Better Off Alone

(Rebecca's POV) The hotel room smells like bleach and stale coffee. I've been staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes. Maybe longer. The crack above the bed runs left to right, thin as a hair, splitting the plaster like a fault line nobody bothered to fix. Kind of like my marriage. I roll over and grab my phone. 8:47 PM in California means 11:47 PM back in Tennessee. Too late to call a five-year-old. But tomorrow is Jack's birthday. My baby is turning five, and I want to be the first one to wish him on this day. I open the camera app and check my face. My eyes are puffy. Not crying puffy — just tired puffy. The kind that comes from four days of twelve-hour shifts, back-to-back client dinners, and sleeping in a hotel bed that smells like bleach and stale coffee. I pinch my cheeks. Smooth my hair. Smile. It's too tight at the corners. I try again. Better. That one almost reaches my eyes. I tap Jack's contact and hit video call. It rings once. Twice. Three times. My chest gets tighter with each ring. Then the screen fills up with his face and the tightness breaks open into something warm. "Mommy!" God, that word. That one word undoes everything. The shitty hotel. The twelve-hour days. The way Sean looked through me in the hallway last week like I was a glass door he could see right past. "Hi, baby." I press my phone closer like I can crawl through the screen. "Happy almost-birthday! One more sleep." Jack grins. He's missing a front tooth. When did he lose that tooth? I don't remember him telling me. Maybe he told Sean. "Mommy, are you still in Cali-forn-ya?" "California. And yes, baby, I am." I keep my voice light. Easy. "But I was thinking — do you want Mommy to fly home tomorrow? I can be there for your birthday. I'll bring cake." Jack scrunches his nose. The same way Sean does when he's thinking. I hate how much they look alike sometimes. "That's far," Jack says. "Daddy says California is really far." "It is. But I don't mind—" "It's okay, Mommy. Daddy is here. He's enough." He's enough. I want to laugh, except there's nothing in me that finds it funny. Six years I've spent learning how to fold myself smaller and smaller so I'd fit into the space they left for me. And it turns out the space was never even there. I swallow, and try not to let those words get to me. "Okay, sweetheart. That's okay too." In the background, somewhere off the edge of the screen, I hear a sound that makes everything in me go still. A laugh. A woman's laugh, light and easy, and then Jack's whole face lights up in a way it never once lit up for me. He turns toward it. "Aunt—" he starts, and then he stops himself, and looks back at the camera fast, guilty, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Aunt who?" I ask. I keep my voice level. I keep it gentle. "Jack? Is someone there with you?" "Nobody," he says. Too quickly. "Just Dad." And then the phone is taken from him. The screen swings, blurs, and resettles on a face I'd know in the dark, in my sleep, in another life. Sean. My husband. "Jack, go brush your teeth." "But Mommy—" "Now." Jack's face disappears. I hear his little feet padding away on the hardwood, and then it's just Sean holding the phone. "Hey," I say. "Is there anything else?" Not how's California. Not we miss you, not even the trip going okay? Just—is there anything else. There's that laugh again, behind him, closer now. And I watch his eyes flick to the side, just for a moment, and something in his face changes. Softens. I've never seen it soften like that. Not in six years. Not for me. I open my mouth. I have a sentence ready. I've had it ready for so long it feels worn smooth, like a stone I've been turning over in my pocket. I miss you. Three words. I've said them before, a hundred times, a thousand times, to this face on this screen and to the back of his head as he walks out the front door and to the empty side of the bed at 2 AM when he's still in his office and I'm staring at the wall like an i***t. I miss you. I miss you. I miss— "Nothing else, then," Sean says. Then the screen goes black. I sit there like an i***t. The dead phone glowing faintly in my hands, my own reflection trapped in the dark glass. I don't recognize the woman looking back. Her mouth is still half-open around the words she didn't get to say. I miss you. That's all it was. That's all I ever wanted to say, and he hung up before the second word could leave my mouth. And the worst part, the part that makes my eyes burn, is that he didn't do it to hurt me. I just wasn't there. I set the phone down on the nightstand, very carefully, like it might shatter, like I might shatter, and think about that night. That one night, and that one terrible beautiful mistake in a hotel that smelled a lot like this one, and then the two pink lines, and then Sean standing in his mother's living room with a jaw like granite saying he'd do the responsible thing. He looked at me that day like I'd set a trap and he'd been dumb enough to step in it. You planned this, his eyes said. You trapped me for my money. He never once asked what I wanted. He decided he knew. And I spent the last six years trying to prove him wrong. Six years ironing his shirts so the collars sat exactly the way he liked. Six years brewing his coffee at the precise temperature, learning his silences like a second language, putting humidifiers in every room because he hated the dry air, even when the damp made my skin crack and bleed at the knuckles. I told myself if I was good enough, soft enough, quiet enough, he'd look up one day and see me. He never looked up. My phone buzzes. For one stupid second my heart kicks, thinking maybe it's Sean calling back. Maybe he felt bad. Maybe he wants to say goodnight. Maybe— It's an email from Alexander. Meeting moved to 9 AM. Please confirm. I confirm. The tears come finally, hot and silent. I let them. There's nobody here to perform for. No coffee to brew. No collar to fix. For the first time in six years, I am completely, perfectly alone, and let myself go.