“I don’t want to do this anymore. Maybe we need to separate for a while.”

He was facing me when I said it, standing across the hotel room. He went quiet. Tense. I hadn’t said the word “divorce,” but it was close enough. His chest was moving in shallow breaths. He blinked a few times.

“And what about Rosie?” he said. “Who does she go with?”

Rosie. Resting on the bed between us, she rustled, still in her car seat alongside the suitcases we needed to pack for our flight back home to Idaho in a few hours. There she lay, eleven months of life and already full of turmoil. Her evenings were peppered with the sounds of her parents’ bitter arguments, slamming doors, Mom crying in closets. On top of this, it took her six months to latch on to my nipple properly because she was born with a tongue-tie, so her introduction to nourishment was a mother weeping from pain, usually screaming into a pillow so she wouldn’t be disturbed as I pushed through, bleeding into the milk. Yes, there were plenty of walks in the sunshine, naps on our chests, holding her father’s thumbs as he cooed over her and blew raspberries on her tummy. That was her favorite. He could always make her laugh by doing that. She would gaze up at us, but we were the ones who were amazed at every little thing she did. There were good times. But more often we lived in a world of chaos.

I spoke quietly: “Well...I mean...I’m nursing her, so...”

He shook his head and let out a quick breath, then picked up a sweatshirt, balled it up, and threw it toward me with a growl.

It was only a sweatshirt. Before that, it was only a toy. Only a book. Only a cell phone. Only potted plants. Only a vintage rolling metal laundry basket colliding with a wall, ricocheting to the floor, and scaring our tough five-pound Yorkshire terrier so badly he shit himself right where he stood. He had only injured his hand punching holes in several of our walls and doors. A sweatshirt was really nothing.