I thought surviving a difficult labor would be the hardest experience I would ever face. I had no idea that the real nightmare was waiting for me on the other side of it, and that everything I believed about my marriage would soon come crashing down.
I was 38 weeks pregnant, and I couldn’t walk past the nursery without breaking into a smile. My pregnancy had been going smoothly. Two heartbeats, two healthy scans, and two names carefully chosen and embroidered onto matching little blankets my sister, Rachel, had sent us.
I worked as a graphic designer and was already on maternity leave. Our suburban home seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the arrival of our two little boys.
My husband, Ryan, worked in finance. By all appearances, he was everything a woman could hope for in a father-to-be. He massaged my feet every night, patiently assembled the second crib on a Saturday in April after I had reminded him about it for three straight weeks, and did his best to make sure I was comfortable.
Although he had approached the crib assembly with his jaw clenched, as though someone had handed him an impossible tax return, I thought it was simply his way of handling stress.
My friends constantly reminded me how lucky I was.
“You picked a good one,” Rachel told me during a phone conversation one evening.
“I know,” I replied. “I really did.”
Still, there were little things I noticed but immediately convinced myself weren’t worth worrying about.
Ryan had started taking unusually long phone calls in the garage. Sometimes they lasted 40 minutes. Other times, nearly an hour. Whenever I asked who he had been speaking with, he would casually wave his hand as if the question were unimportant.
“Just work stuff, babe. You don’t want to hear about it.”
I usually let it go.
The subject of our babies’ names came up one Sunday afternoon while I was sitting on the couch, folding tiny onesies into neat little piles.
“So, Noah and Caleb,” I said. “You still love both names, right?”
“Caleb’s great,” Ryan answered, barely lifting his eyes from his phone.
“And Noah?”
He finally glanced up before returning his attention to the screen.
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever you want.”
I told myself he was exhausted. Perhaps the responsibility of becoming a father was getting to him. I had heard that major life changes could make people behave differently, and I found plenty of other explanations to keep myself from questioning him.
One evening, I caught Ryan looking at my belly from across the kitchen. There was something unusual about his expression, but I couldn’t quite identify it. I decided he must simply have been overwhelmed by the thought of becoming a father.