The Househusband Chapter 08

The Househusband Chapter 08 The Baby Monitor

Charlotte showed up at my Brooklyn apartment one Saturday morning with Leo’s favorite stuffed elephant and a bouquet of flowers. The flowers were the kind she used to buy for the apartment – white peonies, expensive, from that place on Madison Avenue.

She probably didn’t think about the fact that I used to be the one who arranged them in the vase.

I opened the door. Didn’t say anything.

“I just wanted to see Leo,” she said, her voice careful and small. “And to say I’m sorry. I know I should have called first.”

I let her in but stayed behind the kitchen counter while she was there. Physical distance.

The apartment was small enough that I could watch her from the kitchen without being obvious about it She set the flowers on the counter and looked around – the mismatched furniture, the secondhand bookshelf, the kids’ drawings taped to the fridge.

It was a different world from the Upper East Side. Smaller, simpler, and completely mine.

– a purple She ran her hand along the counter and looked at the magnet holding up one of Leo’s drawings blob that was apparently a dinosaur. “He’s gotten better at coloring,” she said softly. “Yeah,” I said. “He has.”

Leo was thrilled to see his mom – he ran to her on unsteady legs, babbling in that one-year-old way, arms reaching up. Charlotte picked him up and held him tight and cried into his hair.

Leo didn’t understand why mommy was crying. He reached out with his tiny hands and tried to catch her tears, like they were something he could take away.

She played with him on the floor for almost an hour. Built block towers, read a board book about farm animals, let him pull her hair and giggle.

She was good with him. She’d always been good with him in moments like these the easy moments, the fun moments. The hard ones were a different story. The 3 AM feedings, the teething nights, the days when he wouldn’t stop crying and she was always “too exhausted” or “had a deadline.”

When it was time for her to leave, she stopped in the doorway. She put Leo down and he wandered over to his toy bin, completely uninterested in the adult conversation about to happen.

She looked at me standing behind that counter and said: “Can we try again? For Leo? I know I don’t deserve to ask, but he deserves a family.”

I looked at her. One question.

–

“When you were in that room every night, and Leo was crying on the baby monitor – you heard him. didn’t you?”

Her face went grey. She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

The baby monitor was right on her desk, two feet from where she sat. She heard every cry, every whimper, every night Leo needed someone. And she chose to stay in that room.

I closed the door. She stood on the other side for a long time. I could hear her breathing through the wood, slow and shallow.

Then her footsteps going down the hallway, slow and heavy, fading away until the building was quiet again.

A week later, Noah – who still couldn’t find work anywhere – started retaliating. He posted anonymous things about Charlotte on Reddit. Private details, personal information, things only someone who’d been close to her would know.

Her morning routines, her insecurities, the way she talked about her colleagues behind their backs. He posted about the apartment, about her spending habits, about how she’d planned the birthday party down to every detail while texting him under the table.

Then he started a TikTok account calling himself “a Manhattan socialite’s secret lover” and posted videos telling his side of the story. He sat in his apartment with a ring light and talked about how Charlotte had seduced him, how she’d manipulated him, how he was just as much a victim as anyone.

The videos had a certain production quality — he’d edited them, added background music, cut between different angles. He’d clearly spent hours on them. The first one got fifty thousand views in a day. The second one got more.

The views were decent but the comment sections destroyed him. Every single video was a wall of people calling him a parasite.

“Bro couldn’t keep a job and thought sleeping with his boss’s wife was the move.” “This is the most delusional man on the internet.” “Imagine thinking you’re the victim here.”

Someone stitched his videos with the courtroom footage and the contrast got half a million likes. The top comment on that stitch had thirty thousand upvotes: “Imagine being so irrelevant that the court didn’t even bother punishing you.”

Charlotte’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter. Noah ignored it. He posted a screenshot of the letter on his account with the caption “They don’t want you to hear the truth” and got another thirty thousand views from people who thought he was brave.

Then someone dug up his real name and address and posted it in the comments, and the internet did what it does best – it turned him into a meme. His face was everywhere.

William pulled some connections to get the content removed from the platforms. But the damage was already done. Screenshots had been saved, reposted, spread across forums and group chats. The internet doesn’t forget.

Every time Charlotte applied for a new job, she knew the hiring manager would find this stuff within five minutes of Googling her name. Every time she walked into a room full of strangers, she wondered which ‘one of them had seen the videos.

Charlotte finally understood something that took her a long time to learn: the more she struggled – whether she was chasing me or fighting Noah – the deeper she sank. There was no way to spin this, no PR strategy that could undo it.

The only move left was to stop moving entirely. To sit still and let the world forget her, the way she’d made the world forget about me.