Chapter 2 - Four WordsI sat down on the bathroom floor next to my wife, my son shivering slightly against my chest, and made myself ask the question slowly, carefully, the way you'd approach someone standing too close to a ledge.
"Who said that?"
"Your mother." Simone's voice was hoarse, like she'd been crying for hours and had run out of the ability to make it sound like crying anymore. "She said I was unfit. She said I couldn't be trusted with him. She took him out of my arms this morning and told me to go rest, and when I tried to check on him an hour ago she told me I was being hysterical, that she had everything under control, that I should go make myself presentable for tonight instead of hovering."
"The window was open."
"I didn't open it." Simone's eyes came up to mine, finally focusing. "I would never open it. I don't know when she opened it. I don't know how long he was in there like that. I tried to go check on him twice and both times she stopped me at the door and said I needed to rest, that I was overreacting, that new mothers get 'nervous' and I needed to trust her judgment because she raised three children and I hadn't raised any."
Something in my chest went very quiet and very cold, colder than the air that had been pouring through that nursery window.
"Why were you in here? Why didn't you just go back in?"
Simone's hands were shaking. "Because she locked the nursery door behind her the second time. I heard the latch. And when I knocked, she told me through the door that Theo was fine, that she'd taken him to feed him, that I needed to stop making a scene before her guests arrived." Her voice cracked. "I came in here because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know if I was losing my mind. I didn't know if she was right and I really was seeing things that weren't there."
I looked at my son's face, at the color slowly returning to his lips as my body heat reached him, and I understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, exactly what had happened in this house over the past several hours while I was thirty thousand feet in the air.
My mother had spent six weeks systematically convincing my wife she couldn't trust her own judgment. And that evening, with a party to host and a baby she considered an inconvenient prop for the wrong kind of story, she had left a six-week-old infant alone in a freezing room and gaslit his mother into believing she was too unstable to check on him.
"Get up," I said gently, helping Simone to her feet. "We're leaving. Right now."
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"Where—"
"I don't know yet. Somewhere else. Anywhere else."
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