Allison nudges him playfully. “You’ll figure it out.”
Joe leans over and kisses the top of her head, casual and affectionate, a gesture that’s so automatic it’s clear he does it all the time without thinking. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Oh, but you wanna hear something that pissed me off?” Allison’s green eyes light up with that particular gleam that means she’s about to go on a tangent. “So I told Deborah—you know Deb from Labor and Delivery? The one who’s been pregnant basically the same time as me? I told her we were naming the baby Alyssa, and you know what she said? She said she might put that down as a nameshe’sconsidering. Like,excuse me, bitch?I just told you that’s my baby’s name and now you’re gonna steal it?”
Joe sighs, like he’s heard this tangent one too many times. “Babe, she said she’s considerin’ it—”
“That’s basically stealing it!” Allison’s getting worked up now, her hands moving as she talks. “And now there’s gonna be like five Alyssas in kindergarten together and everyone’s gonna think we just picked some trendy name when we actually had a whole reason for choosing it.”
“You really think there’s gonna be that many?” Maria asks, amused.
“Oh, absolutely. Mark my words, twenty years from now Alyssa’s are gonna be everywhere. It’s gonna be like Jennifer in the eighties.”
Joe’s just looking at her while she rants, and there’s something in his expression that makes my chest tighten. He’s looking at her like she hung the moon, like she’s the most fascinating person he’s ever encountered, even though she’s complaining about baby name theft and probably being slightly irrational about the whole thing. But that’s the point—he loves her even when she’s being irrational, maybe especially when she’s being irrational, and she knows it and he knows it and they’re just…solid.
I used to look at Rebecca like that.
I used to think she was the most beautiful woman in the world, that she got me in a way no one else did, that she didn’t mind my brain and the way I dissect everything and see patterns where other people just see chaos. I thought we were building something permanent, something that would last. I proposed because I genuinely believed we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, that Emma would grow up in a house with both her parents, that we’d figure out how to navigate the hard parts because that’s what people who love each other do.
But apparently it was all bullshit.
I can’t pretend I was innocent in all of it. I know I worked too much. I know I got lost in my research and forgot to ask about her day or notice when she got her hair cut or remember that she wanted to go to that gallery opening she’d been talking about for weeks. I know I have a tendency to lecture instead of listen, to try to solve problems with logic when what she needed was just for me to be present.
But I wish she’d come to me. I wish she’d said something, anything, before it got to the point where she was looking elsewhere. I wish we could have fixed it together, gone to therapy or had the hard conversations or whatever it took, because I would have tried. I would have changed, or at least tried to change, if I’d known how bad things had gotten for her.
Instead, she ran toward someone else. And now, no matter what, I could never take her back.
That’s the thing about getting cheated on that no one really prepares you for—it’s not just the betrayal, though that would be enough on its own.
It’s what it does to your brain after, the way every interaction gets filtered through this new lens of suspicion. Late night at work? Probably a lie. Phone goes straight to voicemail? They’re definitely doing something they shouldn’t be. Your amygdalagoes haywire, your prefrontal cortex is trying to maintain some semblance of rational thought, and suddenly you’re operating from this constant state of fear and mistrust that you can’t logic your way out of no matter how many times you remind yourself that you’re probably just being irrational.
And I tried. I spent weeks after I found out trying to understand it from a purely neurological perspective, trying to see it as a series of decisions and circumstances rather than a fundamental character flaw in someone I thought I knew. But at the end of the day, she made a choice. Multiple choices, actually, over a span of months. And each one moved her further away from me and Emma until one morning she just didn’t come home at all.
I could never trust her again. Even if she showed up tomorrow with apologies and promises and whatever explanation she’s convinced herself makes sense, I couldn’t do it. Not just for me, but for Emma. To offer Emma the fragile hope of a reunited family, only to have it shatter again when the same corrosive patterns re-emerged? That would be a cruelty far greater than the initial abandonment. My daughter’s world has already been unmade once. I will not be the architect of its second collapse.
That’s what cheating does to you—it rewires your entire threat detection system. It makes you see danger in places where there probably isn’t any, and there’s no easy way to undo that, no way to just decide to trust again like flipping a switch.
I think that the version of me who could love someone without reservation is gone. That man was dismantled, piece by piece, with every lie told by my ex-fiancée.
But watching Joe and Allison now, the easy affection and the way they navigate each other’s moods and quirks without apparent effort, I wonder ifmaybeI’ll ever find that again. If I’ll ever meet someone who I can trust enough to let myguard down, to build something real and lasting, or if Rebecca’s choices broke something so detrimental in me that it can’t be repaired.
And Emma. Emma might just be an only child her whole life.
I used to think only children were weird, and honestly, I partially still think that’s true from what I’ve observed in my students who grew up that way. They tend to be either overly mature from spending so much time around adults or socially awkward from not having to negotiate sibling dynamics. They don’t learn that essential skill of sharing not because you want to but because you have to, or how to settle disputes without adult intervention, or how to read social cues from someone who knows you well enough to call you on your bullshit. They grow up in this bubble where they’re the constant center of attention, which can create either incredible confidence or crippling pressure depending on how the parents handle it.
I was glad to have Maria growing up, even though we fought constantly and drove our parents insane with our bickering. She borrowed my records and sweatpants without asking and I deliberately used vocabulary she didn’t understand just to make her feel stupid. We competed over everything—grades, sports, who could make our dad laugh harder at dinner. But underneath all that competitive hostility was this foundation of loyalty that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older. She was my built-in companion for every family vacation, my automatic partner for whatever scheme we were running, the person who knew exactly which of our relatives were worth talking to at holidays and which ones to avoid. We clashed and butted heads and she drove me absolutely insane, but we were still best friends in that particular way that only siblings can be—the kind where you can hate each other and love each other simultaneously without it being contradictory.
Emma might never have that with anyone. My heart sinks a little thinking about it. She’ll never have someone to conspire with against me when I’m being too strict or too logical. No one to share the singular burden of being my child. No lifelong comrade who is stuck with her, through every phase and folly, by the unbreakable bond of shared DNA and history.
And I’ll never talk about baby names with someone again. The domestic future I meticulously, if quietly, imagined is ashes. I’ll never debate whether Alyssa is pretty enough that other people might steal it, or whether Jean flows better than Marie, or if we should honor my side of the family or hers. I’ll never sit in a pizza place watching my wife’s stomach move with a second child we made together, wondering if this one will have her eyes or my laugh or some odd combination that we can’t predict.
That version of my life is over. The trajectory I thought I was on—marriage, multiple kids, growing old with someone—isn’t happening anymore. My life is now a story of two: Leo and Emma. And I need to make peace with that. I need to accept that it’s enough. It has to be enough.
But watching Joe kiss the top of Allison’s head while she rants about name-stealing nurses, I can’t help feeling like something important is missing from my life, and I have no idea how to get it back.
Maria leans over and steals another mushroom off my pizza slice. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
