I took the bottle, and Vanessa sat back down to her food.

“Hey, do you wanna watch a movie?” she asked. “Here? After we eat? I feel like I’m in solitary confinement. I am bored out of my mind, and I just wanna hang out with somebody.”

Now that I’d torn off the Band-Aid and come over, I realized I wouldn’t mind staying. I’d officially had about all I could handle of the Keller transcripts for one day. And frankly I didn’t love the idea that I’d be going back to my empty apartment in a few minutes to sit around dwelling on the Rachel/Mom/Richard situation until I got tired enough to go to sleep. Why not.

“Sure,” I said, looking at Grace but talking to Vanessa.

“Yay! So what do you want to watch?”

“Whatever you want is fine,” I said, smiling down at Grace. She was falling asleep while she ate, nodding off with milk pooling around the sides of her little mouth.

She was so small. Trusting.

I’d never really been sure I wanted kids. I’d always been worried I’d screw it up. That I’d somehow fail them. I hadn’t really had a good childhood myself. My parents had a tumultuous marriage. Then Dad left, and I’d practically raised myself from that point on. I hadn’t exactly been shown a good example.

I rubbed Grace’s tiny pink cheek with a knuckle.

But maybe being a father was like this. Just being there and doing what needed to be done, one small task at a time until they added up to something good.

Maybe if you started at the beginning and stuck around…

Vanessa picked up the remote. “I know exactly what we should watch. You cannot go wrong with The Office, even though you’ve probably seen it a million times.”

“I’ve never seen it,” I said.

She blanched. “You’ve never— Are you serious?” She looked at me like I was crazy. “Where have you been? How do you understand memes?”

“Memes are not really a large part of my day-to-day operations.”

She blinked at me. “Oh my God. This is…Okay, you know what?” She waved a hand. “We’re gonna set this right. We’re going to start now so that starting tomorrow you won’t have to walk around and tell people you’ve never seen The Office like some kind of lunatic.”

I laughed. Again.

* * *

Three hours later, I was standing to stretch. The TV was asking us if we were still watching, and I hoped we were. I liked the show—and Vanessa was easy to be around. She was one of those people who just sort of rolled with things. The kind you didn’t have to work at hanging out with.

Grace spit out her pacifier, and I leaned down over her swing and put it back in her mouth.

I’d changed my first diaper today. I was here, might as well help give Vanessa a break. She showed me how to do it, and I took the next changing off her hands.

Vanessa was holding Harry Puppins.

About an hour into the show my conscience got the better of me and I went to go get him. I figured as long as someone was holding him, he wouldn’t have any accidents. Vanessa had been more than happy to do it. Apparently she loved dogs.

He bit her when she picked him up.

He didn’t have any teeth. It didn’t hurt, but it was the thought that counts. I was worried it would put her off, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She said he was like an angry potato with legs.

“So is this your bedroom?” she asked, pointing to the wall at the head of her bed.

“Yup.”

The headboard of my bed was pushed up against the same wall. We were separated at night by only about a foot of bricks and plaster. It was a little weird to think about.

I had a retroactive twinge of relief that Vanessa hadn’t heard me having sex with Rachel through the wall. I didn’t realize they were so thin.

Vanessa had been renting this unit for only three months. When Rachel came out in September and October, we’d stayed in the hotel her company put her up in. And this trip she was on her period and didn’t want to have sex. That was her preference, not mine. I couldn’t care less what time of the month it was. But now I wondered if she’d been honest about that excuse. Probably not. She must have come out here knowing she wanted to break up with me and she was trying to make some space between us.

We hadn’t slept with each other since early October. It was almost December.

I should have known something was wrong.

I couldn’t stop looking for all the signs. Scouring the last few months for red flags or things I should have picked up on. We were both busy. She was a software engineer and just like me she worked long days and irregular hours, so not being able to reach her wasn’t exactly eyebrow raising. But it was hard not to be angry at myself for not noticing something wasn’t right.

I had to shake it off and try to focus on something else before I let it drag my mood back down.

I looked around Vanessa’s studio. She had a wall of art. “That’s a nice photograph,” I said, nodding at a framed picture. It was a copper-colored dog on the shore of a lake. Looked like up north.

She closed the space between us to stand next to me. “It’s not a photograph. It’s a painting.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really.”

“Yeah. I got it at a MADD fund-raiser. I had to pledge a fortune for it. It’s a Sloan Monroe.”

“Oh, Jaxon Waters’s wife. I know her,” I said, studying it.

“You know her?” she said to the side of my face. “How?”

“My cousin Josh is married to her best friend. He lives next door to them in Ely. And I went on a date with her once.”

“Bullshit.”

I looked at her and her eyes were wide. I pulled out my cell phone and went to Instagram. I found Sloan’s private page and handed her the phone.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, scrolling through the pictures of Sloan and Jaxon, my cousin and his family intermingled in the feed, sitting around a campfire, at the table for Thanksgiving, playing with each other’s kids.

“This is so cool! You just got cooler by association,” she said, smiling up at me. “I’m a total fangirl. I love her—she is so talented. There’s like a three-year waiting list for one of these.”

“I can see why,” I said, looking back at the artwork. This couldn’t have been cheap. She must make pretty good money doing this vlogger thing to afford fine wines and a Sloan Monroe.