Virgin Dot Com Novel

[Jasmine's POV] One week. Seven days until I board a plane alone, until I become just Jasmine instead of Mommy-Jazz-partner-glue-holding-everything-together. The countdown builds in my chest with the particular anxiety of someone about to commit a crime they can't quite articulate. The girls know something's wrong. Children always know, operating on frequencies adults have trained themselves to ignore. Chloe asks questions with the clinical precision of a tiny prosecutor-where exactly am I going, who will watch them, what time do I return.

She's understanding in the way five-year-olds understand inevitability. Sad but resigned, already building walls against the abandonment. Zoe regresses. Full meltdown tantrums over nothing-wrong cereal, mismatched socks, the existential horror of having to wear shoes. Yesterday she threw herself on the floor screaming for twenty minutes, and when I finally got her calm enough to speak, all she said was "Don't go." Two words. Devastating in their simplicity. I pack Thursday night, three days before departure. My suitcase sits open on the bed, empty and accusing.

Each item I fold feels like evidence of abandonment-this blouse for the panel, these jeans for exploring Nashville, the dress for the keynote dinner I'm attending. Professional clothes for the version of me that exists outside maternal obligation. The guilt is crushing. Physical weight pressing down on my chest, making breathing labored. I know I need this. Know that reclaiming some piece of my identity is necessary, maybe even critical to surviving the slow dissolution happening inside these walls. But knowing doesn't make the guilt lighter.

Doesn't make me feel less like a mother choosing herself over her children. The men promise everything will be fine. They have it handled, they insist, with the confidence of people who've never actually handled school dropoff and homework and the specific brand of chaos that is dinner with two kindergarteners. "We'll manage," Liam says, pulling me into his arms in the kitchen while I stress over detailed schedules. "Three days, Jazz. We can survive three days." Can they, though? They barely manage normal days when I'm orchestrating from behind the scenes.

Who's going to remember that Chloe only eats the purple yogurt, that Zoe's stuffed rabbit needs to be in her backpack or she melts down at naptime? Who's going to notice when Zoe goes quiet, the warning sign that precedes emotional collapse? I don't voice these doubts. Just nod against Liam's chest and try to believe their competence extends beyond boardrooms and operating theaters. The last night before I leave, Liam finds me in our bedroom.

I'm staring at my packed suitcase with the intensity of someone trying to decode ancient texts, and his hands settle on my shoulders with familiar weight. "Come to bed." Not a request. An invitation into something we both need. We make love slowly. None of the desperate urgency that's characterized recent encounters. This is different-deliberate, almost worshipful. His hands trace paths across my skin with the reverence of someone memorizing terrain. Each touch lingers, savoring, as if he's trying to imprint me into his memory against three days of absence. I respond in kind.

Map the geography of him with fingers and mouth, relearn the places that make his breathing catch. We move together with the rhythm of five years practiced intimacy, and for these moments, the fractures don't matter. The paternity results and Elena's efficiency and Asher's pulling away-all of it falls away, leaving just us. Just this connection we built before everything got complicated. After, we lie tangled in sheets, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear. His hand traces my face in the darkness-fingertips ghosting across my forehead, down my nose, tracing my lips with devastating gentleness.

"I want you to go and remember who Jasmine is." His voice is low, rough with emotion. "Not just Mommy, not just ours. You. But come back to me. Promise me you'll come back." "I promise." The words scrape out of my throat. Automatic. Reflexive. But something in my chest feels hollow. Empty space where certainty should be, and I'm terrified he can feel it too. Feel the way I'm already halfway gone, one foot out the door, testing what it means to be untethered. His arms tighten around me. We fall asleep like that-clinging to each other against the coming separation.

Against the question neither of us wants to voice: what if distance reveals things proximity has been hiding? Morning arrives with cruel efficiency. The girls are up early, sensing something's wrong. Chloe is quiet, withdrawn, building emotional fortifications. Zoe refuses breakfast, just climbs into my lap and stays there, small body radiating distress. The Uber arrives too soon. I kneel in the entryway, both girls wrapped around me, and feel my heart fracturing in real time. Zoe is crying-silent tears that destroy me more effectively than screaming ever could.

Chloe's face is set, determined not to cry, which somehow makes it worse. "I'll be back in three days, babies." My voice cracks. "Three sleeps. That's all." "Three sleeps is forever," Zoe whispers against my neck. It is. It's an eternity and nothing at all, and I don't know how to reconcile those truths. Don't know how to be both the mother they need and the woman I'm desperate to remember. The Uber driver is patient, carefully neutral as I climb in with shaking hands. The door closes. We pull away. I turn to look back-see them framed in the doorway, Liam holding both girls, all three waving.

The image blurs as tears flood my vision, and I press my palm against the window like I can reach through glass and distance to touch them one more time. I cry the entire drive to the airport. Not pretty crying-ugly, desperate sobbing that the driver pretends not to notice. My chest heaves with the force of it, ribs aching, throat raw. This is what choosing myself feels like. This agony of leaving them behind, even temporarily, even necessarily. At the gate, I pull out my phone. Text the group chat through blurred vision: Already missing everyone The responses come quickly.

Liam: Missing you more Asher: Girls will be fine. You deserve this Finn: Have fun, bunny. Knock 'em dead Three men trying to reassure me, trying to give permission for this departure. But their words sit wrong, too careful, like they're also trying to convince themselves. Like we're all pretending this is normal and healthy when it feels like the first step toward dissolution. Boarding begins. I join the line with mechanical precision, body going through motions while my mind spirals.

The flight attendant scans my ticket, smiles professional welcome, and I'm walking down the jetway toward a plane that will carry me away from everything I've built. I find my seat-window, thankfully. Somewhere to press my forehead and pretend the other passengers can't see me coming apart. My phone buzzes with final messages, last reassurances, but I can't read them. Can't process words when I'm drowning in the visceral reality of separation. The plane fills. Strangers settling into seats, pulling out laptops and books and neck pillows.

They're comfortable with travel, with movement, with existing untethered from the people they love. I envy them with sudden viciousness-their ease, their certainty, their lack of guilt eating them alive. The door closes. That definitive thunk of pressurization, of commitment. No backing out now. We're taxiing, then accelerating, then lifting into sky. I watch the ground fall away, watch the city shrink to toy-model scale, watch the distance grow between me and the only life I've known for five years. My chest feels hollow. Scooped out.

Like someone reached in and extracted the essential parts, leaving just the shell functioning on autopilot. Who am I without them? The question loops in my head, relentless and unanswerable. Who is Jasmine when she's not Mommy, not partner, not the glue holding four adults and two children in precarious formation? When she's just woman on plane flying toward professional obligation, what exists underneath the accumulated roles? I don't know.

The realization terrifies me more than anything else-that after five years of defining myself through relationship and maternal duty, I might have erased the woman who existed before. That Jasmine-the-artist might be fiction, nostalgia for a self that never actually existed outside my imagination. The plane levels off. The seatbelt sign dings off. Around me, people resume normal activities-typing, reading, sleeping. Existing comfortably in liminal space between departure and arrival. I press my forehead against the cold window and watch clouds drift past.

Somewhere below, my daughters are probably still crying. My partners are probably trying to figure out breakfast logistics and whether anyone remembered Zoe's rabbit. Life continues without me, proving I'm not quite as essential as the guilt suggests. The thought should be comforting. Should prove they'll survive, that three days won't destroy what we've built. Instead, it just makes the hollow feeling worse. Makes me wonder if absence will reveal how little I'm actually needed.

If distance will show them-show all of us-that we've been performing family instead of being family, and maybe the performance works better without me in the center holding all the broken pieces together. Three days. Seventy-two hours. Then I go back. If there's anything left to go back to. If there's enough of me left to return. Virgin Dot Com