Over those two weeks, without ever making a dramatic announcement about it, she quietly built a folder. Screenshots of Grant’s vacation photos, timestamped beside screenshots of my own exhausted, bleary three-in-the-morning texts to her. A printed copy of the hospital admission and discharge paperwork. A note, written out in her neat paralegal handwriting, documenting the exact date and time Grant had left, in his own words, according to what I’d told her that first night.
“Just in case,” she kept saying, whenever I asked what it was all for. “You don’t have to decide anything right now. I just don’t want you scrambling for proof later if you ever need it.”
⸻
Grant called exactly twice during those two weeks. Both calls lasted under three minutes. Both times, I could hear music and laughter in the background, and both times, he asked about the babies in the vague, generalized way a person asks about something they’re not actually picturing clearly in their mind.
“They’re good?” he’d ask. “Everyone’s healthy?”
“They’re healthy,” I’d say. “I’m exhausted, Grant. I haven’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since you left.”
“You’ve got Naomi, though, right? It’ll be fine. I’ll be home soon.”
I stopped expecting more from those calls after the second one. I focused instead on simply getting through each individual day, one feeding, one diaper, one impossibly short nap at a time.
⸻
By the time his two weeks were nearly up, Naomi had started gently raising a different kind of question — not about proof anymore, but about what I actually wanted to happen once he walked back through that door.
