“And all this time, you were paying for your mother’s house?”
He closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
The betrayal felt different this time.
Not like Patricia’s open cruelty.
Like discovering a floorboard had been missing beneath my feet for years.
“Did you ever plan to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He looked at me helplessly.
“I was ashamed.”
I wanted to yell.
I wanted to throw something.
Instead, I thought of Lily sitting in the next room.
So I lowered my voice.
“Ethan, I can’t build a marriage on information you choose to hide whenever you’re uncomfortable.”
He nodded.
“You’re right.”
“Love isn’t enough if I don’t know whether you’re telling me the truth.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“I know that, too.”
I walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
For the first time since Christmas, I wondered whether Patricia had succeeded in something after all.
She hadn’t separated us through insults.
She hadn’t separated us with a forged letter.
But she’d trained her son to believe that keeping secrets was the price of keeping peace.
And those secrets were now reaching into our marriage.
Around eleven that night, the cottage was silent.
Lily was asleep.
Ethan had taken the couch.
I lay awake staring at the ceiling.
Then I heard a sound.
Three knocks.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Exactly like the ones at our house that morning.
I sat upright.
A second later, Ethan called softly from the living room.
“Claire. Stay in the bedroom.”
My heart began hammering.
I reached for my phone.
There was movement near the front door.
Then a woman’s voice.
“Ethan?”
I knew that voice.
Not Patricia.
Not Madison.
A voice I hadn’t heard in six years.
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s late.”
Ethan sounded stunned.
“Rebecca?”
I slid out of bed.
Rebecca Sloan.
The woman Patricia had wanted him to marry.
The woman whose name appeared in the secret emails.
She was standing outside our rental cottage in the middle of the night.
And she wasn’t alone.
Through the slightly open bedroom door, I heard a child crying.
“Please let us in,” Rebecca whispered.
“I think Patricia is going to hurt my son.”
I stepped into the hallway.
Ethan looked back at me.
Then he opened the door.
Rebecca stood beneath the porch light.
Her expensive coat was stained with mud.
Her makeup had run down her face.
And in her arms was a little boy, perhaps four years old, clinging to her neck.
When she saw me, she began to cry.
“Claire, I’m so sorry.”
I stared at her.
“For what?”
She looked at Ethan.
Then at the sleeping child.
“Because Patricia didn’t stop with trying to break up your wedding.”
Her voice cracked.
“She spent six years trying to make Ethan believe this little boy was his.”
I felt the room drop away beneath me.
