Chapter Text
SCARBOROUGH, ILLINOIS
OCTOBER 1, 1999
“El?”
Silence.
Michael Wheeler propped himself up on one elbow and looked around. The bedroom was still. Her side of the bed was cold.
That wasn’t unusual. El was a night owl and had been for the entire eight years of their marriage. But something was off—he could feel the sharp twist of intuition in his stomach, all too familiar. The kind he’d learned to trust over the years, the kind that had warned him the day before his father died, or when El first went into labor three weeks early.
He glanced at the clock on his bedside table. 1:37 A.M.
Mike pushed back the duvet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, not bothering to feel around for his loafers. The room wasn’t just dark—it was pitch black. He couldn’t see three feet in front of him, let alone make it to the hall without cracking a shin on the furniture.
Still, he moved. Slowly. Carefully.
Instinctively, he looked across the room towards the crib in the corner, expecting to find their daughter sprawled on her back, a bottle discarded but still within reach. But the closer he got, feeling his way along the dresser, then the nightstand, he realized something else was wrong.
He stubbed his toe on the bedpost and swore under his breath, but even that pain was distant, dulled in the rising panic. Enough moonlight had finally filtered through the curtains for him to make out the outline of the crib.
It was empty.
For a split second, his mind leapt to the worst possibilities. The ones he never let himself land on in the light of day.
El has her, he told himself. She has to.
Then the guilt came, uninvited and sharp. He hated the idea that Jamie had woken and needed something—needed them—and he hadn’t heard her. Slept through it. Missed something important.
Mike cursed and started for the door.
He found them in the living room. The hitch in Mike’s breathing calmed as he came down the stairs to see Eleven standing in front of the television with the baby. It was on, but she did not seem to be watching it. Her back was to him.
“I didn’t hear her,” he said, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
Startled, El turned. Their daughter’s cheek was resting on her shoulder. An episode of The Twilight Zone flickered on the screen in front of them. A faint voice pleaded: “I don’t want to be special! I want to be normal!”
Gooseflesh broke across the back of Mike’s neck.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. She’s okay. I was about to—”
“I was talking about you. Did something happen?” He asked, though he could see it resting in the bloodless color of her cheeks from the end of the staircase, even through the black-and-white glow of the television set. Something had rattled her. Something bad. This worried him.
Then he went to her.
It happened now and then, the opening of old wounds that time had not healed. Night terrors, though El hadn’t had one since her sixth month with Jamie. Mike had woken to her thrashing in bed beside him, fists tight and beads of sweat forming on her brow. Several months after that, when Jamie had been born, he’d found her curled in the fetal position in the closet. She’d started sleepwalking again.
She didn’t remember either correctly. But Mike did. He would never forget the terror on her face as she shook against him for as long as he lived.
Jamie stirred in El’s arms. “I’m fine,” she muttered, but her face said otherwise. She looked ill with weariness—distant—and Mike wanted to come out and tell her he knew something was bothering her. He had developed a sixth sense with El long ago, and he felt it now, ringing in his ears as she stared at him.
Something was very, very wrong.
Instead, he asked, “Is she asleep?”
El nodded slowly. She could feel the rise and fall of the infant’s chest—slow, quick, slow, quick—against her own, the intangible pulse of their hearts together. It wasn’t just the warmth of her daughter’s body that grounded her; it was the presence, the fragile but insistent aliveness she held in her arms. A small, perfect reminder that all she loved most was still there.
“I just wanted to hold her for a little while,” she said quietly, almost apologetically.
El closed her eyes and pressed her nose into Jamie’s soft brown hair. She smelled like her grape-scented Barney Bubble Bath and a trace of sour milk that had dried at the corner of her mouth. The combination might have made someone else wrinkle their nose, but to El, it was familiar and comforting in a way nothing else could be.
She breathed her in, felt the weight of her body; the delicate hand on her collarbone, the little socked foot against her side.
“Let me take her,” Mike offered. “I’ll make sure she goes down. Unless she can tell the difference in her sleep now, too.”
For the last two weeks, Jamie would not go to him willingly. She would scream if El left the room and even louder if she left her with him. He knew separation anxiety was normal; she was thirteen months old, after all. It was a textbook phase, her pediatrician had said. Nothing personal. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him. It didn’t mean he’d done something wrong.
Even so, it felt like he did. Because when she cried in his arms, she didn’t just cry. She twisted away from him. She would reach for her mother as she went into the next room, sobbing through tear-stained cheeks. And Mike would hold her, gently, comfortingly, whispering that it was okay, that her mama was coming back—even though the words felt hollow coming from someone she didn’t want to hear them from. He rocked her against his chest. He kissed her head. She never settled.
He told himself she would grow out of it, that she just didn’t understand. But it didn’t make it hurt less.
Which he hadn’t mentioned to El. Not really. He didn’t want to make her feel guilty for being the one Jamie needed. El had her own ghosts, her own exhaustion. He couldn't ask her to take on his, too.
This had left him feeling small.
That feeling deepened when his wife looked at him and said, “No, it’s okay.”
Her voice was soft, but there was finality in it too; a protective edge he recognized instantly. The kind that said: I need this right now. Please don’t take her from me.
And so he didn’t press. He stood there, arms slack at his sides, heart sinking a little lower.
She moved past him toward the staircase, and that was when his voice caught. Not angry, never angry, but concerned. Still, he was gentle. “El, talk to me. Please.”
“Mike, I’m okay.” She started upstairs. “Really.”
“You’re not,” he said, following her. It didn’t bother him when she became wary—he was used to her coming around when she was ready—but it did when she brushed him off. “Something happened. I know you. Was it a—”
El turned when she reached the landing and looked down at him. In the dark, she could barely make out the sharp lines of his face. The TV screen still flickered behind him, casting strange shadows along the walls and painting him in fleeting washes of white and gray.
Her arms tightened slightly around Jamie.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said at last.
Mike watched her mouth open, then close again—lips parting just enough to let the words gather, then pressing shut as though she’d forgotten them. The silence that followed wasn’t empty; it pulsed with the things she couldn’t bring herself to say.
She didn’t want to talk.
And that would have to be the end of it.
Of course, Mike wished it were that easy. His jaw tightened. He hated this part: the silence and the guessing. The unknown. But he couldn’t force it. He wouldn’t.
Mike worried for El. More than he ever said out loud. He wished he could just let the silence sit, let it mean what it meant and nothing more. But Mike knew better. He knew what haunted her on the nights she woke, breathless, calling out for him as though she were resurfacing from drowning. The flicker in her gaze when the world got too loud. The tremble in her voice as she called his name from another room. Silence from El had never been neutral. Silence meant something was wrong—something she didn’t have words for, something he couldn’t protect her from.
And when she called for him—even if she didn’t—he would go to her. Because her pain didn’t ask for space; it asked for him. Most of the time, his own well-being was a distant thought, if a thought that crossed his mind at all. There wasn’t room for it. Not when El was hurting. Not when their daughter needed them both to be okay.
To think of himself first … no. That wasn’t love. That was selfishness. He considered that a failure.
It felt almost criminal to suggest otherwise.
So he didn’t. He carried it quietly, for her.
Upstairs, El brought Jamie into bed with them. She did this when she felt uneasy. She laid the baby down between them, curled protectively around her, and slept as though nothing were wrong.
Mike lay awake for a long time, watching them in the pale moonlight from the window. He listened to their breathing in tandem, the occasional murmur from Jamie as she moved in her sleep, while he turned from one side to the other to watch the clock, waiting for something. A sign. He wasn’t sure what for.
When he finally drifted off, it was a dreamless sleep.
But it didn’t feel like rest.
“We should talk about last night,” Mike said later that morning in the kitchen. He was standing over the counter in a maroon sweater and slacks with a warm mug of coffee—not his first choice, but he needed something on his stomach to cut the edge of his anxiety. It was just before seven, and the sun had broken through the window above the sink, promising despite the forecast calling for rain. He had a book signing to attend in two hours, but half the mind to cancel because this—whatever was unraveling between them—felt more urgent than a hundred copies of his recent novel.
El was sitting at the table, still in the faded Radiohead shirt she had worn to bed, picking at a piece of buttered toast with one hand while her chin rested in the other. She was quiet, unsure of what to say.
But what was she supposed to tell him? She hadn’t made her silence convincing last night. It wouldn’t be convincing now either.
After a long moment, without looking at him, she said, “Not right now. Please.”
Mike studied the exhaustion in her body as guilt pulsed through his own. The dark circles, the slack in her movements, lips pressed thin. Her shoulders tensed as she stood to meet him, and he wondered if she had lain awake beside him all night.
“No, not right now,” he repeated gently. “But we should. If something happened—or if something’s wrong—you can tell me. I’ll listen, no matter what. Promise.”
El glanced at the clock on the wall above the doorway. The second hand ticked audibly, and she had a sudden, overwhelming urge to will the hour hand ahead and make him think the driver was late or that his watch had broken. She didn’t, of course, but the thought was there, turning in the back of her mind.
Instead, she sighed, irritated at him for asking in the first place … and for being kind about it. “It’s getting close to seven.”
“You’re—”
“There’s nothing else to talk about, Mike.” She cut in. Her voice was steady, decisive. The same tone she’d used last night on the stairs. El wasn’t going to talk about whatever had shaken her, and Mike knew now that he was pressing his luck, crossing into dangerous territory. “I was restless. That’s all.”
And it wasn’t that he needed to be right—there had been times in their marriage where he wasn’t and had owned it—but what bothered him now was knowing she wasn’t telling the truth. She was pushing him out, and she was doing it on purpose. He could handle sleep deprivation. He could handle tantrums. What he couldn’t handle was the feeling that El was slipping somewhere he couldn’t reach. That he was losing her.
“When did Jamie wake up?” He tried to sound casual, but the question came out too careful.
“One, I think.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear her,” Mike said, and he meant it. He would’ve been there. He wanted to be there.
“It’s okay,” El said.
He set the empty mug in the sink. Behind him on the table, the baby monitor lit up, and a soft hiss of static filled the kitchen. Beneath it, he could make out their daughter’s faint breathing. For a moment, he just listened, knowing she was safe. That was all he could do.
El folded her arms and leaned against the counter’s edge. She exhaled, smothering a yawn.
“You should go back to sleep when I leave,” Mike suggested. “Rest. Please.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Except she wouldn’t.
Once he left, she would pace the house, wide awake with Jamie on her hip. Most of the time was spent steering her from the hallway back into the den, making sure she couldn’t figure out the latch on the wooden safety gate that blocked the laundry room. If Mike wasn’t home, the television held her attention long enough for El to make her something to eat or go to the bathroom alone, but if she stepped out of range, things … well, things happened. Doors shutting as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Books falling off shelves.
Jamie was a year old now, and of course they knew she wasn’t normal. Mike and El had known that since she was a week old, when El moved her into their bedroom, because when she was left alone in her crib, the mobile began to spin on its own. Lightbulbs burned out when her bottles were late; picture frames shattered across the room if her pacifier—the only one she’d ever taken—couldn’t be found.
Mike had tried to mention it once or twice, but El would shut him down each time, insisting that Jamie would grow and learn control.
Neither of them spoke about the things she could do, but the bare walls and decorative lamps in each room said enough. Most of the glass in the house disappeared quietly, undiscussed, the way one removes all delicate things from a child’s reach. Not out of fear, but precaution. And Jamie wasn’t a fussy baby, but when she did get upset, the electricity flickered uncontrollably. She’d blown a television set and shorted out half the lights in the house before her first birthday, once even tripping the circuit in the middle of the night so violently that the alarm clock smoked.
So she slept in their room: in her crib most of the time, sometimes between them in bed, tucked into El’s side while, of course, kicking Mike in the ribs.
“Help me understand,” he’d said out loud one evening after Jamie had cried for an hour. She was still warm with the remnants of her tantrum, whimpering in her sleep while El brushed the hair from her forehead. That had been the week before her birthday party, when she’d learned how to push things without actually moving them.
“She’ll start walking soon. How do we teach her it’s not okay to screw with the TV just because we won’t give her back the toy she already flung across the room three times? If it was the floor, fine, but—”
“I know all babies do that stuff, but it’s—” Mike was going to say that it was dangerous, but the word burned on his tongue, acid down his throat when he swallowed it. Once, he’d taken a small wooden block to the side of his head that might as well have been a bullet. Heaven forbid she was cutting teeth.
But Jamie wasn’t dangerous. She was a baby—their baby.
And El had been right: she would have to learn. When she was older and understood what no meant.
“Different,” he said instead, gentler this time. “It’s different with her.”
He’d stared at his daughter for a long time after that.
Remembering that night, Mike reached for El’s hand and laced their fingers to draw her closer. When he kissed her forehead, his voice softened. “Or I can cancel and watch her. I’d rather be home if—”
“You don’t have to.” She smiled wanly. “I’ll be—”
“You keep telling me you’re fine. El, you don’t look fine. You look tired.” Exhausted was the better word, but he thought to tread lightly this time.
El nestled into him, and his Ralph Lauren cologne was both slight and intoxicating beneath the soft wool of his sweater. She wanted more, wanted him to stay, but didn’t need him to ask her what was wrong again.
“I am tired,” she agreed. Mike was holding her now. “But she’ll be awake soon.”
“Or … she’ll sleep past eight.” He checked his watch over her shoulder. “I’ve got an hour and something before whoever’s here for me. There’s a cover on the twin in her room; I’ll sit with her in ours. If she gets up, then we’ll hang out down here and have Cheerios and ‘nanas. I’ll wake you before I go.”
“She’ll want me if she wakes up,” El said, more to herself than to him.
He held her a second longer, as if that might keep her steady, then kissed her cheek.
She smiled and kissed him back. “Hi.”
“Hey,” Mike mumbled against the side of her mouth, catching her there. El laughed clearly for the first time that morning.
Yes! He thought. She laughed! She’s not that upset!!
“I love you,” she said, her nose tracing the line of his neck. Her breath lingered there, soft and uncertain. She let her head fall on his shoulder, and for a second, Mike thought she might let herself rest.
“I love you, too.”
He didn’t notice it right away. The way her breathing slowed, or how her body changed from tired to intent. She looked up at him, and he could see it in her face—not forgiveness, not desire exactly, but something else.
Then it clicked. Was she distracting him?
He didn’t breathe. Didn’t want to break it. This left Mike confused. Part of him wanted to pull back, to ask why, what changed, but, God, he missed her. So much of their attention went to Jamie now. He couldn’t remember their last moment alone that wasn’t—
Toss a quarter, you idiot.
El straightened the collar of his shirt and kissed him twice, slow and deliberate. Her lips were velvet, and his skin rose beneath the warmth of her mouth. In that moment, he wanted her closeness more than he wanted the truth. And he hated himself a little for that.
Then she went for his earlobe with her teeth—a rough movement that made him draw in a breath.
“Ouch.” He flinched, hissing through his teeth at first, but the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth gave him away.
“You smell good,” she hummed. One of her fingers found a curl of hair at the nape of his neck and teased it.
“So do you.” His hands had moved around her waist and found the small of her back. The heat on her stirred something in him, and he tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear to return the favor. He could taste the faint trace of her perfume, something light and sweet that spiked his tongue when he suckled her skin. It made him ache with how much he missed her—missed them—even while she was right there.
“I haven’t showered today,” she told him. El wasn’t convinced, even smiling. “You’re wearing a very nice bottle of cologne.”
“I don't care.” His voice had gone low, the words catching somewhere between want and plea. If she was distracting him, she’d won. And she had control.
El was leaning in again, breath grazing his cheek. She was going for his mouth when the monitor on the table blinked again—a pulse of green light, a soft whine at first, then a sharp, panicked cry.
“I’ll get her,” he said.
El froze. Her hands, still on his chest, went slack. He felt her hesitation, the pull toward him and away all at once, all the warmth between them gone in an instant.
If he went up instead, he thought, there’d be no choice but for their daughter to go to him. Then he wondered if that was cruel.
“Mike, she wants me,” El insisted, turning away from him with the same determination, the same defiance, the same tilt of the head as Jamie did. It was like watching them both at once. He could see where she got it from.
Cruel, he thought, would be not allowing El to go.
And it wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. Because she did. Mike was her father, the one person El trusted most in the world to keep Jamie safe. But an echo of last night clung to her like a fever that wouldn’t break. She’d spent half her life learning what it meant to be taken from her mother, to wake up and not know where she belonged, where she came from. The dream had been so vivid that she’d come out of it with her heart in her throat, convinced someone was hurting her child.
But Jamie had been okay, sitting awake in her crib, staring quietly through the bars. Knowingly. El wondered then if she had sensed her disturbance.
It wasn’t something she could put into words, not even to Mike. It was stronger than instinct, almost magnetic; when Jamie was upset, she felt the ache in her bones. It lived in her blood and waited. It warned her, even when the danger was out of sight. Even when it wasn’t real.
That, Mike understood. But no amount of understanding could get rid of the hurt that came with standing still, useless, while his wife soothed their daughter in another room.
The monitor’s light turned red against the table when El turned the corner into the hallway. He inhaled slowly, listening as their daughter’s cries came through in bursts of static and breath and grief until El made it to the bedroom: “It’s okay, baby.” She hushed. “It’s okay now, I promise. Mama’s here.”
Mike braced himself on the counter and swallowed hard. What was so wrong about his wanting to be there with them? To be the one who could make it better?
The kitchen went quiet, but the quiet didn’t reach him. It pressed against his ears, a dull weight he couldn’t shake. The hum of the fridge, the tick of the clock on the wall—each sound felt distant, muffled. He stared at the countertop and tried to let the stillness settle somewhere deeper. Somewhere safe. A minute passed. Then another.
Upstairs, the cries dulled, turned to hiccups, then silence. When he heard her footsteps again—the soft pace of her moving down the stairs, the creak of the last step—he exhaled.
El crossed the kitchen slowly, shifting Jamie higher against her shoulder. Mike straightened a little, uncertain whether to reach for her or wait.
“She’s okay?” he asked.
El nodded. “Yeah. She’s up now.” She hesitated, tracing small circles on Jamie’s back before bringing her to him.
“Here,” she said softly. “Go to Daddy.”
It wasn’t reluctant, not exactly, but there was a carefulness in the way she handed Jamie over, as if the moment itself might come apart if she let go too quickly. Mike moved closer and felt the familiar weight of his daughter sink into him. Her breathing had evened out again, but he could tell she was still tired; this was the kind of calm that came only after tears.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he murmured, kissing the top of her head. Her face was still pink and blotchy, and her hair stuck up in soft, wild curls. “Mama’s getting your milk ready. And we have strawberries, bananas, cereal …”
He walked her around the kitchen in the crook of his arm, slow and patient. Jamie’s hand reached for the collar of his shirt, fingers curling into his sweater. Nothing else mattered now.
“Barney? Or we can watch Blue’s Clues,” he thought out loud.
Holding her eased him, but the calm between them felt borrowed. Mike knew it wouldn’t last—none of these moments ever did lately—but he held his daughter anyway. He cradled her head, breathed in the warmth of her neck, and blew a raspberry into the side of her face. Loving her as much as he could.
She giggled when he tickled the bottom of her foot, and he took this as a good sign. For a second, things felt calm again. Normal.
But when Mike went down the hall and into the den to turn on the television, she twisted around so hard he almost lost hold of her. Then she screamed—really screamed, the kind of sound that clawed at the air—but he caught her before she could dive out of his arms.
“Ma!” she cried, reaching over his shoulder.
For a second, the overhead light flickered, and the television screen blinked blue before cutting back to black. Her voice was sharp enough to ring in his ears, and Mike stopped. He hoisted her up and checked her face, her arms, her legs. She was fine.
“Hey, hey—hey, it’s okay,” he whispered instead. “It’s all right.” He tried to soothe her, but she was already pushing away from him. There was no reasoning with a baby. “Jamie,” he tried again, softer this time, though she was past the point of listening—her breath hitched, and the sound broke into a sob that gutted him.
“I know, I know.” He told her, but it made no difference. He wasn’t who she wanted. Mike knew it was irrational, but part of him wondered if she could feel it—the doubt, the fear, the way he sometimes held her like he was afraid she’d slip away.
He swallowed the knot in his throat. “Please, Jamie,” he said. The red fever in her face had returned, and tears followed. “I’m right here. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Then he let out a slow breath and began consoling her back toward the kitchen—not because he’d given up, but because he loved her. And because the overhead lights had begun to glow alarmingly bright. His arms remained firm, steady, even as she wailed against him. But he didn’t get through the hall with her before El appeared in the doorway.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. There was a pacifier hanging from her finger. “Give her here.”
“El—” He started, but Jamie was already turning in his arms again, reaching for her mother with both hands. Her cries broke, wild and desperate.
“It’s okay,” El repeated, and this time he let go. What else could he do?
The change in the room was instant. The air seemed to settle, no longer charged, and the electric hum that had been building faded into silence.
Mike watched solemnly as Jamie burrowed into El’s neck, drawn to something stronger than comfort, until her cries dwindled into soft, uneven whimpers.
He found himself standing there with his arms empty. The absence felt louder than her cries had been, as if something had been taken from him rather than handed back. His arms still remembered her weight, the warmth of her small body, how she fit against his chest as though she belonged there. Because she did.
Perhaps that’s what fatherhood was: loving them completely and still losing them, over and over again, until there was nothing left to hold onto.
The bond El had with their daughter was something else entirely. Instinctive. Unbreakable. It wasn’t meant to be messed with, let alone tested. He knew that. He respected it.
Still—
He wished, just once, that Jamie would reach for him as she did her mother. Not because of something that resembled jealousy, but because he wanted to know, to feel, that he was enough, too.
“She was fine at first,” he said. Not defensive, but there was a strain in his voice that he couldn’t hide. “I was handling it, El. I thought she—”
“You were.” But El didn’t look at him. She gave Jamie the pacifier and watched her lashes flutter until her breathing slowed. It was easier that way. “She just … needs me.” Her voice shook despite the whisper. “And I need her. It’s like … I don’t know.”
Flustered, she drew in a breath and began to sway with the baby. She felt Mike watching her, felt his want to understand, and she wished then that she could explain the panic that gathered in her chest when their daughter wasn’t in her arms.
What had she started to say?
“She needs you,” Mike said, struggling to keep his own voice even. “I get that. I do. But it’s starting to feel like she only needs you.”
El finally looked at him then, her expression somewhere between exhaustion and guilt. “Dr. Wallace said it’s normal right now. We have to be patient with her.”
“I’m not talking about that.” He exhaled through his nose, unsure. His gaze fell at first, then back up. “El, I love her so much. Both of you.”
“We know,” El answered softly. Jamie was almost back asleep.
“No, you know that.” The words came out sharper than he wanted. “But it feels like you don’t think I can handle her. Like you’re waiting for me to mess up, all the time.”
El’s shoulders stiffened. “That’s not fair. You saw what happened.” Her voice cracked with fatigue. “She was screaming. She needed me. She’s a baby, Mike. I can’t ignore her to make you feel—”
“It’s not about making me feel better,” he said, quieter now. “It’s about being her dad. About being allowed to be her dad.”
“You are her dad,” she said. “Of course you are.”
“Not when you take her from me,” he said. “That’s what’s not fair.”
“Mike, I really don’t want to talk about this,” El whispered, but her voice thinned. She rocked Jamie slower, a thumb tracing the infant’s raw, damp cheek.
“You’re changing the subject again.”
“Because we don’t need to. She’ll grow out of this. Just give her time.”
“But we do,” he said on the edge of impatience. The room was starting to feel hot. “There’s a lot to talk about. Not just Jamie. About whatever’s going on with you that you won’t tell me about.”
She didn’t know what to say, and the silence that followed made the words settle heavier than either of them had meant. Instead of answering him, El turned and crossed into the den.
Not when you take her from me, she thought, while the guilt of it tightened in her throat.
Behind her, Mike lingered in the doorway. He turned the switch on the wall, the lights softening around them, and watched as she kissed their daughter’s head and lowered her into the Pack-N-Play.
Jamie made a noise and turned over on her side.
“I don’t want to fight,” El said once she was back in the hall, but Mike didn’t answer right away. The air between them had grown thick, charged in a different way now. He didn’t want to argue either. Who did? His parents, probably, once upon a time, in his childhood. But he and El weren’t like that. Bills, laundry, whose turn it was to call the electrician—none of that ever seemed worth fighting about.
This felt different.
“We don’t have to fight.” He answered, a final glance towards the den before following behind her into the kitchen. The ground there felt neutral. “I’m just … concerned,” he sighed. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
Eleven stopped at the counter and braced a hand on the edge as if the floor beneath her had shifted. For a long moment, she didn’t speak. Mike could see her throat move as she swallowed, the tears building before she could look at him.
El kept her gaze fixed on the countertop. Her lashes trembled once before she steadied them. “I know you’re concerned,” she said quietly.
“I am,” Mike said. “I’m not mad, El. I love you.” He took a careful step closer. “Just—please tell me what’s going on. Let me help. Let me fix this. Or … at least let me try.”
She inhaled through her nose and closed her eyes, as if any more words might undo her completely. “Give me a second.”
Mike didn’t move. He waited, hands loose at his sides, careful not to reach for her and make it worse.
When El spoke again, her voice had lost its edge, all the sharpness drained out of it. “I get scared of what happens when … when she cries and I’m not there,” she murmured through an uneven breath. “And I’m not trying to take her from you. I’m not. I just—when she cries like that, I feel it, and I can’t ignore it. And sometimes I think she feels me, too. When I’m upset.” She looked away.
“That scares me. What she can do scares me, Mike. Because I know what it meant for me. She’s so little.” Her voice broke. “I–I feel like I … like I cursed her, or—”
Mike stepped forward then. Not fast. Not panicked. He placed his hands on her arms, soft and grounding. “You didn’t curse her, El.” He meant it. Not as reassurance, but as fact. “You didn’t.”
If El believed she had broken their daughter, she would never forgive herself. And Mike knew—with a certainty that scared him—that he would spend the rest of his life standing between her and that thought if he had to.
She shook slightly, looking at him now but fighting tears.
“No one’s taking her from us,” he went on, just as softly. “That’s not happening.”
He let the words sit. His heartbeat slowed with them, anchoring him there. El’s shoulders trembled, and this time, he pulled her in.
She had to convince him to go when the driver rang the line in the living room.
Mike hovered near the doorway, bag in hand, still talking as if the right combination of words might make it easier for him to leave. I’ll only be gone a few hours, he said, fixing his tie. It’s nine to twelve, but if the weather’s bad, they’ll probably wrap it up early. I’ll be home by two.
He paused, searching her face for signs of worry. Call me if you need anything. I’ve got the cell, and the bookstore’s number is on the fridge. Another beat as he slipped into his coat. Should I bring food home? That sushi place you like uptown?
El smiled when she told him she’d be okay, when she told him to go, that the baby was asleep and the house was quiet, and he’d been looking forward to this for weeks. She needed him to believe her—because if he didn’t, she might not be able to.
Sushi is fine. Don’t be nervous. I love you. Miss you already.
He kissed her longer than usual before he left.
The house settled differently without Mike there. It wasn’t long before Eleven went to check on her daughter. Not because she thought something was wrong—she didn’t—but because checking had become its own kind of involuntary.
Down the hall, the den was dim and still. Jamie’s hand was tucked beneath her chin now, pacifier abandoned somewhere in the tangle of blankets at her feet. She had managed to kick one of her socks off with it.
El reached down and disentangled her and pulled the blanket up, watching as she turned her head, breathing slow and deep. She counted one breath, two, three—until the cold throb of unease settled in her bones. She told herself that she was waiting for Jamie to stir, for a sign she’d misread the depth of the nap. But the truth sat heavier beneath that: she was waiting for the quiet to prove it was real.
You’re okay, she thought, and when the silence held, El straightened and eased carefully from the Pack-N-Play. Her gaze drifted to the ceiling light. Then to the lamp in the corner. She turned them off and backed out of the den.
She paused in the hallway, listening through the pulse in her ears. The clock in the kitchen. A low burst of static from the living room. Her own breaths, shallow and measured.
Then Mike’s voice surfaced in her head, and she had no choice but to believe him—the alternative had teeth, and she was too tired to feed it.
But the memory came anyway. The same nightmare she’d been waking from for months.
El was no longer in the master bedroom of their home in Scarborough but chasing her daughter’s cries down a long hallway, its white walls buzzing under fluorescent lights that made her head ache. Hospital or lab—it never mattered. The smell was the same: blood, sharp and metallic, clinging to the back of her throat.
Metal doors lined either side of the corridor. Each one she opened revealed an endless black void until she came to the end of the hall. The chiseled numbers there matched the tattoo on her wrist.
Jamie was wailing on the other side. A thin, frightened cry.
A hurt cry.
The knob twisted, but El stopped herself there. Wouldn’t let the door open. She’d wake with her heart racing and sweat cooling at her temples, Mike’s hand resting on her shoulder. El—breathe, honey. I’m right here. Or sometimes she’d turn away, and the dream would shift, mercifully, into something quieter.
But sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes the knob turned in her hand, cold and heavy, and the fear followed her out of bed.
Now, standing in the hallway, the memory loosened its grip. El exhaled and began to move.
She walked from the den to the living room. From the living room to the kitchen. Up the stairs and into Mike’s study. She counted her steps, counted the minutes that went by, whispering out loud to herself as she did so about the mundane. Haunting her own house.
It started to rain. When her mind calmed, she traded her husband’s shirt for a plaid flannel and her nightshorts for sweats before heading back to the den.
The room felt cooler now. She sank into the plush couch without turning on the light, the television humming low out of habit more than interest. A morning talk show. Jamie napped soundly.
El sat there with her legs curled beneath her, attention drifting between the screen and her daughter.
Mike’s voice came to her again, and his words remained longer than the fear did. Long enough for her head to fall back against the cushion. El listened to the rain against the windows, the sound as it folded into the static, until her thoughts thinned and the quiet closed over her.
Somewhere between the rain and the murmur of the TV, without meaning to, she fell asleep.
The drive to Chicago gave him time to think. Too much time. In the backseat, wipers ticked as the road blurred past his window, slick and gray.
Mike rested his forearm against the door and caught his own reflection in the glass—ironed collar, hair combed, the version of himself that looked like he had things under control. He wondered how convincing it was, how convincing he’d sounded when he told El that no one was taking their daughter from them, when he’d said it like a promise while thinking of the handgun hidden in the Fort Knox safe at the back of their closet as the quiet plans ran in the back of his mind: exits, contingencies, the lengths he would go to if something—or someone—ever came too close.
The radio droned up front, but he didn’t hear it. His thoughts kept circling back to the house. He pictured El moving from room to room anxiously, toting Jamie on her hip, waiting for him to walk back through the door.
There was a sudden tremor in his stomach, and then Mike longed to be with his wife and daughter so strongly that he contemplated telling the driver to turn around. He thought of their words in the hall, her tears in the kitchen, and how selfish he felt now for wanting to stand in front of her fear instead of standing with her inside it. The waking in the middle of the night, Jamie clinging to her—and her clinging to Jamie. His own helplessness in those moments, how fast it hardened into vigilance as he searched for what to say, what to do, how to move. It was the language he knew best.
The car slowed for traffic, rain feathering harder against the glass. Mike let his head rest back. He told himself he would finish this. He would go back home. He would tell El to eat and rest while he gave Jamie her bath. Not fixing it, not stopping the world. Just being there with her while it spun out of their control.