Chapter 159

Chapter 159
Ethan

The headache announced itself with the familiar pressure behind my right eye, and I reached automatically for the prescription bottle I now kept in my desk drawer. The pills were supposed to take the edge off, make the symptoms manageable enough that I could function normally. Most days, they worked. Some days—like today—they barely dulled the throbbing.

I swallowed two tablets dry and waited for the relief that would come in twenty minutes, or thirty, or not at all.

The plan had taken shape gradually over the past week, coalescing from raw panic into something resembling coherent thought. It wasn't complicated, really. The simplest strategies rarely were.

I would give Mia her exhibition. I would be there for every moment of it—the final preparations, the opening night, the triumph she had earned through years of being overlooked and dismissed. I would watch her shine the way she was always meant to shine, and I would make sure she remembered me as the husband who finally showed up when it mattered.

And then I would start to pull away.

Slowly. Carefully. In ways she would interpret as work stress or emotional regression rather than what it actually was. A man trying to make himself easy to forget. A man trying to loosen his grip before it was pried away.

The Swiss clinic was the final piece. Dr. Müller had come recommended by three separate specialists, and his success rate with procedures like mine was among the highest in the world. Seventy-three percent, according to the literature. Better odds than many things I had gambled on in business.

But twenty-seven percent was not nothing.

Twenty-seven percent meant nearly one in three patients didn't walk out of that operating room unchanged. Some didn't walk out at all. Others emerged diminished, dependent, a shadow of who they had been. I had seen what that kind of prolonged uncertainty did to families. I had watched Mia endure it with Eleanor—the months of bedside vigils, the slow erosion of hope, the way she had poured herself into caring for a dying woman instead of building her own life.

I would not do that to her again.

If the surgery failed, I would be in Switzerland. Far enough away that she could grieve without being consumed by it. Far enough that the children would not have to watch their father deteriorate. Far enough that the memory she carried would be this version of me—present, attentive, finally worthy of her—rather than whatever I might become.

Let her remember me like this, I thought. Let her remember someone worth mourning, even if only briefly.

And then let her move on.

---

Mia arrived at eleven. I heard her voice in the foyer—greeting Rosa, asking about the twins—and felt the familiar constriction in my chest that her presence always triggered now.

Remember this, I told myself as her footsteps approached my study. Remember how she sounds when she's happy. Remember the particular cadence of her voice when she's excited about something.

"Working on a Saturday?" She appeared in the doorway, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, her camera bag slung over one shoulder. She looked impossibly beautiful in the mundane morning light—not glamorous, not polished, just real. The kind of beauty that revealed itself gradually, that deepened with familiarity rather than fading.

I had spent two years not seeing it. Now I couldn't look away.

"Just finishing up some paperwork," I said, closing the laptop with what I hoped was casual indifference. "The European markets are open. Time zones wait for no man."

She crossed the room and dropped a kiss on my forehead—a gesture so domestic, so unself-conscious, that it made my throat tighten. Six months ago, she would never have touched me so easily. Six months ago, I hadn't deserved to be touched at all.

"The babies are awake," she said. "Rosa's changing Lily. I thought maybe we could take them to the park later, if you're free."

"I'm free." I stood, catching her hand before she could turn away. "I'm always free for you now."

Something flickered across her face—surprise, maybe, or the lingering wariness that two years of neglect had earned me. But then she smiled, and the wariness receded, and I filed the expression away with all the others I was collecting: Mia smiling at me like she trusts me. Mia looking at me like she might be happy.

"You're different lately," she said softly. "Good different. But different."

I'm dying, I thought. Or I might be. And I'm trying to give you everything I should have given you from the beginning, compressed into whatever time I have left.

"I'm trying to be the husband you deserve," I said instead. "Better late than never."

She studied me for a long moment, and I saw the question forming in her eyes—the same question that had been hovering at the edges of our conversations for weeks. Why now? What changed? What aren't you telling me?

But she didn't ask. She had decided to trust me, and I was counting on that trust to buy me enough time to complete what I needed to do.

"Come on," she said finally, tugging my hand. "Your children are wondering where their father is."

I let her lead me down the hallway to the nursery, and for a few precious hours, I allowed myself to forget about Swiss clinics and trust modifications and the countdown running silently in the back of my mind.

Three more weeks, I thought, watching Mia lift Leo from his crib, watching Lily's face light up at the sight of her mother. Three more weeks of this.

I was going to make every single one of them count.

---

The park was crowded with weekend families—fathers pushing strollers, mothers chasing toddlers, the universal chaos of young children and exhausted parents. We found a bench near the playground, the twins arranged in their double stroller, and sat watching the controlled mayhem unfold around us.

"I used to think I'd be one of those mothers," Mia said quietly. "The ones who make it look easy. Matching outfits, organic snacks, educational activities scheduled down to the minute."

"And instead?"

"Instead I'm happy if everyone's dressed and no one's eaten anything poisonous." She laughed, but there was something wistful in it. "I used to have such specific ideas about what motherhood would look like. What marriage would look like. None of it turned out the way I expected."

My fault, I thought. Most of that is my fault.