Chapter 5 - Ethan Began Remembering Different Things
Ethan slept in the guest room.
Not because he had decided his marriage was over.
Because he did not know how to lie beside Nora without asking the same questions all night.
At 2:15 a.m., Lily woke.
Ethan carried her downstairs and warmed a bottle.
The dark kitchen gave him too much room to remember.
His mother calling Lily “Nora’s little shadow.”
Marlene complaining whenever Nora’s parents visited.
Marlene once saying, “Babies shouldn’t replace the people who were here first.”
Ethan had laughed.
He had thought she meant grandparents deserved time too.
Now the sentence sounded entirely different.
Then he remembered the hospital.
The morning after Nora’s crisis, Marlene had pulled him aside near the elevators.
“Nora’s having a difficult adjustment,” she said.
Ethan had asked whether he should worry.
Marlene replied, “Don’t make it worse by interrogating her.”
So he hadn’t.
At the time, he thought his mother was protecting Nora.
Now he wondered whether Marlene had been protecting herself.
The next morning Ethan called Edward Hospital’s medical-records department.
They would not discuss Nora’s file with him.
They shouldn’t.
Nora signed the authorization herself.
“I want you to see all of it,” she said.
That surprised him.
They also contacted the hospital’s maternal mental-health clinic, where Nora had completed two follow-up visits after Lily’s birth.
The therapist was still practicing there.
Getting records would take time.
There would be no convenient envelope containing every answer.
So Ethan did something he should have done months earlier.
He asked Nora what she remembered.
Not what Marlene had told him.
Not what a single paragraph suggested.
Nora described the social worker sitting beside her bed.
She described admitting she felt trapped and terrified.
She described saying she loved Lily and simultaneously feared she had made a mistake becoming a mother.
Then she said something Ethan had never known.
“I asked them not to discharge me until I felt safe.”
Ethan looked at her.
A woman trying to abandon her baby would have been asking to leave.
Nora had asked to stay.
The meaning of the hospital document began to shift.
Then Nora gave him another detail.
“Marlene wasn’t just outside the room listening.”
“What do you mean?”
“She spoke to the social worker before I did.”
Ethan felt cold.
May you like
“About what?”
“I never found out.”
