“Come stay with us for a week after the birth,” Suzanne had said. “We’ve got four bedrooms. You can take your old room. You’ll have help. We want our first grandbaby here.”
Mitchell had been cautious. Wendy remembered the way he stirred pasta that night in their kitchen, watching steam rise while he said, “Do you trust that?”
Wendy had answered too quickly. “It’s only a week.”
He had looked at her, then down at the pan, then back at her. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
She did not know how to answer honestly. Trust was not a yes or no with her parents. It was a muscle she kept straining because she wanted a relationship with them that reality had never offered. “I trust that I’ll need help,” she had said.
Mitchell set the spoon down. “Then we’ll do whatever makes you safest.”
Her mother had insisted hiring outside help would be insulting. “We are not strangers,” she said over the phone. “We’re family. What kind of mother would I be if I let someone else take care of my daughter after surgery?”
That sentence would echo in Wendy’s head later like a threat disguised as a promise.