And while I was clipping coupons and counting grocery receipts, Daniel was paying everybody’s restaurant bills.
Every time we went out with friends, he grabbed the check. Every single time. It made him feel good. Big. Generous. The guy everybody liked.
Meanwhile, our vacation savings account barely grew. We’d been promising the kids a trip to the beach for three summers in a row. Every year, there wasn’t enough.
“Could we discuss big expenses first?” I asked him once. In the kitchen. After he’d paid for a birthday dinner for twelve people.
“Emma,” he said. He said it in that patient voice, the one you’d use with a child. “I earn the money. I know what we can afford.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
It was always the end of the conversation.
So that was where we were, on that Saturday night at Bellamy’s. Eight years of permanent vacation jokes. Eight years of I earn the money.
And then Shut your mouth. You don’t earn a dime. In front of our friends.
On the drive home, Daniel talked about the restaurant.
How good his steak was. How the waiter had been a little slow. How Ben had ordered the lobster even though it was market price, which was very Ben of him. How he was thinking of taking a client there next month.
I didn’t say anything.
I looked out the window at the dark streets going by and counted the streetlights.
He didn’t notice I wasn’t talking. Or if he did, he didn’t say anything.
When we got home, I paid the babysitter. A teenager from down the street named Kayla. Forty dollars, out of my own little stash in the kitchen drawer. The stash I’d built up from returning things to stores and selling Lily’s outgrown clothes online.
Then I went upstairs to check on the kids.
Lily was asleep on her back with her arms flung over her head, the way she’d slept since she was a baby. Noah was asleep sideways across his bed, with one foot hanging off the edge and his stuffed shark, Bruce, clutched under his chin.
I fixed Noah so his foot was back on the mattress. I pulled Lily’s blanket up.
Daniel was already snoring by the time I came back to our bedroom.
I stood in the doorway and looked at him for a long time.
Then I went downstairs.
In the hall closet, on the very top shelf, behind the winter hats and the box of Christmas lights, there was an old canvas tote bag.
I hadn’t opened it in eight years.
Inside was my old work notebook. A thick black one, with a rubber band around it. The pages were full of my handwriting. Timelines. Vendor lists. Phone numbers of florists and caterers and DJs. Seating charts for weddings I’d planned for people I’d never see again. Little notes in the margins. Bride’s mother hates lilies. DO NOT order lilies.
I sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.
At the very back of the notebook, tucked inside the cover, was a business card.
Rachel Kim. Owner. Kim & Co. Events.
On the back, in Rachel’s big loopy handwriting, she’d written:
My door stays open. Always. — R.
Eight years earlier, on my last day at Bright Day Events, Rachel had walked me out to the parking lot.
It was raining a little. I was eight months pregnant with Lily. I was carrying a cardboard box with my desk plant and my coffee mug and a framed photo of Daniel and me.
Rachel hugged me right there by my car. Her earrings jingled.
“You’re really leaving?” she said.
“Daniel and I decided I’ll stay home with the baby,” I said. “At least for a few years.”
She held me at arm’s length and looked at me. She had that look, the one she used on clients who were about to make a terrible decision about their centerpieces.
“Then promise me something,” she said. “Promise me you won’t forget how talented you are.”
“Rachel,” I said, laughing. “I’m becoming a mother. Not dying.”
“Becoming a mother doesn’t mean you stop being Emma,” she said. She pressed something into my hand. Her card. “I’m starting my own company next year. Kim and Company. Write that down. My door stays open.”
Then she hugged me again, and went back inside, and I drove home in the rain, crying a little, with my desk plant on the passenger seat.
