Don’t be silly, darling. Her hands formed fists on the counter.

If he saw her eyes narrowing, it didn’t prevent him from continuing. “You can, of course you can. It’s a confidence issue, isn’t it? You shouldn’t put yourself down—you’re so good at all that baby stuff. Much better than me. You’re a natural. And the boys love being close to you, they just cry when I try to take them anyway.”

As he went on, she started to fade him out, so that when he got to the final few words, persuasions, manipulations, he was just a slight, lilting noise. Annoying, sure, but not painful. He was using his work voice, trying to market motherhood, to her. She let her eyes stop focusing on him and turned slowly away. Slack-faced, she sat down on the edge of a chair that was mostly covered in used blue wrapping paper and tiny coat hangers. His voice faded to nothing, just the vague and distant repetition of her name. Her eyes followed the pattern of the floor tiles, brown and white speckles in perfect squares.

I can’t stay here. I won’t.

She got up and went to the shoe rack next to the back door. She reached for her runners and started putting them on. A hand encircled her wrist, but she shook it off.

“What are you doing, Lauren?”

Casting around the kitchen, she located the car keys lying splayed on the side near the toaster and grabbed them up. Patrick’s face filled her field of vision and she had to step around him.

“Where are you going?”

Her ears were starting to sing with that high, piercing drone and it began to fill her head, must get out, outside, away, anywhere, out of my way.

“Lauren, stop,” said Patrick, loud and urgent enough to break through, to make her pause, but not enough to stop her. She struggled away from him, down the step to the front room, quickly across to the door.

“Please. Please.”

As she opened the front door, she turned towards her husband. Patrick looked imploringly at her, cartoon-puppy eyes covered in a film of panic. He held onto her sleeve with his thumb and forefinger. The drone in her head receded towards a silence as their eyes met. Her mouth was a thin line, where his was parted slightly as he inhaled, about to speak. Then the baby monitor vibrated with the sound of Riley’s cries. She knew immediately it was Riley, not Morgan, even through the cheap speaker of the small plastic device. Even though to everyone else, apparently including Patrick, they looked and sounded exactly the same. The knowledge held her there, briefly. I am that child’s mother.

And then, after stepping into the evening sun, ready to abandon her babies to the attentions of their inadequate and unwilling father, after wrenching her sleeve free and turning towards the street, ready to run, flee, get away to she didn’t even know where and right then it didn’t matter, she stopped. Her breath stopped in her throat.