Part 2: The Silence That Followed
On the first day home, I told myself Ellie was adjusting. We had brought Bobby into a house that had spent months making room for him, and maybe the reality of his arrival felt bigger and stranger than she had expected. On the second day, when she sat through dinner staring at her plate and never once looked toward the bassinet in the corner, I told myself it was still just a phase. By the third day, when I found her standing in the nursery doorway as if there were an invisible line she could not cross, the excuses started sounding thin even to me.
What unsettled me most was not indifference. It was watchfulness.
Every time I caught Ellie near the baby, she was studying him with an expression that did not belong to jealousy or stubbornness. She looked wary. Focused. Like someone trying to solve a problem nobody else had noticed yet. Jack kept insisting she needed a week. He said new babies were strange, that older siblings sometimes had odd reactions, that she would come around when the shock wore off. I wanted to believe him because the alternative was harder to name. It didn’t feel like resentment. It didn’t even feel emotional, not really. It felt observational, and that somehow frightened me more.
Late one night, after I had finally gotten Bobby to sleep and was standing in the kitchen trying to eat a piece of toast with one hand while holding my abdomen with the other, I said, “This doesn’t feel like jealousy, Jack.”
He leaned against the counter, tired enough that his whole body seemed to sag in place. “What else could it be?”
I had no answer then.
Two days later, Ellie gave me one.
