Chapter 1 - The Cold Front
The echo of Jake’s sneakers against the damp concrete of the parking garage sounded like small, rhythmic gunshots. He walked three paces ahead of me, his car keys already spinning around his index finger with an agitated, nervous flick. I had to plant my palm against my lower back, feeling the stubborn flare of sciatica shooting down my right thigh just to keep up.
"Jake, stop walking so fast," I called out, my voice catching on the dry exhaust fumes hanging in the subterranean air. "I can’t move like that right now."
He paused, but he didn't turn around immediately. When he finally pivoted, his shoulders were hitched high toward his ears, defensive and rigid. "I’m not walking fast, Maya. I’m walking normal. You’re just… everything is an emergency to you right now."
"An emergency?" The word felt like acid on my tongue. "The doctor just sat two feet away from you and said our son could come any day. She explicitly told you not to leave the state! And you called it a 'worst-case scenario' before the elevator doors even closed behind us!"
"Because that’s what doctors do!" he snapped, throwing his hands into the air. A passing couple in business suits glanced over at us before quickly looking away. Jake lowered his voice, but the venom remained. "They cover their legal asses. If she said, 'Sure, Jake, go have a weekend with the guys,' and you sneezed and went into labor, you’d sue her. It’s medical boilerplate. You’re dilated two centimeters. Women stay at two centimeters for a month, Maya. My sister was at three centimeters for six weeks with her second kid!"
"Your sister was on bed rest!" I stepped closer, my hand dropping to my swollen abdomen, where Theo gave a sudden, sharp kick against my ribs, as if protesting the pitch of his father’s voice. "This isn't a four-hour drive to Breckenridge, Jake. It’s San Diego. Through Utah. Through Nevada. Across twelve hundred miles of desert. If my water breaks at midnight on Saturday, how are you getting back? Are you going to sprout wings?"
"I’d catch the first flight out from Vegas or Salt Lake," he said, the reply coming so quickly, so cleanly, that I knew he had rehearsed it in the shower or on his commute. "It takes two hours to fly from Vegas to Denver. Two hours! First-time labors take twenty-four hours on average. I’d be home before you even got your epidural."
We reached the passenger side of his gray crossover. He hit the unlock button with an aggressive beep. I stood beside the open door, staring through the tinted glass at the empty back seat where the rear-facing car seat was already installed. We had spent four hours on a Saturday afternoon arguing over the level indicator, making sure the bubble was precisely between the two black lines. He had strapped his favorite childhood teddy bear into the harness to test the straps, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.
*Where did that boy go?* I wondered, a hollow ache hollowing out my chest. *How did he evaporate in seventy-two hours?*
"Get in," he said softly, his voice shifting from anger to that terrible, patronizing gentleness men use when they want an emotional woman to disappear into quiet compliance. "You’re worked up. Your blood pressure is probably spiking. Let’s just go home and talk."
We didn't talk. We drove through Denver in a suffocating silence.
The city was wrapped in a thick, late-spring heat, the snowpack on the distant Front Range melting into thin, silver veins under a pale sky. Every bump in the road sent a jolt through my pelvic bones. Beside me, Jake’s phone rested in the console cupholder. Every few minutes, it vibrated against the plastic with a buzzing hiss that made my teeth clench.
*Brad: "Got the rack installed on the 4Runner. Room for six boards."*
*Tyler: "Parker’s wife cried. He’s still coming though. Alpha squad locked."*
*Brad: "Miller’s bringing the cooler. Jake, tell me you got the green light from the warden."*
Jake saw me looking at the screen. He snatched the phone, flipped it facedown, and jammed it between his thigh and the emergency brake. He didn't say a single word.
When we pulled into our driveway in Lakewood, the afternoon sun was hitting the front porch. The hanging ferns I had planted three weeks ago were thriving, green and lush against the white siding. This was our sanctuary. We had bought this fixer-upper three years ago, sanding the hardwood floors until our knees bled, painting every baseboard, scraping popcorn ceilings until late into the night. We were supposed to be bringing our baby home to this porch.
I hauled myself out of the passenger seat, my ankles swollen to the width of my calves. By the time I reached the front door, Jake had already grabbed the mail and walked inside.
I found him in the spare bedroom—the room that was supposed to be his home office, but which had gradually become a staging ground for his gear. His large canvas duffel bag was open on the unmade daybed. Beside it lay three pairs of board shorts, four graphic tees, his hiking boots, and a row of electrolyte drink packets.
My breath stalled in my throat. "You already packed."
He didn't look up from folding a pair of jeans. "I started gathering stuff yesterday. Before you made this into a federal trial."
"Jake, please look at me."
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath, and turned around. The hostility was gone, replaced by a raw, naked panic that frightened me far more than his anger. His eyes were bloodshot. The skin beneath them was dark and bruised from exhaustion.
"Maya, I can’t breathe," he whispered, his chest heaving under his flannel shirt. "I wake up in the middle of the night, and I feel like there’s a six-hundred-pound slab of concrete sitting on my chest. I look at that nursery, and all I see is the end of me. The end of us."
"It’s not the end of us, Jake! It’s the beginning of our family!"
"That’s a hallmark card, Maya! That’s what people say because the alternative is admitting that you’re surrendering your entire identity to an infant who doesn't even know who you are! My dad gave up his music, he gave up his travel, he gave up everything he cared about when he had me and my brother, and look at him! He spent thirty years sitting in an armchair drinking Scotch until his liver gave out, hating every single choice he made!"
The ghost of his father. There it was. The shadow that had lurked in the corners of Jake’s psyche for as long as I had known him. Richard Miller had died at fifty-four, bitter, estranged, and pickled in cheap bourbon, leaving behind a box of unplayed guitars and a trail of broken promises. Jake had sworn on his father's grave he would never become him.
"You are not your father," I said, reaching out to touch his arm. My fingers brushed his sleeve, but he took an instinctive step backward, putting the duffel bag between us like a barbed-wire barricade.
"How do you know that?" his voice cracked. "How do you know I won’t look at Theo in five years and resent him for the fact that I never went anywhere, never saw anything, never lived without a leash around my neck? I need this trip, Maya. I need ten days to prove to myself that I still have a pulse. That I’m still Jake Miller before I become somebody’s dad."
"And what about me?" The tears finally spilled over, hot and scalded against my cheeks. "Who do I get to be, Jake? When do I get ten days in San Diego to figure out who Maya is? My body is literally being ripped apart from the inside out! I haven't slept on my stomach in seven months! I have to roll out of bed like a beached whale! I’m the one bleeding, dilating, and carrying this life, and you think you’re the one who needs a vacation from it?"
"It’s not a vacation! It’s—"
"It’s abandonment," I said, the word landing between us with the deafening weight of a dropped anvil.
His eyes widened, defensive pride instantly hardening his features again. "Don't you dare call it that. Abandonment? I pay eighty percent of the mortgage! I built that damn crib with my bare hands! I’ve been at every ultrasound! Brad’s right. You’re holding me hostage with a due date that is three weeks away."
"If you walk out that door on Friday," I said, my voice dropping to a terrifying, deadly calm that surprised even me, "do not expect me to be the person who welcomes you back."
May you like
Jake stared at me for three long seconds. His jaw clenched until a tendon bulged beneath his skin. Then, without saying another word, he zipped the canvas duffel bag with a violent, screeching yank, slung it over his shoulder, and walked past me into the hall.
***
