How love can survive, but intimacy can starve.
How easy it is to mean everything and still fail.
But right then, with Ruby breathing softly between us, I believed him.
And I believed in us.
CHAPTER FOUR
EMMA
“Dan,” I hissed.
Not loud enough to wake the baby. Loud enough to carry a threat.
He froze halfway across the bedroom, one hand on the door handle, the other clutching a muslin cloth like it was a weapon. In the low light, he looked like a man trying to defuse a bomb with no training and a very shaky YouTube tutorial.
“What?” he mouthed back.
Ruby let out a tiny snuffle from the Moses basket beside the bed, then went still again.
We both held our breath.
Silence.
For a second, I thought we’d got away with it.
Then Ruby’s bottom lip trembled in the moonlight and my whole body tensed like a warning siren had gone off inside me.
Dan looked at me, wide-eyed.
Don’t.I tried to communicate with nothing but pure murderous intent.
He still moved.
The floorboard near the wardrobe gave a soft, traitorous creak.
Ruby’s face scrunched. Her fists clenched.
And then…
WAAAAAH.
Fucks sake
It wasn’t a normal cry. It was the kind of newborn cry that says, I have been wronged. In my own home. While I slept.
Dan winced, like it physically hurt him. “I barely touched the floor,” he whispered, panicked.
I sat up so fast I saw stars. My hair was a nest. My T-shirt was inside out and slightly damp down one side where Ruby had leaked on me earlier. My breasts felt like two angry boulders strapped to my chest.
“It’s the floorboard,” I mouthed. “It always creaks.”
He blinked at me.
“How do you know it’s always the floorboard?” he mouthed back, genuinely confused.
I stared at him. Because I live here. Because I am awake for every single sound this house makes. Because I know the exact pitch of every creak, cough and toy being stepped on in the dark like I have a PhD in nocturnal household acoustics.
