Then everything went dark.
The pain vanished, the noise faded, and it felt like I was drifting away. Somehow, I pulled myself back—maybe Ryan’s voice kept me grounded, or maybe it was sheer determination to meet our baby.
When I woke up hours later, the first thing I saw was Ryan leaning over me, completely drained. His eyes were swollen from crying, his hair a mess, and he looked as though he’d aged a decade overnight.
That’s when the nurse brought our daughter over. Lily.
She weighed seven pounds, two ounces—pure perfection.
“Do you want to hold her?” I asked Ryan.
He nodded and carefully took Lily from the nurse. But as he looked down at her, something changed. The joy on his face faded into something I couldn’t quite place, like a shadow passing over him. After a long moment, he handed her back to me.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, though his voice sounded strained. “Just like her mom.”
In the hospital, I brushed off his odd behavior as exhaustion. We’d both been through something traumatic.
But once we were home, it only got worse.
Ryan avoided looking directly at Lily when he held her. He took care of her—feeding her, changing her—but his gaze hovered somewhere above her face, as if he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes.
“I need to check the mail,” or “I should start dinner,” he’d say.
The real warning sign appeared about two weeks after we got home. I started waking in the middle of the night to an empty bed and the soft click of the front door closing.
The first time, I told myself he just needed air or was checking something outside—new parent nerves, I assumed.
By the fifth night, I knew something was deeply wrong.
“Ryan, where were you last night?” I asked him over breakfast, trying to keep my voice casual.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, his gaze glued to his coffee. “Went for a drive.”
That was the moment I made a choice that changed everything. If my husband was slipping out every night while I stayed home alone with our newborn, I was going to learn exactly where he was going.
Continue reading…
