I realized I had been staring.
“Fine,” I lied.
He frowned. “You sure?”
I almost confronted him then.
Instead, I asked, “Did you sleep?”
The question made me angry for reasons I could not explain.
The answer should have been no. Of course he had not slept. He spent every night in the nursery with junk food, alcohol, and a hidden notebook while I believed he was beside me.
“Great,” I snapped.
His eyebrows rose.
“I made coffee,” he said carefully.
That had become our life—Ethan approaching me like a frightened man walking across thin ice, unsure which step might crack the surface.
Over the next few nights, I watched more closely.
He did not drink much. He swallowed once or twice from the tiny bottles and grimaced afterward as though he hated the taste.
The food was not leisurely either.
He tore into candy bars, fries, and cookies as if he were trying to fill a hole inside himself. Then he would suddenly stop, lean his head against the wall, and write for ten or fifteen minutes.
On the fifth night, he cried.
He covered his face with one hand and bent over the notebook. His shoulders shook once, then again, before becoming still.
That did not make the secret acceptable.
It made it human.
By noon, guilt and fear had made me feel physically ill.
I remembered all the ways Ethan had kept the house functioning while I drifted through those first weeks like cracked glass filled with nerves.
He did the laundry and washed the bottles. He sent messages to my sister when he thought I was asleep: “She won’t eat. Can you call her tomorrow like it’s casual?”
He often said, “Go shower, I’ve got him,” even when exhaustion had turned his own eyes red.
I had noticed what he did.
I had not noticed his face.
That evening, I waited until Ethan took Noah for a walk, then searched for the notebook.
I found it hidden beneath baby clothes in a bottom drawer we rarely used.
Feeling ashamed that it had come to invading his privacy, I opened directly to the latest entry.
“Today I was afraid I couldn’t do this,” it read.
“Last night your mom cried because the yellow swaddle wouldn’t fold, and I told her it didn’t matter, and then I came in here and cried too because I couldn’t fix anything. It is the night I ate two candy bars and cold fries at two in the morning because I was scared that if I went back to bed, I would lie there and count all the ways I might fail both of you.”
My eyes immediately filled with tears.
The entry continued.
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