Page 116 of Never After Us
By the time dinner is over, I feel like someone ran my soul through a colander and poured lukewarm vulnerability through the holes.Every nerve ending is frayed.Every thought is too loud.Mila is still vibrating with uncontainable joy—babies, ballet, Martians, and marriage, apparently.She spins through the room like the tiny CEO of Emotional Whiplash, and Alec just ...follows her.Answers every question.Takes every left turn like he has the full map of her mind memorized.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting there trying not to fall apart over pasta and garlic bread.Trying not to notice the way Alec saidI’m fallinglike it was both a confession and a diagnosis.Trying not to think about how Mila handed him the role of “future sibling dad” like it was a coloring book assignment.
Trying not to want.
Because that’s the part I’m worst at—the wanting.
I’m still stuck back there while we clear the table.Mila narrates drying forks as if it’s a prime-time cooking show.Alec stands by the sink, sleeves pushed to his elbows, hands in warm water, and my brain won’t stop replaying how he said it:
I plan on sweeping you off your feet and being mindful of Mila while I do it.
Who talks like that?
Who warns a woman he’s going to fall for her?
Who falls for a widow who gets overwhelmed by old letters and still hasn’t figured out how to process decades of loss?
After the kitchen is clear, we move into Mila’s routine—teeth, pajamas, and tonight’s “What I Wish to Dream About” update, which is, predictably, frogs.She curls against my side while Alec readsIf I Had a Pet Frogwith more dramatic flair than should be legal.It’s a book he bought for her the last time he was in the bookstore.She soaks up all the attention, eyes heavy, voice drifting into question after question.
“Do you think babies know who they belong to?”she asks around a yawn.
I should’ve been ready for it.I never am for the things she slips without a warning.
“I think they figure it out,” I tell her, smoothing her blanket.“People show them—with love.”
She nods like this is a scientific fact that should be published, gaze soft and wandering.“Then they’re lucky.When they get the right people.We’ll love our babies a lot when they arrive.”
I kiss her forehead, tuck her unicorn close, and wait until her breathing evens out.
We stay another moment.Just standing there.Watching her.
This child, who can detonate emotional landmines with the tone of someone asking about the weather, then falls asleep without a single repercussion.
When we finally leave her room, the penthouse feels different—quiet in a way that isn’t empty.The lamp near the balcony casts a soft gold across the room, touching the stacks of vinyls and boxes waiting for me to brave their contents.The silence feels almost tender, like it’s giving me space to catch up with myself.
Alec walks beside me down the stairs, close enough that I feel the outline of him—his quiet, his restraint, the way he matches my pace without announcing that he’s doing it.There’s a thoughtfulness to him tonight, a gentleness threaded into his silence, as if he knows my mind is still tangled somewhere between the letters I’ve read and the ones still waiting to be opened.
And then I see it—the shoebox on the couch.
My breath stumbles, barely there, like my body already knows what those letters can do to me before I even touch them.Alec follows my gaze, and something in him reacts—not big, not obvious, just a quiet shift that finds the exact place I’ve been trying to ignore inside my chest.
I could say goodnight.I could run.I could tell him I’m tired, that tomorrow might be better, that tonight isn’t a night for ...anything, not even light conversation.
Instead, I hear myself say, “I was going to go through another box of vinyl.”
“Yeah?”he asks softly.“And are you planning to kick me out and handle all that on your own?”
I shoot him a look.“You’re very confident for a man who used an encyclopedia to explain parenthood.”
His mouth curves, just slightly.“In my defense, she started with ‘the whole love thing.’It went downhill fast.I call that surviving.”
I laugh.Sort of.It slips out awkwardly and too close to a sob, but I don’t let it catch.
Because underneath all this—his quiet presence, her declarations, my scrambled emotional bandwidth—I’m hanging on by the thinnest thread.
We linger in that thin, fragile almost-lightness.
I’m the one who breaks.
