Awake.
Wife handles the kids, while he eats, showers, hurries off to work. He stares at spreadsheets for hours, all the brilliance of his day fading in the moments where his gaze glasses over, and the hand holding the coffee cup goes slack. He drinks to forget, and dreams of a time it was not like this, much as he loves all of this, precious delight radiating from the faces of little ones when he gets home and can hold them tight to his chest, breathe in their baby-smell of sweet milk and warm talcum and something indefinably infant.
He believes they are his, and why shouldn’t he? Kara has always been faithful. She has always been perfect and loving, and so what if he and his wife are both milk pale and all three of those children are perfectly blue-skinned and have sets of curving rams-horns.
But he can trust her, right?
