His mother called me after watching the video and didn’t even say hello. The first thing she asked was, “How long had you known?” I told her I hadn’t known anything. She went silent and then asked me to send her the full recording, because she said there was something in the background of the video that I hadn’t noticed.
I sent it to her. She called back twenty minutes later and told me to look at the moment when my husband walked out of the room during the induction. He’d taken his phone with him, and when he came back, he’d stood beside my bed and kissed my forehead like nothing had happened. But his mother had noticed something else — he’d been checking the same conversation every few minutes, even while I was being examined.
Then she told me why she’d watched the video three times. She had recognized the name at the top of the screen when he handed me his phone. It was his ex-wife. His mother said she knew the woman was going through something, but she hadn’t known they’d been talking for forty-one hours while I was in labor.
I asked her what she thought was happening between them. She said she didn’t believe it was an affair either. Then she said something that made me sit up in bed: “That’s exactly why you need to ask him what she needed him for.” I waited until he came home, put the phone on the table, and asked him one question. He looked at the screen, went completely pale, and said…
