The woman holding the baby looked at me and said, “You must be Claire.” I hadn’t told her my name. I asked who she was, and she glanced toward Randy’s truck before answering. “I’m Melissa. Randy said your husband would explain everything.” I asked what everything was. She stepped aside and I could see a child’s shoes by the door, a crib in the living room, and photographs covering the refrigerator. One of them showed my husband standing beside the baby. The picture was dated eight months earlier.
I didn’t go inside. I called my husband from the driveway and asked him where he was. He said he was still at work. I asked him why Randy’s truck was at a house we supposedly didn’t own. He went completely silent. Then Melissa came outside and said, “He told me you knew about the house. He said you were helping pay for it.” I asked her how long she’d lived there. She said almost two years. Two years. That was before my husband started taking the long way home. I asked whether my husband had ever told her he was married. She looked genuinely confused and said, “He told me his wife had passed away.”
I drove home and waited. When my husband finally walked through the door, I had the water company’s letter sitting on the table beside his phone. He didn’t even take off his boots. I asked him who Melissa was, and he finally admitted he’d been renting the house under a different name and helping her because Randy had gotten her pregnant. I asked why my husband was in the photographs. He said the baby wasn’t Randy’s. Then he looked at me and said something that made everything else disappear: “I was trying to protect you from finding out who the father really is.” I stared at him and asked, “Then why is Randy’s truck sitting in her driveway?” He didn’t answer. His phone buzzed on the table. One new message from Randy said: “She knows. Tell her before she talks to the baby’s mother.”
