What I felt for Vanessa was not love.
It was vanity wearing perfume.
She came into my department in the middle of August, when Hannah was six months pregnant and Texas was so hot the sidewalks seemed to breathe fire. Vanessa was thirty-nine, bright-eyed, quick with compliments, and so careless with attention that I mistook it for intimacy. She laughed at my old stories. She asked my opinion in meetings. She touched my sleeve when she spoke.
At first, I told myself it was harmless.
A lunch here. A drink there. A ride to her apartment when her car was “acting funny.” She made me feel interesting, and God help me, I had begun to feel invisible at home.
Hannah was forty-three when Grace was born. She called the pregnancy a miracle. I called it the second chance I did not deserve.
For a while, I meant it.
When Grace arrived, red-faced and furious, I cried harder than I had cried at my own mother’s funeral. Hannah laughed weakly from the bed and said, “Trevor, she’s here. Our girl is here.”
I held Grace in both hands, terrified by her smallness.
“I’ll do better,” I told Hannah. “I swear to you, I’ll do better than I did before.”
Hannah knew what “before” meant.
She knew about Claire, though not enough. I had told her the version that made me look wounded instead of guilty. I said my first wife, Linda, made it impossible. I said I was young. I said I tried.
Hannah, being Hannah, had touched my cheek and said, “Then don’t try this time. Show up.”
And I did—for a few weeks.
I changed diapers badly but proudly. I warmed bottles. I took photographs. I walked Grace around the living room at midnight and told her stories about the world, about bluebonnets in spring, about baseball games, about how her mother sang off-key when she thought nobody heard.
Then the crying started wearing on me.
Grace had reflux. Hannah slept in pieces. Our house smelled like milk, laundry detergent, diaper cream, and exhaustion. Hannah’s hair was always tied in a loose knot. Her eyes looked bruised from lack of sleep. She did not laugh at my jokes as quickly. She forgot to ask about my day.
I told myself she had changed.
But the truth was uglier.
Hannah had become a mother, and I had become jealous of a baby.
Vanessa noticed the restlessness in me before I admitted it.
“You look tired, Trevor,” she said one afternoon, leaning against my office door.
“Newborn at home,” I said.
She smiled. “That’ll do it.”
“It’s a blessing,” I added quickly, because respectable men say respectable things.
“Of course,” she said. Then, softer, “But blessings can still make a man feel trapped.”
I should have told her to leave.
Instead, I laughed.
That laugh was the first door opening.
By October, I was staying late more often. By November, I was lying. By Christmas, I was buying Vanessa earrings while Hannah wrapped gifts one-handed with Grace asleep against her chest.
There were moments when I almost stopped.
Once, I came home and found Hannah at the kitchen table, staring at nothing while Grace slept in the bassinet.
“Hannah?” I said.
She blinked as if returning from a long distance. “I’m so tired I can hear colors.”
I laughed, thinking she was joking.
