“Some new dads stay,” I said. “Some new dads figure out how to handle panic without leaving their wife alone with three newborns for two weeks.”
⸻
“What does this mean?” he asked, nodding toward the folder. “A separation agreement? You’re serious about this?”
“I’m serious about needing time,” I said. “I’m serious about you understanding exactly what these two weeks looked like, in detail, instead of the version where you come home tanned and rested and I’m just supposed to slot back into being your wife like nothing happened.”
He picked up one of the printed pages with shaking hands — a photo of himself grinning beside a pool, timestamped 2:14 a.m., directly beside a screenshot of a text I’d sent Naomi at 2:17 a.m. that same night, three minutes later, saying only: I don’t think I can do this much longer.
He stared at those two timestamps for a long moment.
“I didn’t know,” he said quietly. “I mean — I knew it would be hard. I didn’t know it was like this.”
⸻
“You didn’t ask,” I said. “Not once, in two weeks, did you ask me what an actual night looked like. You asked if everyone was healthy, and then you asked about dinner reservations in the same phone call.”
He set the page down slowly, and for the first time since he’d walked through that door, some of the color drained out of his tan, replaced by something that looked, finally, like real understanding.
“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I don’t think ‘I’m sorry’ really covers what I did.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
⸻
We talked for almost two more hours that night, long after Naomi quietly excused herself to check on the babies upstairs, giving us the privacy the rest of that conversation actually needed.
