I rub my eyes and groan, knowing this means we’ll have to leave.
Noah and Ethan are going to kill me.
Chapter 11
BAILEY
“Bailey, come on,” Ethan says as we push outside into a morning draped in fog. “Noah wants to stay.”
“Please,” Noah echoes, still rubbing his head. “I don’t wanna go.”
I lean over and ruffle his hair. “Another time, buddy.”
“We’ll take an Uber, Bay,” Ethan says.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. We just talked about this before coming outside. The Taylor Swift concert is kicking off at noon. Every Uber in the city is already backed up. The wait times are ridiculous—well over an hour—and so are the charges. Even then, I’d be happy to cave if Ethan could be trusted to properly install Noah’s car seat, which he can’t. Despite all of his strengths, my husband has two left thumbs. When he last tried, he missed one of the latches completely. And it wasn’t the first time.
“Ethan, please don’t fight me on this,” I say as I stop. “I’ve already got enough on my plate as it is.”
“Can you tell Bob no? You’ve killed yourself for that man. Surely he’ll understand this once.” He nods at Noah. “And we have the matinée later, remember?”
I suddenly feel very tired. My husband is made of gentler stuffthan me. He doesn’t possess the same constitution I have to claw my way throughthe corporate world. If I say no to Bob, someone else will say yes. And even at my level, it’s still a race to the top.
“You know I can’t do that,” I say, annoyed, stepping forward to take Noah. There should be another option—the one whereIgrab an Uber and leave Ethan and Noah here with the car. But that option doesn’t exist. Not after Ethan’s DUI. Four months ago, he and a couple of his old high school buddies went to a Seattle Kraken hockey game and had a few too many beers. It was a much-needed night out for him to relax and unwind, a brief reprieve from watching Noah. And relax he did. Then he climbed behind the wheel and drove straight through a DUI checkpoint. It’s one of the few major mistakes he’s made in our marriage, and one we’ve already worked through—which is why I don’t bring it up now, even though I’m tempted to. Doing so would be like pulling the pin on the grenade.
I head for the car instead, Noah dragging his feet the entire way. “No! Let me go! I wanna stay!”
“We’ll come back next weekend, okay?” I open the back door to my blue Audi sedan and motion for him to get in. He goes slack in response, all of his weight hitting at once. It happens so fast, I nearly lose my grip on his hand.
“Stop it, Noah,” I say, bending down to pick him up.
He nearly squirms free. “You stop it! You’re being mean!” He bucks against me, thrashing and shaking his head as I pick him up by the armpits and set him in his car seat. “Let me go! Let me go!”
“Stop it,” I repeat, then more firmly: “Noah, stop!”
Still he fights, his tantrum kicking into high gear. “Let go!”
I bend over and attempt to buckle him in. When I do, he swings his foot and the tip of his shoe connects with my chin. My teeth clack together painfully. I exhale and take him by the shoulders as I try again. “Noah Eric, you will behave right now! Understand? Right. Now.”
“Bailey!” Ethan says behind me. “Calm down.”
“A little help would be nice,” I say, turning and pushing past him without another word.
Five minutes later, we’re on the road with rain salting the windshield as I drive.Whump, click. Whump, click. Whump, click.Through the windshield, past the wipers, trees pass by in inkblot stains drizzled in fog. January in the Pacific Northwest is my least favorite time of year. The cloud cover is always bad, but at least in the summer you see the sun once in a while. Winter means going weeks without light. Sometimes months. It’s a nice dose of seasonal affective disorder paired with all the work.
We travel in silence, the only sounds those of the highway mixing with Noah’s sniffles. It’s like this any time Ethan and I have a disagreement—a battle of the wills to see who will wave the white flag and speak first. I have a low-grade headache throbbing between my temples by the time he does.
“Hey, you missed the turn.”
“No, I didn’t,” I say. “I’m not taking the interstate. There’ll be too much traffic with the concert. Pioneer will be faster.”
“No, it won’t,” he says. “It never is.”
“Today it will be.” I grip the steering wheel harder. “Are you trying to find a reason to argue with me at this point?” The statement comes out hotter than I intend. I tense for whatever Ethan’s about to say in return, but he just runs a hand over his face and falls silent. He’s right that Pioneer usually takes longer. It’s a relatively empty stretch of road that winds through the rolling farmland near where Ethan’s brother lives before dumping drivers back onto I-5. Most days it would add at least thirty minutes to the route but today it will save more than that.
“I wanna go back,” Noah mumbles from the backseat through a heaving sob. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to Luke.”
I eye him in the rearview mirror. “We’ll see Luke again soon, honey.”
