The baby was crying again. The baby was always crying these days. Small, pitiful whimpers that would quickly turn to long, piercing wails.

The kid had a pair of lungs, that much was sure. He had heard the cries all the way from the guardhouse of their expansive condominium, though he had hoped beyond hope that it was an ambulance siren or a fire drill or, better yet...

“Please God, be someone else’s baby,” he had prayed. But the closer he got to his apartment block, the louder and more familiar the anguished screams.

“Christ,” he thought, resigning himself to the situation. He loosened his tie and quickened his step, turning what had been a leisurely walk home from a hellish day at work into a speed-walking sprint to what was sure to be an even more hellish evening at home.

“Are you working out?” Siri inquired.

“Fuck off, Siri,” he mumbled, fumbling with the buzzing buttons on his smart watch to dumb it down.

His ninth-story apartment came into view as he rounded the corner. It was an unusually hot evening, but all the balcony doors of the 16-story block were shut tight except his. The sliding doors of his apartment hung wide open like a gaping mouth, darkness inside. The baby’s screams projected out the doors, echoing off the courtyard walls to create an eerie banshee effect.

“It’s enough to raise the dead,” he said in his head. “But apparently not enough for Stella to raise her lazy ass off the fucking couch and close the goddamn doors!”

He may have said that last bit out loud.

“Problems with the family?” said Chloe, the ground floor neighbor, in her British-Chinese accent as he approached his apartment block. Her flabby breasts were so close to flopping out of her silk robe as she leaned over the fencing that he nearly reached out to catch them. A ball player in his day, it was instinct to catch falling objects. This had gotten him into trouble in the past, though, and in this day and age, such good intentions were liable to get him sued. Imprisoned, even.

“All good, thanks,” he responded, clenching his fists and rushing past what was sure to become a crime sight of public indecency.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” she responded. He felt her gaze linger on him, traveling up and down his 6-foot frame.

He punched the elevator button repeatedly with belligerent force, partly to herald the damn thing as quickly as possible — good god, the baby was shrieking at ungodly decibels now — and partly to exorcise the inexplicable bulge in his pants.

It had been months since Stella had looked at him like that. And he had known things would change after having a baby. He wasn’t a total moron, after all. Plus, when he has announced the news, pretty much all the men in his life had both congratulated him and given him their condolences in the same breath.

Usually, it was the other way around, actually.

“Another one bites the dust,” his best friend Brad had said, shaking his head while pouring him a drink.

“Say goodbye to the good stuff,” said Miguel, thrusting his hips.

Only his dad had been congratulatory first, his eyes turning glassy. But even he had amended the mood by adding, “Things will change, you know.”

No, apparently he hadn’t known. He thought he had known, but no one had told him that you don’t automatically fall in love with your baby.

No one had told him that colicky babies could scream for sometimes 12 hours per day, or that this could go on for months.

And no one told him that his wife, best friend, and truly the woman he had fancied his soulmate would never look at him the same. It was as if the baby’s arrival had commandeered her time, attention, and even her feelings for him. As if she had taken back her love, the love she had shown him for eight years before having the baby, and redirected it all toward the tiny stranger that had already demanded so much these past four months.

She had even admitted this to be true. “I have to,” she had told him in that desperate way she had about her these days while bouncing the baby on one hip.

“Well,” said Chloe through a drag of her menthol cigarette, “you know where to find me if you, you know, change your mind.”

Pushpushpushpushpushpushpushpushpush!

The elevator doors opened with the ding of deliverance.

He leaned his creased forehead against the cool mirrors in the elevator, noting the deep blue bags that seemed now permanently etched under his eyes. He seized this moment of rare silence to compose himself as the digital numbers ticked off his last seconds of calm before the chaos.

“Ninth story.” The elevator’s mechanical announcement was quickly drowned out by ear-splitting scream-cries as the doors parted.

His neighbor, Arneau or Arnet — he could never remember his name — was waiting. “Oh thank God,” said Arneau or Arnet over the noise. “Can you do something about that?? My wife has a terrible headache! I’m going to buy ear plugs!”

“Sorry,” he yelled and then rolled his eyes as he turned toward his apartment. People without children had ludicrous expectations of parents.

The screaming was unbearable now, but he knew he had little control over what lay behind the big, oak door. He had learned fast that dads could only do so much for the little alien beings that are infants, but perhaps he could be a relief to Stella. Prove his worth.

But as he clasped the doorknob, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

It was only then he realized he had made assumptions, assumptions created from four months of sleeplessness and near round-the-clock crying.

So he hadn’t even entertained that the source of the screams might not be the baby.

But there lay little Gregory, named after his grandfather, in his bassinet peacefully still and perfectly quiet for the first time in his short life. Already a little bluish, his complexion now complemented the light blue blankie in which he was wrapped.

The worst of it, though, was how the balcony curtains framed Stella’s shadow and the heart-stopping thud that proceeded pure silence.