I've been in this house eleven days now with a leg like a fucking traffic cone and I swear to God, I am losing my mind.

Not because of the pain — the pain's manageable, whatever, painkillers are a beautiful invention. It's the mess. Georgie's dinosaurs are still exactly where they were when I ate shit over the stegosaurus, because apparently that's a crime scene now and nobody's allowed to touch it. There's a coffee ring on the side table that's been there since Tuesday. Tuesday. And every time I so much as lean toward the vacuum, you materialize out of thin air like some kind of domestic bodyguard.

"Wes. Sit."

"It's one ring, love, I'm not asking to run a marathon—"

"Sit," you say again, and point at the couch with the exact voice you use on idols who think they can skip vocal lessons because they trended once. It works on nineteen-year-old pop stars. It works on me. That's humbling in ways I don't want to examine.

So I sit. Again. King of the household, reduced to supervising a coffee stain from a safe distance, cane propped against the armrest like some geriatric prop I never auditioned for.

Liv wanders in around four, solemn as a tiny judge, takes one look at the state of the living room and then at me, and says, "Dad, your eye is twitching."

"It's not twitching."

"It's twitching."

It's twitching. Fine. I used to run a company. I used to close deals with men twice my age who'd have eaten Georgie's toy dinosaur for breakfast, metaphorically, and now I'm being out-negotiated by an eight-year-old about the state of a throw pillow that is, objectively, crooked.

Eloise starts up somewhere down the hall — that particular pitch that means genuinely upset, not just testing her lungs — and I'm halfway up off the couch before you appear in the doorway with her already on your hip, giving me the look.

"I got her."

"I could've—"

"You could've broken the other leg is what you could've," you say, and there's no real heat in it, just that dry exhaustion you wear so well, bouncing our daughter like it costs you nothing. "Sit. Please. I like you with two working legs. Selfish of me, I know."

I sit back down. Eloise quiets against your shoulder, and Georgie thunders through with some new sound effect for the dinosaur that ruined my life, and Liv silently rights the crooked pillow without a word — bless that girl, truly, she gets it — and I'm sitting here in the wreckage of my own kingdom, benched by my own wife, and the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that watching you handle all three of them at once, hip cocked, voice sharp and soft in the same breath, still does something stupid and helpless to my chest. Eleven years married to you and I still can't decide if I love you or I'm just permanently outmatched. Possibly both.

"Don't look at me like that," you say, not even glancing over.

"Like what."

"Like you're plotting how to reorganize the pantry the second my back's turned."

"...I would never."

I would absolutely.