Chapter 1 - The Party DownstairsI came home two days early from a business trip to Singapore, carrying a stuffed elephant for my son and a bottle of wine for my wife, expecting nothing more complicated than a quiet Tuesday evening.
I Returned Early From a Business Trip and Found My Wife Unable to Leave Her Room While Our 6-Week-Old Son Was Cold Beside an Open Window — Downstairs, My Mother Was Hosting an Elegant Party as Though Everything Was Fine.
Instead, I walked into my mother's house — the same house Simone and I had been staying in for six weeks since Theo was born, at my mother's own insistence, so she could "help" — and found the downstairs transformed into something out of a magazine spread. Candles everywhere. A string quartet tucked into the corner of the sunroom. Forty guests in cocktail attire, holding champagne flutes, laughing at something my mother, Rosalind, had just said.
She spotted me before I'd even set down my bags.
"Darling! You're early! Come, come, everyone's dying to meet you—"
"Where's Simone?"
Something flickered across her face, gone almost as fast as it appeared. "Upstairs, resting. You know how she gets."
"Where's Theo?"
"With her, obviously." She was already turning back toward her guests, already reaching for another glass of champagne. "Go say hello to the Whitmores first, they came all the way from—"
I didn't hear the rest. I was already on the stairs.
The hallway upstairs was noticeably colder than the party below, which struck me as strange before I understood why. The nursery door was ajar. I pushed it open and the cold hit me first — the window was wide open, curtains lifting in the February wind, and my son was lying in his bassinet in nothing but a thin cotton onesie and a blanket that had slid halfway off him.
His lips had a faint blue tinge. His hands, when I touched them, were like ice.
I scooped him up against my chest, inside my coat, and felt him stir weakly against me, which was the only thing that kept me from collapsing right there on the nursery floor.
"Simone!" My voice came out louder than I intended. Nothing. "Simone!"
I found her in the guest bathroom down the hall, the door locked. When she didn't answer, I put my shoulder into it — cheap hardware, gave way easily — and found her sitting on the tile floor with her back against the tub, knees pulled to her chest, staring at nothing.
She looked up at me like she wasn't entirely sure I was real.
"Simone. Baby, what happened? Theo's freezing."
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She opened her mouth. It took her three tries to get words out.
"She said I'm unfit."
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