I just stared at him. After everything we'd gone through to have those babies, those words hit considerably harder than I expected them to.
⸻
But I didn't argue. I didn't ask him to stay.
I let him walk out the door.
⸻
The first night alone, I cried more than I had in the entire six months since the girls were born, sitting on the nursery floor at two in the morning with both babies finally quiet, working through exactly how alone I actually was inside my own marriage.
⸻
By the second morning, something in me had started shifting. I called my mother, something I'd avoided doing too often over the past six months, not wanting to admit how much help I actually needed.
⸻
"I'm coming over," she said, before I'd even finished explaining. "Don't argue with me."
⸻
She stayed the following two days, and having her there, competent and calm and genuinely present in a way Carter hadn't managed to be in weeks, gave me the space to actually think clearly for the first time since the twins were born.
⸻
"How long has it been like this?" my mother asked me, folding tiny onesies at my kitchen table while both girls napped upstairs.
⸻
"Since they were born, mostly," I admitted. "It got worse gradually. I kept telling myself it would even out once we found our rhythm."
⸻
"Vivian," my mother said carefully, "I don't think a rhythm is the problem here."
⸻
On the third day, I called a family lawyer, a careful, direct woman named Priscilla Nash who a coworker had recommended years earlier for an entirely unrelated reason I'd long since forgotten.
⸻
"I'm not calling to file anything today," I told her honestly. "I need to understand my actual options. What separation would look like. What I'd be entitled to, if it came to that."
⸻
"That's a smart first step," Priscilla said. "A lot of people wait until they're in crisis to ask these questions. It's better to know the landscape before you actually need to use it."
⸻
