Chapter 2
Ivy was born on a Tuesday. She was seven pounds four ounces and she had her grandfather's ears and a way of looking at things that made her seem, from the very first hour, like she was already forming opinions. We came home on Thursday. I spent Friday resting, the specific rest of a woman who has just done the most physically demanding thing a body can do and is also managing a newborn and her own emotional weather and a husband who had been attentive during the hospital stay in the performed way and was now, at home, checking his phone with the frequency of a man whose attention has already moved on to something else.
Saturday morning Brent told me his mother had been asking for him. He said it casually, the way he said things he had already decided, as though the conversation was a formality rather than a consultation. He said he and Diane were going to Miami for a few days, that his sister Karen would be around if I needed anything, and that I should rest and not try to do too much. He said this while I was sitting in the nursing chair in Ivy's room at four in the morning with a three-day-old baby and the specific exhaustion of someone who has not had more than ninety minutes of consecutive sleep since Tuesday. He said it like he was doing me a favor by leaving.
He left Sunday morning.
I discovered the code had been changed Sunday evening when I had put Ivy in the car to drive to the pharmacy for something I needed and come back to find the keypad rejecting me. My key fob still worked the garage, but Brent had also changed the interior code on the door from the garage to the house, and the back door code, and I stood in my own garage in the dark with my newborn daughter and understood that my husband had locked me out of my house before flying to Miami with his mother.
I stood there for a moment.
Then I went back to the car, adjusted Ivy's blanket, got in the driver's seat, and called Jennifer.
Jennifer Cho had worked beside me for almost eight years. She had watched me through negotiations that had taken two years to close and legal disputes that had required the kind of patience that most people do not have and every kind of difficult conversation a professional life eventually produces. She had never heard me at a loss for words. She was not going to hear me at a loss for words now.
May you like
"Sell it," I said.
The rain was running down the windshield and Ivy was asleep in the car seat and the house I had bought at thirty-four was lit up behind me with the lights I had chosen for every room, and I said those two words in the calmest voice I owned because the calm was not absence of feeling. The calm was what feeling becomes when you have been practicing it for nine years and you understand that the version of yourself who is calm is the most dangerous version you have.
