Grant called exactly twice during those two weeks. Both calls lasted under three minutes. Both times, I could hear music and laughter in the background, and both times, he asked about the babies in the vague, generalized way a person asks about something they're not actually picturing clearly in their mind.
"They're good?" he'd ask. "Everyone's healthy?"
"They're healthy," I'd say. "I'm exhausted, Grant. I haven't slept more than two hours at a stretch since you left."
"You've got Naomi, though, right? It'll be fine. I'll be home soon."
I stopped expecting more from those calls after the second one. I focused instead on simply getting through each individual day, one feeding, one diaper, one impossibly short nap at a time.
⸻
By the time his two weeks were nearly up, Naomi had started gently raising a different kind of question — not about proof anymore, but about what I actually wanted to happen once he walked back through that door.
"You don't have to know yet," she told me, the night before he was due back, both of us sitting in my living room surrounded by bottles and burp cloths while all three babies slept, miraculously, at the same time. "But I think it's worth thinking about. Whatever you decide, I've got everything organized if you need it."
"I don't even know what I want to say to him," I admitted. "I keep imagining the conversation, and it just turns into me crying, which is exactly what he'd expect."
"Then don't say anything at all," Naomi said. "Let him see it instead."
⸻
I didn't fully understand what she meant by that until the following evening, when the two of us spent an hour quietly moving things around the living room while my mother watched the babies upstairs — a hastily assembled slideshow printed and taped across the coffee table, screenshots and timestamps laid out in a neat, undeniable timeline. Beside it, a folder Naomi had prepared with her attorney's letterhead, outlining a temporary separation agreement drafted, at my request, earlier that afternoon.
"You don't have to use any of this," Naomi reminded me, one last time, as we heard a car pull into the driveway. "You can still just talk to him if that's what you want instead."
"No," I said, surprising myself with how steady my own voice sounded. "I want him to see exactly what these two weeks looked like from where I was standing."
⸻
Grant unlocked the front door a few minutes later, tanned, relaxed, wheeling his suitcase behind him like a man returning from a well-earned trip instead of a man about to face two weeks of consequences he hadn't once bothered to imagine.
"Hey," he called out, setting his keys on the entry table the same easy way he always had. "I'm back. Where is everyone?"
He stepped into the living room, and I watched the exact moment his expression changed.
His eyes moved across the coffee table — the printed screenshots, his own vacation photos laid out beside my sister's timestamped texts describing three-hour crying jags and forty-degree fevers and diaper counts I'd tracked obsessively just to feel like I had control over something. Beside all of it, the folder with the attorney's letterhead, unmistakable even from across the room.
He stopped dead in the middle of the living room.
His suitcase dropped from his hand and hit the floor with a loud, flat thud.
"This can't be happening," he said, his voice cracking somewhere between disbelief and genuine panic.
⸻
"It's happening, Grant," I said, standing near the hallway, arms crossed, steadier than I'd expected to feel in this exact moment.
"Ivy, what is all this?" He gestured at the coffee table like it might rearrange itself if he stared hard enough. "Is this — are you serious right now?"
"I asked you to be quieter during labor," I said. "You left six days after I brought three newborns home because it was too stressful for your mental health. You called twice in two weeks, both times from somewhere with a beach in the background."
"I told you I needed to reset," he said. "I told you—"
"You told me a lot of things," I said. "Naomi kept track of most of them, actually. Times, dates, screenshots. It's all right there on the table if you'd like to review it."
⸻
Grant looked at Naomi, standing quietly by the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, wearing the same steady expression I imagined she wore in courtrooms.
"You did this," he said. "This is you, isn't it. Turning her against me."
"Nobody turned anyone against you, Grant," Naomi said evenly. "You did this part all on your own. I just made sure it was documented properly, in case it ever needed to be."
"Ivy," Grant said, turning back to me, his voice dropping into something closer to pleading now. "Come on. I made a mistake. I panicked. New dads panic sometimes."
"Some new dads stay," I said. "Some new dads figure out how to handle panic without leaving their wife alone with three newborns for two weeks."
⸻
"What does this mean?" he asked, nodding toward the folder. "A separation agreement? You're serious about this?"
