Daniel stood in the doorway the whole time, smiling.
He never once stepped inside the room.
I noticed it. I filed it away as nothing. Looking back, it wasn’t nothing. It was the first of several small cracks I walked right past because I didn’t want to see them.
Claire got more protective as the pregnancy went on, which made sense to me — she’d text me at eleven at night just to ask if I’d felt the baby kick, like she needed proof twice a day that this was really happening. That, I understood.
What I didn’t understand, not then, was Daniel.
During ultrasounds, he started checking his phone constantly. More than once he angled the screen away from Claire when it lit up, quick, like a reflex. I asked him once, half-joking, if something was going on at work.
“Nothing,” he said, too fast. “Just busy.”
