I nodded. But I wasn't thinking about being right or wrong. I was thinking about Jake, Emma, and Sophie waiting for me at home with a babysitter. Probably wondering why Daddy had to go to court again and when things would finally get back to normal.
For the first time in almost a year, I had an answer for them. Things were going to get back to normal starting right now. No more drama, no more chaos, no more wondering whether the woman who was supposed to be their mother would make another decision that would turn their world upside down. Just me and them building something stable and sane from the wreckage of what used to be our family.
It wasn't the happy ending I'd imagined when I'd first gotten married, but it was better than the alternative. It was a chance for all of us to start over, to build something new without the constant threat of someone else's bad decisions destroying everything we cared about. For the first time in months, I felt like I could breathe again. Six months later, I'm sitting in my kitchen on a Saturday morning, watching Jake attempt to make pancakes while Emma argues with Sophie about whether syrup belongs on scrambled eggs.
The house smells like coffee and slightly burned batter. The morning light is streaming through windows that actually stay clean now that nobody's crying on them constantly. And for the first time in what feels like forever, everything is exactly as chaotic as it should be. This is what normal looks like.
Not the fake, Instagram-perfect normal that people pretend to have, but real normal. The kind where your eight-year-old puts too much vanilla in the pancake mix. Your six-year-old insists that purple is a perfectly reasonable color for breakfast food, and your four-year-old tries to feed pancakes to the dog we don't have. "Dad, can we get a dog?" Sophie asks, right on cue because apparently my kids have developed telepathic powers.
"Ask me again when you can remember to put your clothes in the hamper instead of on the floor," I tell her, which is parent-speak for not until you're 30 and living in your own house. The funny thing about divorce is that everyone expects you to be miserable. They expect you to be bitter, lonely, struggling to figure out how to braid your daughter's hair or explain why Mommy doesn't live here anymore. And sure, there were some rough patches.
Like the night Emma asked if Mommy stopped loving us. Or when Jake's teacher called because he'd been acting out at school. But mostly, mostly it's been peaceful. Quiet in a good way.
Like when you finally turn off a TV that's been playing static in the background for so long you forgot it was even on. The kids have their routine now. School, homework, dinner that doesn't come with a side of drama. Weekend movies where nobody sighs dramatically about screen time.
Bedtime stories that don't get interrupted by phone calls from people wanting to discuss the moral implications of my abandonment of a woman who chose another man's baby over her own family. Melissa still calls sometimes, usually when she's run out of money, discovered that Charles and Vivien aren't quite as generous with their beautiful-gift provider as they were during the pregnancy, or realized that being a single mom living in her sister's spare bedroom isn't quite the empowering experience she thought it would be. "Grant, I know we've had our differences, but could you help me out with the electric bill? Just this once."