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Those two weeks were the hardest stretch of my entire life, and I say that as someone who’d just been through labor with three babies at once less than two weeks earlier.
My sister, Naomi, came by whenever she could, which was often, given that she worked as a paralegal at a family law office twenty minutes away and had a fairly flexible schedule. But even with her help, most nights it was just me, alone in that house, moving between three cribs on a rotation that left almost no time for sleep, for eating properly, for anything beyond keeping three small humans alive until morning.
“He actually said that to you?” Naomi asked one night, sitting at my kitchen table at two in the morning, holding Nora while I fed Wesley and Callum slept, temporarily, in the bassinet between us. “During labor? To be quieter?”
“Word for word,” I said.
Naomi’s jaw tightened in a way I recognized from years of watching her handle difficult cases at work.
“And now he’s in Cabo,” she said.
“Posting about it, apparently,” I said, tilting my phone toward her. “Danny’s girlfriend tagged him in a photo an hour ago.”
Naomi looked at the screen for a long moment, her expression unreadable.
“I want you to keep every single one of these,” she finally said. “Every post. Every timestamp. Don’t delete anything, Ivy. Not one thing.”
⸻
I didn’t fully understand, at the time, why that mattered so much to her. I was too exhausted to think more than a few hours ahead at any given moment, let alone plan for whatever might come after Grant’s return.
But Naomi understood things about situations like mine that I didn’t yet. She’d spent six years working family law cases, watching exactly this kind of pattern play out in other people’s marriages, and she recognized, faster than I did, exactly what we might eventually need proof of.
