Chapter 1 - The Stripped Nursery
Six days before my due date, I came home and found the nursery torn apart.
The crib mattress was on the floor. Every drawer had been emptied. Baby clothes were stuffed into cardboard boxes. My nine-year-old stepson, Eli, stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard.
“Eli, what did you do?”
He looked at my stomach. “Now maybe the baby can’t come yet.”
Then I realized my hospital bag was missing.
For a second, I couldn’t speak. I was thirty-nine weeks pregnant, carrying two grocery bags that suddenly felt like they weighed fifty pounds each, staring at the room Drew and I had spent three months putting together.
One side of the crib sagged where someone had tried to loosen the hardware. The little wooden mobile Drew had hung over it was gone. The changing table drawers were open. Tiny pajamas, blankets, diapers, wipes—everything had disappeared. Three taped cardboard boxes sat against the wall.
“Where is everything?” I asked.
Eli shrugged. “Packed.”
“Why?”
His eyes dropped to my stomach again. “I told you.”
“No. You said maybe the baby can’t come yet. What does that mean?”
He pressed his lips together.
I set the groceries down in the hallway before I dropped them. “Eli.”
He turned away. That hurt more than I expected. Before I got pregnant, Eli and I had been good. Not movie-commercial good. He didn’t call me Mom. I never asked him to. But I knew how he liked his grilled cheese cut, he knew I hated raisins, and Thursday nights were ours because Drew worked late and Eli had somehow decided I made better tacos.
Then the pregnancy got farther along. Something changed. He stopped asking questions about the baby. Stopped coming into the nursery. Stopped sitting next to me on the couch if the baby was kicking.
I had told myself not to take it personally. He was nine. He had been an only child his entire life. Of course this was hard.
Standing in that empty room, I ran out of excuses.
The front door opened downstairs. “Megan?”
Drew. I heard his keys hit the entry table.
“Upstairs.”
Something in my voice must have scared him because he came up fast. He stopped in the nursery doorway. “What happened?”
I looked at Eli. “Ask him.”
Drew took in the mattress, the half-loosened crib rail, the boxes. Then he looked at his son. “Eli.”
No answer.
“What did you do?”
“I packed it.”
Drew stared at him. “You packed the baby’s entire room?”
Eli’s face hardened. “She doesn’t need it yet.”
My anger flared. “She’s due in six days.”
“That doesn’t mean she has to come.”
I actually stepped backward.
Drew’s voice changed. “Enough.”
Eli flinched. Drew almost never raised his voice with him.
“You do not get to decide whether this baby belongs in our house.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You emptied her room.”
“I didn’t say she doesn’t belong here!”
“Then what are you saying?”
Eli’s eyes filled, but he blinked hard and looked at the floor.
Drew exhaled through his nose. “Where’s the car seat?”
Silence.
“Eli.”
“Garage.”
“The stroller?”
“Garage.”
I turned. My bedroom door was open across the hall. Something looked wrong. It took me a second. Then I realized what was missing.
I had packed my hospital bag two weeks earlier. It had been sitting beside the dresser. Blue canvas. Impossible to miss.
It was gone.
I walked into the bedroom anyway, checking behind the door, beside the closet, under the bench. Nothing.
“Drew.”
He came in. “My bag is gone.”
His face tightened. We both looked at Eli.
“Where is Megan’s hospital bag?” Drew asked.
Eli went very still. That was the first moment my anger turned into something else.
“Where is it?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Eli.”
“No.”
Drew stared at him. “No?”
“I’m not telling you.”
I pressed one hand beneath my stomach. The baby shifted. For weeks, I had worried that Eli was jealous. Now I was thinking about labor. About getting to the hospital. About a nine-year-old who had deliberately hidden the one bag I would need when it started.
Drew stepped toward him. “Go to your room.”
“I—”
“Now.”
Eli ran past us. His bedroom door slammed.
Drew rubbed both hands over his face. “I’m sorry.”
“What is happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You’ve been telling me for three months he’s adjusting.”
“I thought he was.”
I went downstairs because my back was beginning to ache. That was when I noticed the calendar.
May you like
We kept a big paper calendar on the refrigerator because Drew refused to use the shared app I had set up. September was still there. Except one strip of paper had been torn out. The week with my due date. The red circle Drew had drawn around Tuesday was gone.
I stood staring at the jagged edge. For the first time, I stopped wondering whether Eli was jealous of the baby. I started wondering what exactly he was trying to stop.
