Page 42 of Pretend You Love Me

I nod, even though he can’t see it. “Thank you,” I say again. “That means…thank you.”

“I should let you go,” he says, already moving toward what’s clearly a conclusion. “It’s late, and you’ve had a day. But Elsie?” He pauses, the silence stretching between us. “You did the right thing. Not the easy thing. The right one.”

We say goodnight, Henry with quiet warmth, me trying not to cry, and then he’s gone, the line going quiet with a soft click. I sit perfectly still in the dark room with the phone in my hand, Henry’s words stay with me. The support he offered. The care. I miss my dad more than I have in years in this moment. I wish for just a second that he could scoop me up and tell me that everything will be alright.

My marriage is over. My life is changing. Everything I thought was true has turned out to be something else entirely.

Tomorrow I can pick up the pieces, tonight, I can just break.

Fifteen

Daniel

I stayed because leaving felt like admitting the marriage was over.

Not legally or technically. Not in whatever careful language solicitors used when they wanted to turn your life into paperwork and billable hours. Actually over.

The type of over that meant packing a bag, walking out the front door, and knowing Elsie wouldn’t ask me to come back.

So, I stayed. I hovered in doorways. In the kitchen. In the hallway outside the nursery after both twins were down, listening to the soft hum of the monitor and the tiny restless noises Milo made in his sleep.

I stayed because the house still smelled like them. Baby lotion, laundry powder, coffee, formula, Elsie’s shampoo when she actually had time to wash her hair. I stayed because my toothbrush was still beside hers in the bathroom. Because my shoes were still by the door. Because my jacket still hung on the hook near the entryway. Because if I was still physically inside the home, some stupid, desperate part of me could pretend I had not already lost it all.

Elsie moved around me now. Not toward me. Never toward me. That was the part that made something in my chest twist so sharply that it hurt to swallow.

She didn’t slam doors. She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw things or cry in front of me or give me the sort of explosive grief I could meet with apologies and explanations and promises. She was calm. Too calm.

She fed Maisie. Changed Milo. Answered messages. Spoke to me about nappies and formula and schedules with a polite, exhausted voice that made me feel like a neighbour she was forced to coordinate bins with. I hated it. I hated that she could do it. I hated myself more because I knew that I had taught her how.

The keys hit the bowl by the door harder than I meant them to when I came home from work on Wednesday.

Elsie was standing at the sink washing bottles, her sleeves pushed up, hair twisted into the same loose knot she wore when she was too tired to care what it looked like. Milo was asleep in the bouncer beside the table, one fist curled near his cheek. Maisie was in the bassinet near the window, silent and watchful even in sleep.

I had rehearsed the words in the car. I had spent the whole drive building them into something reasonable. Something that might make her see how badly she had handled it.

But when I saw her standing there, so still and small inside the wreckage of their life, anger broke out first because anger was easier than shame.

“You should have come to me,” I said.

Elsie did not turn around. That made it worse. She kept washing the bottle, the soft squeak of the brush against plastic impossibly loud in the kitchen.

“Not announced it in front of everyone,” I continued, moving toward the bench because standing still felt unbearable. “My family. Our family.”

Elsie rinsed the bottle and placed it on the drying rack. Carefully. Like the bottle deserved more emotional attention than I did.

“Do you have any idea what that did to me?” I asked, and even as I said it, some part of me knew it was the wrong question.

The worst question. But I just could not seem to stop.

“Mum is devastated. Sophie sent one text saying she needed space, which is apparently what people say now when they want to cut you out politely.”

Elsie finally turned. Her face was tired. Not angry. Not harsh. Just tired in a way I had no defence against.

“Your family being embarrassed is not the worst thing that happened here.”

The words might as well have smacked me in the face. No raised voice. Just the complete truth. I looked away first. I hated that too. Because I wanted to argue. Wanted to say she had made it public, she had turned my family against me, she had humiliated me in a room full of people who had known me since I was a child. But underneath all that was the thing I could not make disappear. She had not lied. She had exposed me. There was a difference, apparently. A brutal one.

“You should have come to me,” I repeated, quieter now. “Alone. We could have talked about it. We could have figured something out.”