At six-thirty that evening, I came home.

My feet hurt. My head was spinning with names and dates and vendor lists. I’d spent eight hours learning Rachel’s booking software and sitting in on three client calls and taking notes until my hand cramped.

I was exhausted.

And I felt more alive than I had in years.

I walked into the kitchen.

Lily and Noah were sitting at the table. Eating cereal.

“Where’s dinner?” I said.

Daniel was on the couch in the living room, with his tie off and his laptop open. He looked up and shrugged.

“Forgot the groceries,” he said. “Cereal’s food.”

Noah raised his spoon in the air. Milk dripped down his arm.

“Daddy says breakfast can be dinner!” he shouted happily.

“Occasionally,” I agreed. I kissed the top of his head. “Tomorrow, let’s try some vegetables, okay?”

“Vegetables are breakfast too,” Noah said. “If you believe.”

I looked at Daniel.

He sighed and closed his laptop.

“You’re enjoying this,” he said.

“Did you update the shopping list?” I asked. “Like it says on the schedule? We’re out of milk. Noah’s using the last of it.”

He hadn’t.

Tuesday brought a different disaster.

I was upstairs, changing out of my work clothes, when I heard him yelling from the basement.

“EMMA!”

I went down the basement stairs. Daniel was standing in front of the washing machine, holding up one of his work shirts.

It used to be white.

It was pink now. A soft, even, very cheerful pink. Like a flamingo. Like cotton candy.

“These shirts were white!” Daniel said.

He held up another one. Pink. And another one. Also pink.

I looked into the washing machine.

At the very bottom, wrapped around the agitator, was a small red T-shirt with a cartoon fire truck on it.

“Daniel,” I said. “Why is Noah’s red T-shirt in there?”

“Because it needed washing!”

“With your white shirts?”

He stared at the machine. He stared at the red T-shirt. He stared at the pink work shirts in his hands.

“Was that a mistake?” he said. “Nobody told me colors mattered!”

I pointed at the wall beside the washing machine.

There was a laminated card taped there. I’d made it two years ago, when Lily started asking to help with laundry. It had pictures on it. A white pile. A dark pile. A colors pile. HOT. WARM. COLD. With little smiley faces.

“The instructions are right beside the machine,” I said.

Daniel looked at the laminated card for a long time.

“There are smiley faces,” he said quietly.

“Lily helped me make it.”

He held up his pink shirts.

“Can you fix them?”

“I can show you how to try,” I said. “With a stain remover and some bleach. But I’m not going to do it for you.”

He sighed. A long, heavy sigh.

“This is unnecessarily complicated,” he said.

Wednesday was worse.

I got home at six-fifteen. Daniel was in the kitchen, actually cooking. Spaghetti. With sauce from a jar. It smelled okay. I was proud of him.

Lily was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked like she was about to cry.

“Mom,” she whispered. “My solar system project is due tomorrow.”

I froze.

I’d written it on the shared calendar three weeks ago. Lily’s solar system project due Thursday. Daniel promised to help. With a little picture of a planet next to it.

Daniel looked up from the spaghetti.

“What project?”

Lily’s chin started to wobble.

“You promised, Daddy,” she said. “You promised we’d make it together. Three weeks ago. You said we’d make it on a weekend and you’d help me with Saturn. And then you didn’t.” She looked down at the table. “I thought you forgot because you didn’t want to.”

Daniel’s face changed completely.

He put the spoon down. He came over and crouched next to Lily’s chair.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “No. No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Of course I want to. I just… I forgot. That’s all. Daddy forgot.”

He turned and looked up at me.

“Why didn’t you remind me?” he said.

“It’s in the shared calendar,” I said. “With a picture of a planet.”

“Emma, I have a thousand things to remember!”

“So did I,” I said. “For eight years.”

He opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

He looked at Lily. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

I went to the hall closet and got out the big plastic bin of craft supplies. Styrofoam balls in eight different sizes. Paint. Brushes. Wooden dowels. A hot glue gun. Pipe cleaners. And glitter. A lot of glitter. Lily had picked out the glitter.

I’d bought everything two weeks ago. Just in case.

I handed the bin to Daniel.

He looked down at it.

“Where do we start?” he said.

“Ask Lily,” I said.

Lily sat up straight. Her eyes were still wet, but she was already getting excited.

“Daddy, we need Saturn first! Saturn’s the hardest!”

“Okay,” Daniel said. He picked up a Styrofoam ball. “Which one’s Saturn?”

Lily stared at him like he was the dumbest person in the world.

“The one with the rings, Daddy!”

I took over the spaghetti. I fed Noah and gave him a bath and put him to bed. I read him a book about a dinosaur who wanted to be a ballerina.

When I came back downstairs, the kitchen was a war zone.

There was paint on the table. There was hot glue on the floor. There was a Styrofoam Jupiter rolling slowly under the refrigerator. And there was glitter. Everywhere. On the table. On the chairs. On the cabinets. On the light fixture.

Somehow, there was glitter on the ceiling.

Three hours later, Daniel finally came out of the kitchen.

He was covered in glitter. His hair. His eyebrows. His beard. Both his hands were stuck together with glue. He looked like a disco ball.

Lily was right behind him, holding the finished solar system on a big piece of cardboard. Nine planets on wooden sticks. The sun in the middle, painted bright orange.

“Daddy made Saturn look like a doughnut!” she announced proudly.

It did look like a doughnut. A big, lumpy, yellow doughnut with a pink paper ring glued around the middle at a crooked angle.

Lily thought it was the best thing she’d ever seen.

Daniel collapsed onto the couch next to me.

Glitter fell off him onto the cushions.

“How did you do this every week?” he said.

“Usually without glitter on the ceiling,” I said.

He laughed. A real laugh. Tired.

He watched Lily across the room. She’d put the solar system on the coffee table and was walking around it, looking at it from every angle, moving Saturn a tiny bit to the left.

“I didn’t realize how much I was missing,” Daniel said quietly.

I looked at him.

For a second, I thought maybe he got it. Maybe that was all it would take. One night. One glitter-covered solar system.

Then he hesitated.

“Emma,” he said. “Maybe you could quit after the trial? I’ll help more around the house. I promise. I’ll do the laundry. I’ll learn the smiley-face card.”

I stared at him.

“You still think my job is optional?” I said.

“Things were just… easier before,” he said.

“Easier for whom, Daniel?”

He didn’t have an answer.

He just sat there on the couch, covered in glitter, looking at the floor.

But I wasn’t finished with that lesson yet.

I had one more surprise planned.

And this time, Daniel wasn’t going to be the only one watching.

 

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