Waking to Another Woman's Name

I heard him before I saw him.

The front door opened with that familiar drag—the bottom corner had been scraping the hardwood for three months and Kade kept saying he'd fix it. He never did. I'd learned to use the sound as a clock. Tonight it scraped at 2:07 AM.

I was in Mia's room, folding laundry on the floor because the dresser was too small and the changing table was covered in things that had nowhere else to go. That's what nobody tells you about having a baby—it's not the sleepless nights that break you. It's the laundry. The endless, relentless laundry that multiplies like something alive.

I heard his footsteps in the hallway. Uneven. He'd been drinking.

The door pushed open and then he was there, filling the frame, tie loosened, top button undone, that lopsided look on his face that used to make me laugh in college. He crossed the room in three steps and wrapped his arms around me from behind, chin dropping to my shoulder, weight settling into me like I was a wall he'd been walking toward all night.

"Still up," he murmured. Not a question.

"Still up," I said.

"Good." He pressed his face into the curve of my neck. "Still good. You're still here. Good."

And then: "Still good that I have you."

I should have leaned back into him. That's what I would have done six months ago, a year ago, two years ago—I would have turned my face toward his and said something soft and he would have kissed my temple and we would have been fine.

Instead, I went still.

Because there was a smell.

Not his cologne. Not the bar smoke that usually clung to him after a night out with clients. Something underneath all of that. Sweet. Synthetic. Coconut.

My fingers tightened around the small white onesie in my hands—the one with the yellow ducks on the snaps, the one Mia had worn home from the hospital. I held it like it was the only solid thing in the room.

I breathed in again. Slow. Deliberate.

Coconut shampoo. Unmistakable. Not mine. I used the unscented kind because Mia had sensitive skin and I'd gotten so used to it I'd forgotten what fragrance even smelled like. This was fragrance. This was someone else's hair pressed against my husband's neck long enough to leave a mark.

Kade's breathing slowed against my skin. His arms went heavier. He was falling asleep standing up, just like that, like a man with nothing weighing on him.

I set the onesie down.

---

It took me forty minutes to get him into bed.

He was dead weight—cooperative but useless, mumbling half-words while I worked his shoes off, pulled the blanket up, moved his phone from his chest to the nightstand before it could wake Mia through the wall. He didn't thank me. He didn't say anything. He just sank into the pillow and his face went slack and peaceful.

I stood over him