42/

I guess at the end of the day what I wonder most is, if I died tomorrow, would anyone even know you had lost someone? Would anyone even know you had someone to grieve?

Alan clicks the pause button and presses his fingers through his hair. Jen comes in from the other room and wraps her arms around his shoulders, leaning down to press a kiss against his cheek. “Again?” she says, and he leans back against her and sighs and nods with his eyes closed, savoring the peace before he leans forward and presses play.

I guess I have to say this isn’t working for me. I don’t know if it ever was. I don’t know, I think I just — I feel like you don’t care about me. You don’t! Or maybe I don’t care about me. Maybe this isn’t going to work like I thought it would. Ugh, I’m mad! I need to put my phone down. Okay, I’m done. I’m done with this message. But seriously, you could have warned me? Instead it’s just like, Oh, Hannah, why aren’t you telling me your needs. What? Come on. Why aren’t you asking for them?

Alan remembers the fight at the soaking pool, Hannah perched over and crying with her forehead on her knees, onlookers staring as cold dread knotted up his chest. He remembers Hannah’s distant, blank stare when he asked her what was wrong and the curt assertion that it was nothing. I’ll get over it, she had said. And then she disappeared, until the thirty-some texts and the voice memos.

It was always Jen this and Jen that. Maybe I don’t want to constantly be compared to your wife? You ever think that maybe I’m my own person? And God, I get it, I get that she’s neurodivergent and we have to hold space for that. But where’s the space for me having a bad day? Don’t I get some grace, too?

“Did she just compare my being autistic to her period?” Jen says, close to his ear. Shooting pains go through his fingers. He clenches them into fists and shakes his head in disbelief.

I just don’t get it. I’m sorry. I should stop. I’ll stop. I just don’t know what to even say or do. I’m hurt, I’m hurting. That’s life, right? We just come in and we meet someone and we think it will work, then it doesn’t. And now you’re just going to go off and live your life and I’ll live mine and that’ll just have to be how it is. I think all the time of waking up in your bed and Jen coming in the room and the way she looked at us, and how you went to go comfort her instead of staying with me. And then yeah you had some life stuff come up but I just felt discarded. I don’t know. I should have said something. I’m sorry. I’ll go. I need to go, I just needed to get this out.

“And where was she, when you needed her, exactly?” Jen’s voice is low. “She never talked to us about any of this. We lost a pregnancy and where was she? It’s not like you pulled back out of frivolity.” Alan can hear the edge to her voice, the coarse scratch of her tone. Jen pulls back from him and he pauses to focus on her retreating footsteps.

I guess none of this matters. I just really liked you. I wanted this to work. But maybe I need to do my own work first? Around why I didn’t leave sooner. About why I’m sending this at all. Do I matter? Because those six weeks when you were basically absent, all I could think was do I even matter to this guy? Does he even care about me?

Alan listens in silence, again, the words burning into his mind. The divergence of the three perspectives grates against him. Hannah feels wronged. He feels wronged. Jen feels wronged. “Who’s right, here?” he mumbles, under his breath. “None of us? All of us?” Hannah’s detached voice continues through a list of his wrongdoings, her anger preserved by his phone like an insect in amber.

So, bye. Just bye. Okay? You get what you want. We all get what we want. Crazy Hannah won’t bother you anymore. I’m sure you’ll make fun of me. I’m sure you’ll think I’m just being a diva. I’m not. I’m hurt. And you don’t care. So it’s over. It’s over. It’s so freaking over.

“I do care,” Alan mumbles again. He slips his phone into his pocket and goes to find Jen sitting outside on the porch. Her hands are on her stomach, fingers twisting. She looks up at him, and he catches a moment of doubt on her face before she rearranges it.

“I’m sorry she made that neurodivergent comment,” Alan says, sitting next to her. She leans her head on his shoulder, their fingers intertwining. “That was way out of line, even if she was upset.”

“Why did she only tell you so much now? Why not ask for what she needed as it came up?”

Alan shrugs. “She said there wasn’t space for her.”

“Did we do that?” Jen asks, peering up at him. Alan sighs.

“I need to listen to it again, at some point. Maybe we did. She didn’t say anything, though, at the time. We could have tried to address it.”

Chicken and egg, Alan thinks. A snake eating its tail. Did she not tell us because there wasn’t space? Did we not make space because she didn’t tell us?

Alan and Jen sit in silence, and he slowly strokes his thumb over the rings on her hand. We’re learning, he thinks. We’ll do better next time. Maybe Hannah will, too.