The Househusband Chapter 07

The Househusband Chapter 07 The Paint Under Her Fingernails

The new routine was simple. Drop Leo at daycare in the morning, head to the studio, pick him up in the afternoon, cook dinner, bath time, bedtime. Every day the same.

I liked the samneness. After months of pretending not to know, pretending everything was fine while my stomach twisted itself into knots every night, the routine felt clean.

The restaurant design project wrapped up and the client loved it. He sent two more projects my way withi a week – a bakery in Williamsburg and a wine bar in Cobble Hill.

I threw every ounce of energy I had into the work. Drawings, site visits, material selections, late nights at the drafting table – anything to keep my hands busy and my mind quiet.

My partner James came back from a conference and said business had never looked better. “Whatever you did, keep doing it,” he told me over coffee in the break room.

I didn’t tell him that what I did was lose my entire life and rebuild it from scratch. The new projects kept coming a rooftop bar in Dumbo, a pediatric dental office in Park Slope. I said yes to everything. The more hours I worked, the less time I had to think about anything else.

One afternoon at daycare pickup, a young woman walked over and introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Olivia. My daughter Mia is in the same class as Leo.”

She was a children’s book illustrator. Single mom. She had an easy smile and paint under her fingernails and a streak of blue in her hair that she said her daughter had insisted on. We swapped phone numbers to coordinate playdates.

The first playdate was at a park near her place. Mia and Leo chased each other around the playground while Olivia and I sat on a bench and talked.

Not about anything heavy. Just kids, work, the weird things toddlers say. She told me about a picture book she was illustrating – about a fox who couldn’t sleep because the forest was too loud. She’d been working on it for months and was running behind deadline because Mia kept “helping” by scribbling on the drafts.

She made me laugh – actually laugh – for the first time in months. She told me Mia had asked her that morning why Leo’s daddy always looked tired, and Olivia had said it was because he worked very hard. “She said, ‘Harder than you?’ And I said, ‘Maybe a little harder.”

That evening I got home and my phone rang. Charlotte’s number.

I didn’t answer.

It rang again the next day. And the day after that.

The missed call count climbed from three to seven to twelve. Each time the phone lit up with her name, I’d stare at it for a few seconds and then flip it face-down.

Sometimes she’d leave voicemails. I listened to one – her voice was hoarse, like she’d been crying for hours. “I just want to talk,” she said. “Please.” I deleted it halfway through and didn’t listen to the rest.

I didn’t call back. Not once.

Meanwhile, Charlotte was staying at her parents’ place on the Upper East Side. William barely spoke to her – he couldn’t look at her without thinking about what she’d done to the family name.

The country club had started asking pointed questions about their membership, and William’s law firm partners had stopped inviting them to dinner. Margaret tried to be kind but didn’t know what to say. She’d bring Charlotte tea and sit on the edge of the bed, wanting to say something but never finding the words.

Charlotte spent most of her time in her old bedroom, the one she’d lived in before college, surrounded by her high school trophies and debate team ribbons. She told her mother she was looking for an apartment. Margaret said that wasn’t necessary. Charlotte said it was.

Then Noah showed up. Not to comfort her. To ask for money.

He knocked on the door of her parents’ apartment on a Tuesday evening. Charlotte opened it and there he was – wearing the same jacket he’d had for months, looking thinner, with dark circles under his eyes and a stubble that made him look rougher than the clean-cut guy from the party.

“Look, I lost everything because of this whole thing. My job, my reputation. I need some help. You owe me that much. We’re in this together, remember?”

Charlotte stared at him. “Get out.”

–

Noah paused at the door and turned back. His expression had changed — the polite mask was gone.

“Come on, Charlotte. You knew what this was from the beginning. Don’t act surprised now. You wanted a distraction and I was convenient. That’s all either of us ever were to each other.”

She closed the door and sat on the floor in the entryway and cried for a long time. Not because Noah left. But because she finally saw him clearly- the way he’d always been, the way she’d refused to see while it was happening.

He’d never cared about her. Not the way she’d told herself he did. Not the way the affair had felt at two in the morning when the world was quiet and everything seemed urgent and important.

In daylight, standing in the entryway of her parents’ apartment, she could see it for what it was two people using each other and pretending it was something more.

–

Then her mind started going to other places. She pulled out her phone and opened the photo gallery. Scrolled past the recent stuff and went deep – to the photos I’d taken.

Leo’s first smile. The first time he rolled over. His first step, wobbly and uncertain, caught on video with me cheering off-camera. The sticky notes I used to leave on the fridge: “Dinner in the oven. Love you.” The selfie from three AM outside the delivery room, my eyes red from crying, grinning like a fool, captioned “It’s a boy.” The video of me teaching Leo to clap his hands, the one where he finally got it and I whooped so loud the neighbors complained.

Her hands were shaking by the time she scrolled through all of it.