Mara was still there. She stared at him.
“You bought your wife a surveillance device?”
“I bought my wife a tool.”
“Take it back,” I said.
He ignored me and opened the refrigerator.
“Where did this soup come from?”
“I restored the meal delivery.”
He shut the refrigerator harder than necessary. “So now we’re paying twice because you refuse to try the plan?”
“We are paying twice because you canceled food without asking me.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You accessed my medical portal.”
His back went still.
Mara looked from him to me.
“You canceled my physical therapy referral,” I continued. “You sent a message pretending to be me.”
Grant turned around. “I canceled one appointment because it conflicted with the assessment.”
“You told the clinic I had chosen private coaching instead.”
“It was easier than explaining the whole program.”
“You mean your program.”
“Our program.”
“There is no ‘our’ in something I did not choose.”
For a moment, the only sound in the room was the gentle hum of the bottle warmer.
Then Grant looked at Mara.
“Could you give my wife and me some privacy?”
Mara folded her arms. “Could you stop making decisions about my sister’s body while she is feeding your children?”
“This is a marriage issue.”
“It became a family issue when you invited your family to shame her.”
I touched Mara’s arm. “I’m okay.”
She studied my face, then gathered her purse.
“Call me,” she said. “For any reason.”
After she left, Grant took his laptop bag upstairs and locked himself in the home office.
He did not come down for dinner. He did not help with the seven-o’clock bottles. At eight, he texted me from the second floor asking if I had seen his gray charging cable.
At nine, after all three babies were asleep, I went looking for it—not for him, but because the home office also held our printer and filing cabinet.
Grant had left the door open when he went to shower.
His laptop was locked. The filing cabinet was not.
The blue hospital folder lay beneath a stack of ForgeWell brochures in the bottom drawer.
Inside was my original recovery plan.
