At three months postpartum, I took my first small design project again—a nursery consultation for a couple in Wallingford expecting twins. I almost turned it down out of fear, then accepted it out of pride, then nearly canceled the morning of because my body still felt like a house under repairs.
Ethan found out because he arrived for visitation while fabric samples were spread across the dining table.
“You’re working.”
“Yes.”
“Can you handle it?”
I looked at him over the edge of a swatch book. “I’m not collecting hobbies, Ethan. I have a career.”
Something shifted in his face—not offense, exactly. Recognition, maybe.
That night, after Leo fell asleep, I found an old framed watercolor on the bookshelf I hadn’t unpacked fully since moving. It was a painting I had done in college, sunflowers in a blue pitcher, wild brushstrokes, unapologetically bright. It had gone missing during the divorce.
“I had someone find it,” Ethan said from the doorway.
I turned. “Why?”
He looked at the painting instead of me. “Because you used to make rooms brighter just by being in them.”
It was such an unexpectedly human sentence that it hurt.