, that's absolutely something we do together. I promise."
"It's fine. Really." He reached over and squeezed my hand, and the gesture felt genuine enough that I believed him, and the conversation moved on to Melody's day and something funny she'd said at dinner, and by the time we cleared the table I'd more or less forgotten the strange half-second where his face had done something I couldn't fully read.
I didn't think about it again that night, or the next day, satisfied that we'd talked it through and left it somewhere fine.
What I didn't know, and had no way of knowing, was that Ryan had gone quiet after that conversation for reasons that had nothing to do with tuition or logistics and everything to do with a feeling he couldn't yet put into words even for himself: that I'd gone and looked at a piece of our future without him, easily, competently, the way I did most things, and that some part of him had heard it as evidence of something he was afraid was already true.
I called my mother later that week to tell her about the tour, mostly because she'd been asking, gently and repeatedly, whether we'd made any progress on the daycare search.
"It sounds wonderful," she said, once I'd finished describing the infant room and the sibling discount and Marcy's genuine warmth. "Did Ryan get to see it too?"
"Not yet. I went on my own, just to screen it. He can come look before we actually decide anything."
There was a small pause on the line, the kind my mother was prone to when she had an opinion she wasn't sure was hers to offer. "That's probably fine. Just, you know how your father gets when I make plans without looping him in first, even little ones. Sometimes it's not really about the plan."
"Ryan's not like that."
"I didn't say he was. I just know men can surprise you with what they decide matters.
" She said it lightly, no real weight behind it, already moving on to ask about Melody's latest preschool drama, and I let the comment pass without much thought, filing it away as my mother's general wisdom about men rather than anything specific to my own marriage.
I mentioned the odd exchange to Jenna over lunch that same week, mostly because I was still turning it over and hadn't fully let it go the way I'd told myself I had.
"He got weird about it? Like jealous weird, or hurt weird?" Jenna asked, stealing a chip off my tray without asking, same as always.
"Hurt weird, I think. Or maybe left-out weird.
He said something about picturing us doing that kind of thing together, and then got quiet when I explained it was just a first look.
" I turned the memory over again, trying to pin down exactly what it was.
"It's strange, because it's not like I excluded him on purpose.
He's the one buried at a job site sixty hours a week.
I didn't think a fifteen-minute tour needed a summit. "
"Sounds like it wasn't really about the tour."
"That's what I thought too. But then he seemed fine, so I let it go." I shrugged, not entirely convinced by my own explanation even as I offered it. "Maybe he's just stretched thin right now and everything's landing a little heavier than it normally would."
"Could be." Jenna considered it a second longer than felt casual. "Or maybe keep an eye on it. Sometimes 'fine' is just the thing people say until they've figured out what they actually want to say instead."
"You think I should bring it up again?"
"I think you already did, and he told you it was fine, and you're allowed to take him at his word unless something else comes along that says otherwise." She bumped my shoulder, lighter now. "You're not required to go looking for problems that aren't actively knocking on the door yet."
I appreciated that, mostly because it matched the instinct I already had, and let the conversation drift toward easier things, a patient of hers with an unusually dramatic response to a routine flu shot, my own morning spent convincing a stubborn eight-year-old that his sling was, in fact, cooler than no sling.
Ryan and I went together to see it a second time about a month later, mostly at my insistence, wanting him to actually have his own impression of the place instead of only mine secondhand.
He asked Marcy thoughtful, specific questions I hadn't thought to ask, about staff turnover, about how they handled a strong-willed kid who didn't want to nap, and by the end of the tour I could tell he was genuinely won over, not performing enthusiasm for my benefit but actually seeing what I'd seen the first time.
"I get why you liked it," he said, once we were back in the car. "It's a good place. I'm glad you found it."
"I'm glad you got to see it too. I should have pushed for us to go together from the start, honestly, instead of assuming a first look didn't need both of us."
"You don't have to apologize again. I told you it was fine." He reached over and squeezed my hand on the console, easy and warm. "I think I just had a weird moment about it. Wasn't really about the daycare."
"What was it about, then? If you want to tell me."
He was quiet for a second, considering, and I watched him decide, visibly, how much to actually say.
"I don't know exactly. Some feeling about not being in the room for things anymore.
It's not about you doing anything wrong.
I think it's more about the hotel eating so many of my hours that I keep missing small moments I didn't even know I wanted to be part of until they'd already happened without me. "
"That makes sense. I don't want you to feel like you're missing your own life, Ryan."
"I don't feel that way most days. Just sometimes." He smiled, small and a little rueful. "Four more months. I keep saying that like it's a magic number that fixes everything."
"Maybe it just needs to be true enough of the time. Nobody's ever going to be in every room."
"That's fair." He laced his fingers through mine, and we drove home in a comfortable quiet, and I let myself believe, mostly correctly in that particular moment, that whatever had been bothering him had actually been resolved by simply naming it out loud, instead of understanding that the feeling itself, the fear of becoming decorative, was still finding other, quieter places to land.
I closed the loop in my head that week, marked Little Sprouts down as a strong option for whenever we actually needed to move, and went back to the ordinary rhythm of work and Melody and a marriage that felt, from where I was standing, entirely repaired.