Arthur and Wren looked at each other, locked eyes, and started laughing.
“I think we handled that well,” Wren said in a low voice.
“Totally. We didn’t buckle under the pressure at all. Go us.”
Wren held out a fist and Arthur bumped it with his.
Together, they walked into the bedroom and laid Liam down in his bassinet, carefully, slowly, as if defusing a bomb. Once he was down, they both backed away with their hands up, careful not to disturb the air and somehow wake him again.
“Ready to do this again in a few hours?” Arthur whispered.
“Do we have to?”
“We don’t have to; we get to,” Arthur said.
“That’s it, you’re not allowed to hang out with Tristan for a while.”
Arthur laughed. “I can finally admit. He’s not so bad.”
Silence. Only little heart-shattering noises coming from their son, sound asleep in the bassinet a few feet away. Arthur opened his phone, swiped his way through TikTok until he found a video with bold, aggressive text overlaid:Newborn won’t stop crying? 3 HUGE things you’re doing wrong!
“Anything helpful?” Wren said. Arthur paused, then closed the app.
“Nope,” he said, holding his thumb on the icon and deleting it from his life forever.
They lay down on the bed. It was too early for them to go to sleep, but they also felt like they couldn’t make even the smallest peep of noise. They were trapped. But there were worse things.
“We never got to talk about the house,” he said out of nowhere. It had been looming over them since the hospital.There never seemed to be a good time to discuss it. “It’s over; I got us out of it.”
Wren shot up.
“You didn’t have to do that. How much money did we lose? Arthur, I was being selfish; we could have made it work.”
“No, you weren’t, and we couldn’t. I can admit that now.”
“So…” she said. “How much money?”
“Believe it or not, none.”
“I’m sorry? I’m no real estate attorney, but even I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.”
“Let’s just say Linda Kellerman took pity on us.” After he’d run into her while cleaning up the mess—the mess he himself had created—he apparently looked like such hell, so down and broken, that she just couldn’t bring herself to rake him over the coals. The home, it turns out, was owned by a big property development company Linda did a lot of work with. She had sway, she said, and could probably get them to rip the deal up. It didn’t hurt that she felt a little bad about breaking the news to Wren prematurely after a bit of wine at the wedding.
“So we got off scot-free?”
“Not quite. She made me promise to volunteer at her Spring Cleaning Dumpster Day, and she’s going to drop off about twenty boxes of hideous baby clothes we have to pretend to love.”
“So she’s made herself an honorary grandma,” Wren said.
“Small price to pay.”
Silence. Only little coos and baby snorts.
“So what do we do now?” Wren asked.
“I think we still need to move.”
“Because you hate this place.”
