My name is Olivia, I’m thirty-two, and if you asked me what I do, I’d still say “caregiver”—even though, for three years, my world had been compressed into the radius of a stroller, a sink, and a little girl’s arms around my neck.
I grew up wanting to be useful. I took the vocational program straight out of high school, passed the licensure exam, and started working in elder care at twenty. It was exhausting—lifting, changing, listening, being present for goodbyes—but when a patient squeezed my hand and whispered, “Thank you, sweetheart,” the fatigue would pull back like a tide. Usefulness, I learned, could buoy you. It could also drown you if you forgot to come up for air.
I met Liam at a mixer a coworker dragged me to. He was the handsome, quiet type until we walked to the station and discovered he wasn’t aloof, just shy. He laughed the way shy men do when they realize they are safe: freely, almost boyishly, relieved. We started dating. We married a year later, and the day after we moved into our rental, a friend pulled me aside and said, “You know he was seeing someone else when he started seeing you, right?” I felt the floor tilt.
He cried when I confronted him. He said he had broken it off. He said he’d chosen me. He said, “That was before you.” I told myself we all make mistakes in our twenties. I told myself I was the woman he’d grow with. It became the first story I learned to tell myself because it was what I needed to believe.
For a while, our life fit the brochure. On our days off, we sat shoulder to shoulder on bleachers at baseball games and yelled for teams we didn’t know the names of an hour before. After a game, on a whim, we bought a sports lottery ticket for the first time from a little booth tucked beside a souvenir stand. The numbers hit a small prize—just enough to send us giggling to a diner for pie and cheap coffee—and it became a running joke: if my horoscope said Aries was lucky or if the cashier gave us the right kind of smile, we’d buy one ticket, not the kind that asks you to be foolish, the kind that lets you be hopeful for a minute.
Year four, we had finally started talking about what would happen if our wanting became waiting. Fertility treatments were an option our wallets and our hearts were debating when I took a test in a bathroom with bad fluorescent lighting and nearly cried at the second faint line. At the obstetrician the next day, the doctor pointed at the tiny flicker on the screen and said, “Congratulations.”
I texted Liam in the waiting room: I’m pregnant. Fifth week. Once we’re past the first trimester, let’s tell everyone. He responded in under a minute: Really? That’s great. Thank you. Be careful getting home. He was not a fast texter. That day, he was.
Our dinner that night tasted like listening. We played the old game: boy or girl? Liam said he’d be happy either way but joked that he’d probably cry the day a daughter got married. I said if we had a daughter, I’d be able to talk to her about love; if we had a son, Liam could teach him to make pancakes on Sundays. Neither of us said the thing we both desired more than anything else: a healthy baby and a healthy me.
Pregnancy was both hard and lovely. My back ached, and my ankles figured out how to be ankles and water balloons at the same time. I learned the absolute best way to sleep is “however you don’t cry.” I also learned that when Liam rubbed my feet without being asked, I could forgive almost anything.
We named our daughter Charlotte when they placed her on my chest—a perfect stranger whose face already lived in the room of my heart. We were going to be okay, I told myself. We had made a person. We would remake ourselves into the people she needed us to be.
And then the seams started to split.
Before I got pregnant, we both worked full-time. That came with an obvious fairness: if two people bring home paychecks, two people split bathrooms and dishes and laundry and all of the domestic tasks that no one pays you for. After I gave birth, the caregiving job with twelve-hour shifts and nights broke my body’s math. I quit, telling myself it was temporary. “You were home today, weren’t you?” Liam started to say when he wanted to remind me of my new job. “Why didn’t you even clean the house? You must have had free time.”
Free time, I wanted to say, does not exist when a newborn believes you and only you have the magical object she calls “milk.” Instead, I adjusted. Again.
Housework partners became housework verdicts. “This is bland,” he said, pushing back from the table after a bite I had cut into polite pieces. “I can’t eat this.” When I told him I was trying to cook with less salt because his blood pressure readings in the company health screening had creeped up, he told me to shut up. He started to use words I had never heard directed at me. Useless. Stupid. “If I hadn’t married you, no one would have picked up a woman like you,” he said one night, half drunk on his own contempt.
He was gentle toward Charlotte only when other people were watching. “Daddy, look,” she said once, at three years old, holding up a purple crayon drawing that looked exactly like a dragon if you were the sort of person who loves dragons. “So what?” he said, eyes never leaving his phone.
He could be charming when he wanted to be. At a friend’s wedding, he told our table, “Olivia’s a perfect wife. Best cooking, best laundry,” and our friends smiled at me with envy I did not know where to put. At home, he was a different person. On his days off, he left in the morning, came home smell of cologne and bars in the early hours, and if I asked, he said where he went was none of my business. “Be grateful an elite like me brings money home,” he said, and I learned that a sentence can render you invisible even while you are physically in the room.
Why didn’t I leave? The short answer: Charlotte. The longer answer: fear. I had a little girl with a laugh like sunshine and an appetite like curiosity. As a full-time housewife, could I give her what she deserved? Could I find a job fast enough? Could I afford piano lessons if she wanted them, or college, or braces, or any of the million little things love becomes when it grows?
One afternoon, I saw, out of habit and nostalgia, a banner in the corner of the supermarket: Lucky Day. The lottery ticket booth, wrapped in red and gold paper, the way old wishes dress up to seem new. We used to buy tickets on silly days. We used to make lists of things we’d do if ten dollars turned into an impossible number. Something in me that had been folding itself smaller and smaller for years unfolded an inch. I bought one ticket. I put it in my pocket and then in a drawer and then, after Charlotte was asleep, I remembered to check it on my phone, expecting the usual: a free play, a coffee.
I blinked. The number didn’t make sense. I counted zeros: one, two, three, four, five, six. The screen said $6,000,000. I closed the browser because that is what your brain does when it thinks the world has played a trick on it. The next morning, I opened it again. It was still there.
Breathless, I called a lawyer from the list a friend had given me when her marriage ended. “If you bought the ticket after the marriage broke down and the divorce is due to his fault,” she said, “the winnings aren’t marital assets. You should be beyond careful—document everything, do not tell him, and file.”
I didn’t tell Liam.
Continued in the first c0mment ⬇️💬
