I told him everything Naomi’s folder couldn’t fully capture — the exact texture of exhaustion at four in the morning with three crying babies and no one else in the house. The moment, around day nine, when I’d sat on the bathroom floor and genuinely wondered if I was capable of doing this alone for the rest of my life. The particular loneliness of watching his vacation photos load on my phone screen at the exact moment Callum spiked his first fever.
Grant didn’t argue with any of it. I think, somewhere in that conversation, he finally understood there wasn’t an argument available to him that could undo what those two weeks had actually cost.
⸻
We didn’t finalize the separation agreement that night. I want to be honest about that, because these stories don’t always resolve as cleanly as a single dramatic confrontation.
What we did agree to was six weeks of him staying with his brother, attending counseling — both individually and eventually together — and rebuilding, slowly and without any guarantees, whatever trust could realistically be rebuilt after something like that.
It’s been four months now since that night. Grant moved back in two months ago, and things are different than they were before — quieter in some ways, more honest in others. He hasn’t missed a single overnight feeding since he came back. He still winces sometimes, I’ve noticed, whenever he passes the spot in the living room where that coffee table sat covered in printed proof of exactly what kind of husband and father he’d almost become permanently.
