Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 33: Now

The house feels dead when I return. Tentatively, I step through the back door and into the empty kitchen. Lines of afternoon sunlight steal in through the window blinds and cast stripes across the wall. Three tins of powder blue paint are stacked in the corner by the kitchen door. The laundry from the morning is folded neatly on one of the chairs.

Reaching the end of the table, I notice a notecard propped on top of the pile of folded laundry. Creased down the middle, it stands on its edges. A little tent bearing news I don't want to read.

Time seems to slow down as I pick it up. Owen's distinctive, left-handed printing glares back at me in blue ink. His note is brief:

I'm sorry to leave you with Thomas but I can't be in this house anymore. I hope you can understand.

Love, O

Owen is gone.

I feel his absence immediately, everywhere. It's not the same absence as when he's at the office, or out running errands for a couple of hours.

He's not gone in a way that ends.

I sit down on the chair behind me, hard.

He couldn't even bother to sign his full name. My vision blurs as the anger I've been ignoring since Thomas's traumatic birth overflows.

The vagueness of his note infuriates me, but not as much as the fact that he left today. On November 13th. The day before our fifth wedding anniversary. No wonder he's been avoiding a conversation about how we're going to celebrate. We're not going to celebrate. I wonder if Owen was ever planning to.

It hasn't even been a year since I was attacked at the Dolans' party. Owen knows that whatever happened that night was so terrible, my brain forced me to forget it. And since then, things have only gotten worse. The pregnancy. Paula's suicide. Thomas's premature arrival.

After everything we've been through this past year, how could Owen abandon me now? How could he just leave so abruptly, when Thomas is only five months old? I've never needed his support more, but he chose to leave me with the baby and his fucking mother.

At the same time, in some corner of my raging heart, I understand.

Really, it comes down to Then and Now. Then, even with all the circumstances surrounding my pregnancy, Owen was my best friend. He listened to me, held me, and supported my decision-making the best way he knew how, for the most part. The Owen I know and love never would have left me on the day before our anniversary.

Now, after Thomas's birth, he's been different.

And I've been different, too. We used to like to sit in silence together. Now, just being near me seems to make him uncomfortable and he leaves the room as soon as he has an excuse.

But I haven't known what to talk about with him, anyway. It breaks my heart that over the past five months I've been far too distracted to even attempt to understand what all of this must be like for Owen.

It's not that I haven't been interested in Owen and whatever's going on in his life, necessarily. I just haven't been interested in much of anything at all, besides getting to the bottom of how my baby ended up in the Dolans' shed in the middle of the night, and who shut us in there and grabbed me by the arms, and whether any of that even happened.

And why my missing earring was hidden in the dirt. If I'd been able to lead Diana over to the shed, if she'd found the earring there herself, then maybe she could have corroborated my story. But now, that chance is lost forever.

Owen doesn't want any part of solving that mystery. In fact, whenever I've brought it up to him, he just pulls away from me even more.

Inviting Diana to live with us was supposed to help, I think, but her presence has only become another knot, yanking the tension in the house tighter and tighter.