I was twenty-nine, divorced for six months, and living in a rented apartment near Green Lake with creaky floors, thin walls, and exactly enough space for a bassinet, a foldout table, and the kind of silence that starts to feel like another person in the room.
When people talk about divorce, they talk about freedom.
What they don’t talk about is the aftermath.
The grocery runs where you stand in front of the soup aisle trying not to cry because there’s nobody to text anymore. The doctor’s visits where you answer every form alone. The humiliating little moments when you realize the person who once knew the shape of your whole life now wouldn’t know your address, your due date, or whether you were dead.
I had not told Ethan about the baby.
Not because I wanted revenge.
Because I was afraid.
Afraid he would come back out of obligation instead of love. Afraid his mother would turn my son into a Collins heir before he even learned how to hold his own head up. Afraid that if I let that family touch him, they would never stop reaching.
I had just managed to get Leo to sleep when the doorbell rang.
I froze so hard it felt like my heartbeat stopped and then restarted wrong.