It was ashamed.
“It’s okay,” I said, struggling around the tightness in my throat. “I read it, watched the camera, and I understand.”
His body softened against mine.
“You watched the camera?”
I nodded.
He looked as though he wanted the floor to swallow him.
“I know this looks bad.”
“It does.”
We carried Noah inside and sat facing each other on the couch.
Up close, Ethan looked worse than I had allowed myself to notice. Dark circles shadowed his eyes. Stubble covered his jaw, his cheeks looked thinner, and he smelled faintly of liquor, baby soap, and sweat.
He stared at the floor.
“I didn’t want you to see this version of me.”
Something inside my chest cracked.
“What version?”
“The one who’s hiding in the nursery eating gas station candy at two in the morning because the baby finally stopped crying and his wife is asleep for the first time in hours and he’s terrified that if he admits he’s not handling this well, everything will fall apart.”
Tears rose so quickly that I felt embarrassed.
“Ethan…”
“No, let me say it before I lose my nerve.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “You were drowning. I could see it. I knew it. Every article said postpartum depression can get ugly fast, and I kept thinking, Okay, I have to be the steady one. I have to be the one who keeps the wheels on. And for a while I did. Or I thought I did.”
He gave a quieter laugh.
“Then I started waking up every night, convinced Noah had stopped breathing. Or that we’d left him too warm or too cold. Or that the formula bottle wasn’t clean enough. Or that I was going to go to work exhausted and make some mistake big enough to get fired, and then we’d lose the house, and that would be my fault too.”
When he finally looked at me, real pain filled his face.
“Because you were already carrying so much. Every time I looked at you, you seemed one bad sentence away from shattering. So, I thought if I said, ‘By the way, I’m losing my mind too,’ it would be one cruelty too many.”
I covered my mouth.
The notebook lay between us.
He touched it with two fingers.
“I started writing to Noah because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell my friends, because all they say is stuff like ‘Welcome to fatherhood’ and laugh like it’s all a joke. So I wrote to him. I thought maybe if I put my thoughts somewhere, they wouldn’t own me so much.”
Near the bottom of the page, his handwriting had become uneven.
