“Because I was seven months pregnant and you were working overtime, Aaron. Because he was helping us. Because he is your best friend.”
“Don’t.”
Heat bloomed across my chest, sudden and stinging — my milk letting down at exactly the wrong moment, soaking through the thin hospital gown in two dark circles. I sat up too fast and the stitches pulled, a hot bright tug low in my body. I reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“Then do a test,” I said. “A DNA test. Right now. Today. I don’t care what it costs, I don’t care what you have to sign, do it.”
“Don’t you dare do this to us.”
He pulled his hand away like I had burned him.
“I don’t need a test to tell me what I’m looking at.”
“Aaron.”
“Take the baby to your sister’s when they discharge you. Take him to Diana’s. I can’t. I can’t be in the same house.”
“Aaron, please. Just look at me.”
I was a liar.
He didn’t.
“Don’t do this. Don’t you dare do this to us.”
He walked to the door. He didn’t look at our son. He didn’t look at me.
And then he was gone, and I was alone with a baby whose father had just decided, in the space of one glance, that I was a liar.
****
Diana closed the front door behind me and took the car seat from my arms without a word. My son was three days old, and I was standing in my sister’s hallway with a diaper bag, a hospital bracelet still on my wrist, and a phone full of messages Aaron refused to open.
“He won’t pick up.”
The girls were already upstairs. Lily had asked twice when Dad was coming to get us. I hadn’t known what to tell her.
“Sit down,” Diana ordered. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”
Grace had packed the banner they’d made for the baby and brought it with her. It was folded on the stairs now, one corner bent, WELCOME HOME HENRY written across it in four different colors.
“Should I save it for when Dad comes?” she’d asked.
“Elena, stop calling him.”
I’d told her yes because I couldn’t make myself explain why we weren’t going home at all.
“He won’t pick up. Look.”
I held out the screen. Three missed calls from me. One reply from Aaron:
‘I’ll have my lawyer contact you about the separation.’
Diana read it twice.
“You’re not guilty. Act like it.”
“Elena, stop calling him.”
“He’s my husband. I have to make him listen.”
“He’s not listening. That’s the whole point.” She sat down across from me and put her hand on my knee. “You keep begging, you keep looking guilty. You’re not guilty. Act like it.”
I stared at the baby.
Waiting was the worst part.
