Nowhere, Kansas

Part 1 - Present

He takes the paper from her and looks over it again. "Why would he arrange for him and his wife to have a romantic anniversary weekend at an AirBnB without children?"

"Yes!"

"Because he loves you."

She smiles at that. "He does. But—"

"Because you've been working on opposite schedules for the past nine months, quarantining and helping the kids with the school and basically never seeing each other except for the one day a month you overlap at the hospital."

"Well, yeah—"

"And because now that things are calming down, and you don't have to quarantine anymore, and there's a chance for both of you to breathe, maybe, just maybe, he wants to have hot, dirty bed-and-breakfast sex with his wife."

She's chuckling now as she snatches the note back from him. "Okay, enough."

She reads it again; it's probably the sixtieth time today. Alex had been gone when she woke up this morning – she vaguely remembers him getting an emergency page sometime during the predawn hours. She'd stumbled into the kitchen to find a steaming pot of coffee and her favorite mug waiting for her on the counter – one of the tiny married rituals she and Alex do for each other on the days they can't start their mornings together.

But today was different. Today there had been this note.

"But seriously – I do not catch any whiff of anything weird about this." Dylan finally takes a drink and levels her a frank look. "So why are you really freaking out?"

She takes Alex's note back and studies it quietly. She notices, not for the first time, that Eli makes his a's and k's the same way his father does. It makes her heart skip a sweet series of beats.

"Izzie. C'mon. What's up?"

"What if... what if it's getting to him?"

Dylan cocks his head to the side. "What do you mean?"

"All of it... the grind of parenting and working and having no time for romance. I mean, last time we had sex I jumped out of bed when it was over to start a load of laundry because neither of us had any clean work clothes, and he had to run into the living room to help the kids with their online learning." She drains the rest of her wine and looks at the empty glass glumly. "We just... we didn't get a chance to do any of the fun, sexy stuff this time. We found each other again and it was just, bam, instant family, with all the stuff that comes with it." She waves the note through the air. "What if this is his way of telling me that he needs more than what I've been giving him?"

She ought to have seen it coming, but she still fails to dodge as her friend flicks her in the nose again.

"Damn it, Rees, would you stop that?!"

"Is it getting to you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The grind. The no time for romance. The in-between-laundry-and-Zoom-classes sex."

She shakes her head. "Of course not."

"Are you happy, then?"

A memory flashes into her brain, unbidden, to a month ago, after the last of the covid surges. Shawnee County Hospital was no longer requiring all hands on deck at all hours; she and Alex had, for the first time in months, come home at the same time, spent an evening with their children, and gotten into bed at the same time. She remembers how Alex had banded his arm around her waist as he pulled her back against his chest, how he'd fallen asleep in minutes with his face buried in the spread of her hair. She remembers waking up in the middle of the night, the familiar, heavy weight of his arm over her, and how she'd fallen back asleep with grateful tears in her eyes.