Instead, he tossed the wipe into the trash bin and moved straight to the small bassinet they had temporarily parked in the living room.

Inside lay the baby’s coming-home outfit—a tiny, impossibly soft sage-green knit onesie with a small wooden button at the collar.

Ben picked it up, inspected it, and began to refold it with painstaking slowness.

“The zipper shouldn’t crease in photos,” he said, his voice completely serious, his eyes narrowed as he smoothed the fabric flat against the mattress pad.

“When we put him in it, if there’s a crease, it’s going to look weird in the announcement picture.

I just want it to be right.”

Normally, Erin would have laughed.

She would have walked over, wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, rested her chin on his shoulder, and teased him about his sudden, overwhelming descent into stereotypical new-dad neurosis.

But as she watched him trace the line of the zipper, the smile slowly faded from her lips.

There was something different about him this morning.

Yes, he looked focused.

He looked incredibly loving, undeniably devoted to the monumental life shift they were about to endure.

But beneath the surface of his bustling preparation, there was a palpable, vibrating hum of raw nerves.

This wasn’t just the standard, garden-variety anxiety of a man who was about to become a father for the first time.

It wasn’t the usual pacing, the double-checking of hospital routes, or the over-preparing that she had been gently mocking him for all week.

This was something else entirely.

Something tight.

Something guarded.

She noticed it first with the phone.

Every few minutes, Ben’s hand would dart into the pocket of his jeans.

He would pull out his phone, wake the screen, and stare at it.

His jaw would clench, just a fraction.

But the moment he sensed Erin shifting in the room, the moment her gaze lingered on him for a second too long, his thumb would snap down on the lock button, plunging the screen into darkness.

He would slip the device back into his pocket with a casualness that felt entirely rehearsed.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice carrying across the kitchen, carefully stripped of any accusation but heavy with genuine curiosity.

He spun around, and the smile that broke across his face arrived a split-second too fast.

It didn’t reach his eyes.

“Just making sure everything’s ready,” he said, his voice pitching a half-octave higher than normal.

“Checking the weather for next week.

You know how the traffic gets on I-65 if it rains.”

That answer should have comforted her.

It was a perfectly logical, perfectly ‘Ben’ thing to say.

But instead of easing her mind, the words landed heavily in her chest, making her stomach tighten in a sudden, sickening knot that had absolutely nothing to do with the physical strain of her pregnancy.