Six months after my divorce was finalized, I never imagined I’d hear Ethan Walker’s voice again.
I certainly never imagined I’d hear it while lying in a hospital bed at Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, exhausted and overwhelmed, with my hours-old daughter sleeping in a bassinet beside me.
But that’s exactly what happened on a Tuesday morning in early September when my phone buzzed and his name appeared on the screen.
I stared at it for a long moment, my thumb hovering over the decline button. Every instinct told me to let it go to voicemail. To delete whatever message he left without listening to it. To maintain the wall I’d carefully built between us over the past six months.
But something—curiosity, maybe, or just the raw vulnerability that comes with having given birth twelve hours earlier—made me answer.
“Why are you calling?” My voice came out rougher than I intended, exhaustion making it hard to sound as indifferent as I wanted to.
Ethan sounded almost cheerful. Light. Like we were old friends catching up instead of divorced spouses who hadn’t spoken since our lawyers finalized the paperwork.
“Hey. I wanted to let you know I’m getting married this weekend. I thought it would be… I don’t know, polite to invite you. Close the chapter properly, you know?”
I gave a weak laugh that turned into a sound somewhere between exhaustion and disbelief.
“Ethan, I just had a baby. Like, literally yesterday. I’m not going anywhere.”
The silence on the other end stretched long enough that I wondered if the call had dropped.
Then, in a tone that was suddenly much flatter: “Oh. Alright. Well, I just wanted you to know.”
And he hung up.
