Mr. Smithfield - Louise Bay Page 0,86

fund kid.”

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the only reason you do it.” I didn’t ask her to elaborate. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “You’re never going to end up as your father. You have far too much character for that.”

It was the kind of thing she would have said to me when we were married. At the heart of our relationship, there had always been mutual respect. It was what had always puzzled me about Penelope’s leaving. We didn’t argue. We bickered over little things but there had never been a fundamental disagreement. Or so I’d always thought. Her departure had come out of the blue. I’d been completely blindsided.

“Going to work keeps me honest.”

She paused and looked at me. “Really? Going to work and doing something you hate keeps you honest? Why not choose something you love?”

I wasn’t interested in a come-to-Jesus moment for myself. I wanted to hear about hers. “So, Penelope, why are you back?” I asked. “Why now?”

“I suppose I figured out what was important.”

“And that took three years?”

“There were reasons I left. And there were reasons why I didn’t come back. They weren’t necessarily the same. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Try,” I said. I wanted to hear this. I deserved to hear this. “All I’ve gotten so far is some messed-up analogy about monkey bars.”

She smiled and shifted her fringe out of her eyes. The fringe was new. It suited her.

“I always loved Bethany, but over that first year of her life, it felt like the walls were closing in. It felt like my life wasn’t my own and that my choices had been taken away from me.” She looked sad but she didn’t look beaten or tired, and it occurred to me that before she’d left, that was how she’d looked—as if the color had drained from her face and someone had switched her into slow motion. The woman who sat before me was much more like the woman I’d married compared to the one who’d left.

“All I could see was a future being an unpaid servant to this squirming human, and I knew you wanted more than one child,” she said. “I felt as if my entire future was laid out for me. I didn’t like it.”

I kept my expression neutral. I wasn’t sure if Penelope was telling me she’d been depressed, and if that’s what she was saying, I didn’t want to be insensitive. “You didn’t say anything at the time.”

“I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time. I just had this sense of panic, needing to run, needing to escape. I didn’t see that I wasn’t coping. I just felt this urge to leave. It didn’t help that I was clearly terrible at caring for Bethany.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I was so impatient with her. Remember when I screamed at her for crying? Like that was going to help.” She shook her head while she worried the edge of the menu with her nail. “When you were around, you were so patient with her, so calming. You only had to pick her up and she settled. It emphasized the way I didn’t feel any of those things. I was the opposite of calm. The opposite of patient. I just felt like a failure. Like she’d be better off with you and without me. I could get out of the way and let the two of you be.”

As much as I’d like Penelope to have turned into a monster, she was still the same woman I’d married. The woman who set her standards way too high and beat herself up far too much when she didn’t meet them. “I should have paid more attention. I had no idea you felt any of this.”

She reached over and grabbed my hand. “This is not your fault,” she said. “We were trying to navigate not killing a tiny human. That is quite the distraction.”

I smiled, remembering how we used to hover over her cot to check she was breathing, how we baby-proofed our entire house before Penelope had given birth, even though Bethany wouldn’t crawl for months. We’d been so cautious and careful about everything. Everything except our own relationship. That had been left to wither and die.

“After I left, over the following few months, I sort of emerged from a fog only to be enveloped in shame and guilt for leaving,” she continued. “I wanted to come back a thousand