Chapter 4
**10:31 p.m. We are home. She is stable. I will remain overnight. Please contact your wife.**
Adam swallowed.
“I never saw the last two.”
“You saw the first one.”
“How do you know?”
“It says read.”
He looked away.
The roses lay on the counter between them.
He suddenly hated them.
“Marina never told me she was that sick.”
Bernice’s expression did not change.
“She stopped telling you things after she realized telling you did not make you come home.”
Rainwater tapped steadily at the glass.
Adam rubbed a hand over his face.
“When did she leave?”
“March thirteenth.”
Four days after the fever.
Adam counted automatically.
He had been in Florida for twelve days by then.
Savannah had booked a sunset cruise that afternoon.
He remembered because she had worn a red dress and complained that the wind ruined her hair.
“What happened on the thirteenth?”
Bernice looked toward the counter.
“Your wife packed one suitcase, one diaper bag, the baby’s bassinet sheets, her kettle, six bottles, a framed photograph of her mother, and the yellow blanket your sister made for Nell.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That is exactly what happened.”
“Why?”
Bernice inhaled slowly.
“Because at three seventeen that morning, Nell would not stop crying.”
Adam’s expression hardened with confusion.
“What does that have to do with—”
“Marina had been awake almost the entire night. Her incision hurt. She was crying too, though she tried to hide it from me. She sat in that chair.”
Bernice pointed toward an empty patch beside the window.
The rocking chair was gone.
“She held Nell against her chest and said, ‘I keep waiting for Adam to walk through that door.’”
Adam stared at the empty space.
Bernice continued.
“And then she looked at me and said, ‘Why am I waiting for the person who chose not to be here?’”
His face changed.
Only slightly.
But Bernice saw it.
“She stopped crying after that,” she said.
Adam swallowed.
“And the next morning?”
“She called her sister.”
“Rachel?”
“Yes.”
“She went to Rachel’s?”
“For two nights.”
“And then?”
“Ask your wife.”
Adam picked up his phone.
For the first time since he had walked through the door, he opened the message thread with Marina.
He had expected complaints.
Accusations.
Paragraphs demanding explanations.
Instead, there were only practical messages.
**March 10: Nell’s pediatric appointment is Friday at 10. I’ll send you the summary.**