Chapter 5 - Sunday Morning Armageddon
Carter did not sleep.
Bedtime on Saturday night had been an unmitigated disaster that lasted until nearly midnight.
Without Elena's methodical routine—the warm bath with lavender oil, the specific storybooks assigned to each child, the meticulously hunted down "stuffed bunnies" without which sleep was deemed impossible—the bedtime process had resembled an uprising in a maximum-security prison.
Noah had hidden inside a wardrobe to avoid brushing his teeth. Maya had refused to sleep in her room because Chloe was crying, and Chloe had cried because she claimed the shadows on her wall looked like spiders. By the time Carter had collapsed onto the sofa in the living room at 1:15 AM—too dirty and exhausted to even climb the stairs to his own bed—he felt as though he had run an ultra-marathon through wet cement.
At 4:45 AM, a sharp thumb jabbed directly into his eye socket.
"Daddy. I'm wet," a tiny voice whispered.
Carter bolted upright, gasping in pain, his hand flying to his throbbing eye. Chloe was standing beside the couch in her pajamas, looking miserable. Behind her, baby Sam was already rattling the bars of his crib upstairs, his early-morning cries echoing down the stairwell like an air-raid siren.
The sun hadn't even broken the horizon. The world outside was pitch-black.
"Oh, God," Carter rasped, his throat raw. "Please, just two more hours."
"I peed through my pull-up," Chloe whimpered, shifting uncomfortably. "It's cold."
Groaning like an eighty-year-old man, Carter hauled his stiff, aching body off the cushions. Every muscle in his lower back screamed in protest. His golf-honed posture had completely collapsed.
For the next two hours, Carter lived through the invisible shift that Elena performed three hundred and sixty-five days a year before he even opened his eyes.
He stripped Chloe’s bed, scrubbed her mattress with disinfectant wipes he found under the sink, and ran a load of laundry, staring blankly at the washing machine's dial, completely baffled by the difference between "Delicates" and "Casual Perm-Press." Upstairs, Sam’s diaper had leaked entirely up his back, requiring an immediate, slippery, terrifying bath in the sink while the infant squirmed like an oiled eel, nearly sliding from Carter’s soapy grasp twice.
By 7:30 AM, Leo and Lucas were awake and demanding breakfast.
"I'm making scrambled eggs," Carter announced through gritted teeth, desperately trying to keep control.
"I don't like runny eggs," Lucas stated, sitting at the counter.
"Then they won't be runny!" Carter snapped.
Ten minutes later, the eggs were dry, brown, and rubbery. Lucas took one bite, gagged dramatically, and refused to touch the plate.
"Mom makes cinnamon toast on Sundays," Leo pointed out, his tone dripping with quiet judgment. "And she packs our bags for soccer practice. We have a game at ten, Dad. Did you wash our jerseys?"
Carter froze, a spatula dripping with yellow grease held mid-air.
"Soccer?" he whispered.
"Yeah. The blue jerseys. Coach Henderson said if we're late again, we sit on the bench."
Carter stumbled into the laundry room. The washing machine was mid-cycle, humming loudly. Through the circular glass door, he saw a swirling vortex of soaked, soapy clothes—including Chloe’s bedsheets, two red kitchen towels, and the boys' white-and-blue soccer jerseys.
He had washed them together in hot water.
When Carter pulled the jerseys out, his stomach dropped into his shoes. The pristine white fabric was now a patchy, mottled shade of violently bright flamingo pink.
"I can't wear that!" Leo yelled from the doorway, his eyes wide with horror. "The other kids will laugh at me! Dad, what did you do?!"
"It was an accident!" Carter shouted back, his voice cracking with hysterical exhaustion. "It's just a color! Real men wear pink, Leo!"
"I'm not going!" Leo threw his water bottle across the room. It struck the pantry door with a loud thud, leaving a fresh dent in the white paneling.
Carter sank onto a basket of unfolded towels, buried his face in his stained hands, and began to hyperventilate.
He looked at the digital clock on the wall: 8:45 AM.
Elena had been doing this every single day for nearly a decade. She handled the sports schedules, the laundry temperatures, the emotional meltdowns, the meal preferences, the night terrors, the teething, and the cleaning—often while carrying a child on her hip—and she did it seamlessly enough that Carter had genuinely believed it required no effort at all.
He had honestly thought she stayed home all day watching daytime talk shows and drinking coffee while the kids played quietly in the background.
*“You're just always tired and no fun anymore.”*
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The memory of his own voice from twenty-four hours earlier made him physically sick. He remembered the look in Elena's eyes when he had said it—not anger, but a profound, soul-crushing defeat. He had taken a vibrant, brilliant woman, buried her alive under a mountain of domestic labor he refused to touch, and then mocked her for suffocating.
***
