Chapter Eight: What Was Left Behind
The first overnight visit was the hardest.
Lorie packed Samuel's bag with the thorough efficiency of someone who understands that a six-week-old baby requires an astonishing amount of infrastructure — the formula, the bottles, the diapers, the wipes, the specific diaper rash cream, the sound machine, the nightlight, the exact blanket he was accustomed to sleeping with — and she kept her face even throughout.
James stood in the nursery doorway and watched her pack.
"He'll be all right," she said, without turning around. "I'll be there."
"I know," James said. "That's the only reason I'm not losing my mind."
She glanced at him over her shoulder.
"A little," she said. "It's okay to lose it a little."
His mouth curved.
"Thank you for being honest," he said.
She zipped the bag. Lifted Samuel from the crib. He made the small sound he made when she picked him up — a kind of settling exhale, the sound of someone who is where they expected to be.
She handed him to James.
"Hold him for a minute," she said. "Before we go."
James took Samuel and looked at him — at this small, serious, dear person — and said something low that Lorie didn't try to hear. Samuel looked back at his father with the steady clarity that was becoming one of his signatures.
Then James handed him back.
"Bring him home," he said.
"Always," Lorie said.
The overnight visits with Eliza and Kevin were exactly what Lorie had expected and not a fraction easier for having expected them.
The apartment Eliza and Kevin had moved into — Lorie learned this address and confirmed it with James's attorney before the first visit — was nice enough. Modern, clean, the kind of place that photographs well. There was a room set up for Samuel that had clearly been done recently and with some effort, which Lorie noted and recorded honestly.
But the care of Samuel fell entirely to Lorie.
Kevin was cordial to her in the way of someone performing cordiality for an audience that didn't exist. He made himself useful with the visible effort of a man who is doing a thing because it is required of him, and stopped as soon as the requirement was technically satisfied.
Eliza engaged with Samuel in bursts — would hold him for a while, would talk to him, would sometimes be genuinely present with him in a way that made Lorie think, watching, there it is. There's something real there. But it would dissolve. Her phone would pull her away, or she'd hand Samuel to Kevin or to Lorie with the practiced ease of someone who has decided that caring for an infant was not the bulk of her job in this scenario.
Samuel was fed and changed and held and talked to through all of this. He was cared for. Lorie made sure of it.
She sent James updates — not in the detailed way of surveillance, but in the plain, honest way of someone who knows that a father separated from his infant deserves to know that his child is all right. A photo when Samuel was sleeping. A note when he'd eaten well. A simple he's good, he's settled, he's okay that she knew James needed even when she didn't say that out loud.
James texted back every time. Sometimes just a word. Sometimes just an emoji — he'd told her he didn't use emojis ordinarily, which made the fact that he sent her a small blue heart one evening, in response to a photo of Samuel laughing at a ceiling fan, feel like a larger thing than its format suggested.
She looked at it for a long time before she put her phone down.
Then she prayed, quietly, about exactly nothing she was willing to fully examine yet.
The documentation she kept during these visits was thorough. Not because she wanted to build a case. Because the Holy Spirit had told her this child's future was at stake and she had learned, over years, that when the Spirit tells you something is important, the worst thing you can do is decide your own comfort matters more than obedience.
She noted every interaction and its duration. Every care task and who performed it. Every hour she was the sole responsible party for Samuel's needs. Every time the sound machine wasn't set up correctly until she did it herself. Every time Kevin disappeared for an hour or two without explanation and Eliza was on her phone in the next room while Samuel slept in Lorie's arms.
She wrote it all down in the notebook. Sealed in the locked drawer.
She also noted the things that were good: the times Eliza read to Samuel, the times Kevin made him laugh with a funny face, the times the visit felt, for twenty minutes, like what it was supposed to be. Because the record needed to be honest, and Lorie was constitutionally unable to be anything else.
The divorce was finalized on a morning in April that was attempting to be spring and not quite succeeding.
James called Lorie from the courthouse parking lot.
"Primary custody to Eliza," he said, and his voice was flat in a way she recognized as the voice of a man who has absorbed a blow and is keeping himself upright through sheer force of character.
"Weekend visitation for you," she said.
"Yes."
She was in the kitchen, Samuel in the bouncer at her feet, and she looked down at him and felt the full weight of it.
"James," she said.
"The Spirit said —" he started, and then stopped. She could hear him collecting himself on the other end of the line. "He said 'Wait and see, but fear not. I am yet working on your behalf.'"
"Then hold onto that," Lorie said. "Hold it with both hands."
A pause.
"I don't know what I would have done without you," he said.
She didn't have an answer for that. Not the right kind.
"Come home," she said instead. "Samuel wants to see his dad."
She heard him exhale. Something in it that was almost relief.
"I'm on my way," he said.
May arrived and Samuel was five months old and the world was finally spring in earnest — actual spring, green and warm and full of the kind of light that had no apology in it.
The overnight visits had been continuing. Samuel was rolling now, and attempting with enormous conviction to get himself into a sitting position, and had recently discovered that the sound mmm was a sound he had the capacity to make, which he did constantly and with great satisfaction. Lorie narrated his developmental milestones to James with the enthusiasm of a woman who had been there for every one of them and was constitutionally incapable of keeping good news to herself.
On a Thursday afternoon in May, Lorie came back from the park with Samuel.
She came through the back door — Samuel in the carrier on her front, his head listing with the heavy satisfaction of a baby who has been in the fresh air for an hour and is approximately seventeen seconds from sleep — and she stopped.
The house was wrong.
She stood in the kitchen doorway and felt it before she could have explained it — a stillness that was different from empty, a kind of changed air, as if the house itself had registered something and was holding it.
She carried Samuel upstairs. Stood in the hallway. Opened Eliza's bedroom door.
Stripped. Closets open and bare. Dresser top cleared. The only things left were James's — his books on the nightstand, his watch on the dresser, his clothes in his half of the closet.
She checked the guest room. The room Eliza had been using as a home office. The living room. The dining room.
The furniture was still in the common areas — that wasn't it. But all of Eliza's personal belongings — clothes, shoes, the items she'd moved in with, the cosmetics and the perfume bottles and the framed photos — were gone.
Lorie stood in the middle of the stripped bedroom and looked at what remained, which was James's, and which was real.
Then she walked down the hall to the nursery.
The nursery was exactly as it always was. The crib with its mobile. The changing table. The glider. The little bookshelf with its board books. The sound machine on the window ledge. Samuel's tiny clothes folded in the dresser. The Psalm 27 print on the wall — she'd put one in here too, because it belonged in here.
Untouched. Entirely untouched.
She stood in the nursery with Samuel asleep on her front and looked at the room and felt, very clearly, the hand of God in the shape of what had been left behind.
They'd left the baby's room alone.
Even in leaving, there was something in Eliza or Kevin or both of them that had not touched this room.
"Thank You," Lorie said quietly, to the air of the nursery. "Thank You."
Then she put Samuel in his crib, pulled out her phone, and called James.