My Husband Chose His Ex Over Our Baby

The clinic was on the other side of town, past a laundromat and a nail salon with a hand-painted sign. I picked it because no one I knew would ever have a reason to walk past it.

I filled out the intake form with my own name. Elliot Sullivan. Date of birth. Emergency contact. I stared at that line for a long time. Then I wrote Naomi's number instead of his.

I paid in cash. I'd taken it out over three separate days, small amounts, nothing that would show up as a pattern on a statement he never checked anyway.

The waiting room had fluorescent lights that hummed if you listened for it. I sat with a clipboard balanced on my knees and watched a woman across from me hold her partner's hand. He kept smoothing his thumb over her knuckles, over and over, like he was trying to memorize the shape of her hand before something changed it.

No one held mine. I hadn't expected anyone to. I'd just never pictured it quite like this, so plain, so fluorescent.

When they called my name, I stood up on legs that felt borrowed and followed a nurse in blue scrubs down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee.

I don't remember most of it. I remember the paper gown. I remember counting backward from ten and only getting to seven. I remember waking up cold, with a nurse pressing a cup of water into my hand and telling me to sip slowly.

I took a cab home. The driver had the radio on low, some talk show host arguing with a caller about parking regulations, and I watched the city go by in smears of light and thought about nothing. I was very good, by then, at thinking about nothing.

The penthouse was empty when I let myself in. I didn't know where Gael was and I didn't check. I went straight to the guest room, climbed into the narrow bed still in my coat, and stared at the ceiling.

The sky outside the window went from black to grey to a pale, meaningless gold. I watched every stage of it. I didn't sleep. I didn't cry, either, not really — just a slow, steady leak at the corners of my eyes that I wiped away without thinking, the way you'd wipe condensation off a glass.

Handle it, he'd said.

I had.

—

Aspen was Priscilla's idea, though it came out of Gael's mouth at the breakfast table like it was his. "A few days at the lodge," he said, not looking up from his phone. "Change of scenery."

I still hadn't told him. There wasn't a version of that conversation I could survive twice.

We flew out on a Thursday. The lodge was all glass and cedar, snow banked against the windows in soft blue drifts. I was still tender in ways no one could see — tired in my bones, careful with how I moved, the kind of fragile that doesn't show up unless you're looking for it, and no one was looking.

Friday evening, we went up to the slope so Priscilla could show off a run she claimed to have skied as a girl. I stayed near the lodge, wrapped in a coat too heavy for how little I weighed that week, and watched them from the deck. Gael's arm out to steady her. Her laugh carrying thin across the cold air.

Then she stumbled.

It happened in slow motion, the way rehearsed things always do if you're paying close enough attention. Her knees buckled. Her hand flew to her chest. She made a small, breathless sound, and Gael was there before she finished falling, catching her elbow, her waist, saying her name twice, fast, like it was an alarm.

"I can't — I can't breathe," she gasped, and even from the deck I could hear how carefully that sentence had been shaped, how it landed exactly where it needed to.

Gael didn't look back once.

He half-carried her toward the resort's medical center, shouting for someone to bring the car around, his voice sharp with a fear I hadn't heard him use for me in seven years. Staff scattered after them — the concierge, a ski instructor, someone from housekeeping. Within ten minutes, the lodge had emptied out entirely, doors swinging shut behind the last of them, the quiet settling in so fast it felt like the building itself had exhaled.

I stood on the deck a while longer, watching the taillights disappear down the mountain road.

Then I went inside, alone, into a house gone completely silent, and I told myself it was fine. I told myself I only needed to rest.

I didn't know yet how wrong I was.