Page 6 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

Priscilla.

I text backtwo secondsand go out the back door into the alley. The air has that early-January edge to it, the kind that feels clean if you’re in it for a short time and miserable after that. I call her back.

She picks up on the second ring.

“Hey.” Her voice is the voice she uses when she’s keeping things measured and careful. I know all her voices. We weretogether for six years and broke up a year after Owen was born. I know the measured voice and the genuinely angry voice and the voice where she’s trying to be fair even though she doesn’t feel like being fair.

This is the measured voice, which is actually the hardest because it means she’s already processed whatever she’s about to say. “So, the living room.”

“Yeah.”

“August.”

“I know.”

“Owen’s toys were everywhere. The blankets are still—” She stops and does that thing where she’s recalibrating. “I know you cleaned the kitchen. I saw that. But the living room looked like?—”

“I know what it looked like. It’s totally my bad.” I pull at a loose thread on my jeans. “I ran out of time before my shift. I was going to ask if you could?—”

“I can’t be cleaning up after you every time you do a handoff. You know that. That’s not?—”

“I know. You’re right. It’s not fair.”

She pauses. I don’t think she was expecting me to agree that fast. But I’m trying to get better about taking accountability.

Yes, shit can still be a little harder for me because of… just how my brain works. Which, as Dr. Delaney is always saying with that kind, compassionate dad voice of his, isunderstandable.

But it also doesn’t mean the effects on the others around me are any less impactful.

“Trent had to move the blankets just to sit down.”

I sink down to the step on my ass at her words. Fuck, it does genuinely kill me a little to hear the mighty Trent had to swoop in to fix my fuck up. It’s not jealousy—that ship sailed a long time ago and I genuinely don’t miss Priscilla that way.

It’s more about the petty pain of knowing Trent will be a far more stable, reasonable stand-in father to my son than I’ll ever be able to be. I imagine Trent picking up the pillow barricade that Owen and I spent an hour building, putting everything away with his sensible hands.

I know that’s not fair. Trent is fine. He’s a good, stable guy, which is precisely his most annoying quality.

“I’ll be more careful next time with time management,” I say.

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad.” And I can hear that she means it, which is one of the genuinely hard things about Priscilla—she’s too decent for it to be simple. “I just need the handoffs to be cleaner. For Owen, too.”

“You’re right,” I say again.

After we hang up I stay on the step a while.

She’s right. She’s not wrong about any of it. She’s usually not.

I cleaned the kitchen first because I was trying to attack the things that most needed to be done first and work down the list. It’s the habit Dr. Delaney suggests I try to build and I try. Man, I fuckingtry. I just ran out of time before I got to the living room.

Ain’t that some shit?

When you try your hardest to keep everything together and you still fuck it up?

I drag my hands through my hair. Because I guess, if I’m brutally honest, some part of me knew I was running out of time. And I didn’t hurry, because Owen had fallen asleep in the fort.

He’d crawled to the center of it with his head on a pillow and just passed out, the way little kids can—completely, no transition, justgone—and I sat in there next to him for maybe twenty minutes that I didn’t have, listening to him breathe. The dragon sword on the floor beside him. The pillow walls standing.

I didn’t want to break it down while he was sleeping in it.