She sips her latte nervously, her fingers trembling slightly against her to-go cup . “It’s okay. Cold. But I found a job teaching third-grade music at a charter school. It’s…it’s been good to be back in a classroom.”
“Right.” I take a sip of my coffee. It’s gone lukewarm. “I’m happy life has been…working out for you. For the last nine months.”
The anger is boiling now, a hot, thick sludge in my chest that defies every logical impulse I have to stay calm. I lean forward, my hands flat on the table. “Ask me what I’ve been doing.”
Her eyes widen. They’re Emma’s eyes. Forget-me-not blue. She doesn’t say anything.
“Ask me, Rebecca.”
She swallows. “Leo, I—”
“I’ve been a parent,” I cut her off. “Alone. I’ve been learning how to braid hair into something that doesn’t look like a bird’s nest. I’ve been juggling TA office hours with pediatrician appointments for ear infections that hit at two in the morning. I’ve been the one holding her while she cries because a kid at school said her mom left because she was bad, and I’ve had to look her in the eyes and tell her, every single time, that it wasn’t true, that it had nothing to do with her, while having absolutely no fucking idea where you were or if you were ever coming back to prove it.”
Rebecca is staring at me, her face pale. Her chin trembles. A single tear escapes, tracking quickly down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it away. She stares at her hands, knotted together on the table. “I deserve that,” she whispers. Her voice is shredded. “I deserve all of it.”
“You don’t deserve anything from me,” I say, and the truth of it is a cold stone in my chest. “Not my anger, not my understanding. You forfeited that when you had someone else in our bed and abandoned our daughter.”
She nods, a quick, jerky motion. She sniffs, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. When she lowers them, her mascara is smudged. “Leo, I was in a…a bad place. After Emma. A really bad place.”
She takes a shaky breath, her gaze fixed on a sugar packet she’s turning over and over. “I was spiraling. I…I didn’t know that’s what it was. I just thought I was failing. At everything. I’d look at her in the bassinet and feel this…this tidal wave of panic. What if she stopped breathing? What if I dropped her? What if I loved her wrong?” Her voice hitches. “She had colic, and she’d scream for hours, and I’d just…sit there on the nursery floor, holding her, crying with her, convinced her pain was my fault somehow. It was like my brain turned against me, whisperingthat I wasn’t cut out for this, that every other mom had it figured out except me.”
She pauses, breath hitching, and I can see her throat work as she swallows hard. “I remember I could barely produce any milk. Every time we went to the pediatrician and they weighed her, it felt like I was failing.Again.You were there, Leo, but you weren’t seeing it—not really. Not how deep it went, how much I was drowning and needed someone to throw me a line.”
I remember those days. The exhaustion so deep it felt like a physical substance in our bones. I remember her quietness. I’d attributed it to fatigue. I’d see her staring out the window while Emma napped, and I’d think,She’s just tired. She’s resting.I never saw the cliff she was standing on.
“I would’ve,” I say, leaning back, the vinyl creaking under me. “You could’ve told me. We could’ve figured it out together.”
Her laugh is bitter, short, echoing off the cafe’s walls where the alt-rock track fades into static for a beat. “You were in your own world, Leo. Lectures, students—you had purpose, direction. I envied that, you know? It ate at me, because suddenly I didn’t. You had a place to go where you got to be you, and I was just…a milk machine who couldn’t even do that right.”
She pauses, pulling a lace-edged handkerchief out of her bag and dabbing at the corners of her eyes. “I felt…invisible. And then there was someone who saw me. Who made me feel like a person again. And I gravitated toward that feeling, selfishly, at your expense. At Emma’s.” She folds the handkerchief into a smaller and smaller square. “It was wrong. I was so, so wrong.”
I watch her, and I feel this sickening mix of empathy and absolute, unadulterated revulsion. I can understand the darkness she was in, but I can’t bridge the gap between “I’m struggling” and “I’m leaving my child without even a goodbye.”
“So,” I say, the word feeling heavy and dry. “How’s Michael? Did the grand romance survive the move to Boston?”
She looks down, then out the window. A long pause. “We’re…not together anymore. We haven’t been for a few months.”
Shocker.The guy who helps you blow up your life isn’t usually the one who helps you pick up the pieces.
“So you left your family for someone who didn’t even stick around,” I say flatly.
Her face crumples. “I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds like you torched your entire life to the ground for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” she says quietly. “It was a wake-up call. It made me realize I needed help. I’m seeing a therapist now. I’m on medication. I’m trying to figure out who I am outside of being someone’s mother or someone’s girlfriend.”
“Good for you.”
“Leo—”
“What do you want, Rebecca?” I lean forward again. “Why are you here? Why now?”
“I want to be a part of Emma’s life,” she says, her voice gaining a sudden, desperate traction. “I know I can’t just…step back in. But I want to figure out an arrangement. Something that works for both of us. Weekends, or holidays, or…”
I stare at her. “That’s really convenient.”
“I’m her mother. I miss her every day, Leo.”
