I stared at him, unable to believe what I was hearing.
“Gerald… this isn’t funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny,” he answered with a shrug. “I’m trying to keep this household running efficiently.”
“You’re actually serious?”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“Completely.”
“I’m trying to keep this household running efficiently.”
Part of me still believed he wouldn’t actually do it.
But the first time the timer reached zero, I learned just how wrong I was.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
I still had soap covering one arm and shampoo tangled in the roots of my hair.
Then, without warning, the water stopped.
The pipes shuddered violently inside the walls as the pressure disappeared, leaving me standing there in complete silence, dripping, stunned, and unable to process what had just happened.
“Time’s up!” Gerald shouted from the other side of the door.
I wrapped myself in a towel, filled a plastic pitcher from the bathroom sink, and climbed back into the shower just to rinse the remaining soap away with freezing cold water while Maisie cried from her bassinet in the next room.
Gerald never apologized.
When I finally walked out, he barely looked up before saying,
“See? You managed just fine.”
The first time that alarm sounded, something inside me froze along with the water.
“Do you even hear yourself?” I asked quietly.
Without taking his eyes off his laptop, Gerald answered,
“I hear the baby. That’s exactly the problem.”
The second incident was somehow even worse because this time I was prepared for it.
I skipped washing my hair altogether. I barely cleaned myself. Every movement became a race against the countdown, and my hands shook as I watched the seconds disappear one by one.
The instant the beeping started, I lunged for the shower handle.
It didn’t matter.
Gerald shut off the water anyway.
Once again, I filled a bucket from the sink and silently poured cold water over myself until the soap was finally gone.
As he walked past the bathroom, he glanced inside, saw me crouched on the shower floor with the bucket beside me, and said almost casually,
“You really need to learn how to manage your time better.”
I wanted to answer.
I wanted to scream.
But no words came.
What frightened me most wasn’t the timer anymore.
It was the fact that I was already beginning to organize my life around it… as though this had somehow become normal.
“I hear the baby,” Gerald had said.
“That’s the problem.”
The entire previous week had already pushed me to my limit.
Maisie had been unusually fussy for two straight days. My hair constantly smelled of sour milk and spit-up. Formula powder covered the kitchen counter. My body was surviving on barely three broken hours of sleep, stitched together in tiny fragments that never felt like real rest.
Gerald had spent part of each night shut inside his office wearing noise-canceling headphones while I wandered the house feeling less like a wife and more like an unpaid employee who happened to be wearing a wedding ring.
By ten o’clock that morning, I needed a shower so desperately I honestly felt like crying.
I fed Maisie, changed her diaper, rocked her until she was drowsy, gently laid her in her bassinet, and slipped quietly into the bathroom.
The timer was already waiting.
Within thirty seconds, I had shampoo in my hair and was scrubbing dried spit-up from my scalp so hard that my skin began to sting.
Outside the bathroom door, Maisie stirred.
Then she started crying.
I needed that shower so badly I could barely hold back tears.
“Jennie!” Gerald shouted.
“I’m almost finished!” I called back.
“The timer says otherwise,” he answered coldly.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Then the water disappeared.
I stood there, frozen beneath the silent shower, my hair still coated with shampoo and my body sticky with sweat.
For one weak, heartbreaking moment, a single thought entered my mind.
Maybe I should apologize.
That was how twisted everything had become.
“The timer says otherwise.”
I shoved open the shower door, wrapped a robe around myself as quickly as I could, and stepped into the hallway.
But Gerald wasn’t standing there.
Instead, it was my father-in-law, Robert.
He had been stopping by our house more often recently because he wanted to spend as much time as possible with his granddaughter. Now he stood silently outside the bathroom, holding the second kitchen timer in one hand.
Gerald was only a few feet away.
His face had gone completely pale.
His entire body was rigid.
Without saying a word, Robert handed me a fresh towel.
Only then did he turn toward his son.
In an unusually calm voice, he said,
“Explain this.”
Gerald forced out a nervous laugh—the kind people use when they’re desperately hoping something outrageous will somehow sound reasonable.
“Dad… it’s not what it looks like.”
Robert didn’t even blink.