At exactly 2:00 p.m., I opened the nursery under the conference room table because I missed my wife and newborn daughter.
That was the whole reason.
Not suspicion.
Just the weak, guilty kind of love that hits you when you are sitting in a suit under fluorescent lights while your wife is home thirteen days after nearly dying to give birth to your child.
The room smelled like burnt coffee, printer paper, and the expensive hand soap from the executive bathroom down the hall.
A senior partner was talking about quarterly numbers, tapping his pen against a binder like every second had a price tag attached to it.
This was the most important meeting of my career.
Six months of late nights had led to that table, that presentation, that one chance to prove I could move from the outside edge of the company into the circle where decisions were made.
I had slept four hours the night before.
Claire had slept less.
She was still moving through the house like every step had to be negotiated with her body first.
Thirteen days earlier, I had stood beside a hospital bed while nurses moved too quickly and doctors used voices that were too calm, and I learned how terror can make an entire room shrink down to the pulse line on a monitor.
laire had lost too much blood.
For a while, nobody told me she was going to be fine.
Then she was.
Barely.
The hospital discharged her with warnings that sounded simple only if you did not love the person receiving them.
Rest.
No heavy lifting.
No scrubbing floors.
No stress if we could avoid it.
Watch for bleeding.
Call immediately if anything changes.
