Chapter 3: What He Said Next
Nobody moved.
The dining room felt smaller than it ever had.
The overhead light hummed.
My husband stood on one side of the table.
The boy — this pale, dark-eyed boy my daughter had brought home — stood on the other.
And I was somewhere between them, holding a phone that had just cracked my life down the middle.
"Say something," I said to my husband.
He looked at the table.
"Richard." My voice came out harder than I expected.
"Look at me."
He did.
And I saw it — not guilt exactly, but the particular exhaustion of a man whose secret has finally caught up with him.
He'd been carrying this for a long time.
"What's your name?" I asked the boy.
"Eli."
"How old are you, Eli?"
"Twenty.
I'll be twenty-one in March."
Twenty.
I did the math without wanting to.
Richard and I had been together for twenty-three years.
Married for twenty-one.
"What's your mother's name?"
"Carol.
Carol Marsh." He paused.
"She passed away eight months ago.
Cancer."
"I'm sorry," I said.
I meant it.
My daughter hadn't spoken.
She was standing near the doorway to the kitchen, her arms wrapped around herself, watching her father with an expression I had never seen on her face before.
"Caitlin," I said.
She shook her head slightly.
Not now.
I turned back to Richard.
"Did you know about him?"
The pause before he answered was long enough to be its own answer.
"Yes," he said.
Caitlin made a short, sharp sound.
"For how long?"
"Since before he was born."
The room went very quiet.
"You knew Carol was pregnant."
"Yes."
"And you knew the child was yours."
He didn't answer that one.
He didn't need to.
I set Eli's phone down on the table between us.
My hands were steady, which surprised me.
"How much did you give her?
To stay quiet?"
Richard's jaw tightened.
"That's not what it was."
"Then tell me what it was."
"It was complicated.
Carol and I — it wasn't a long thing.
It was a mistake.
She didn't want anything from me.
She just wanted me to know he existed."
"And you decided I didn't need to know."
"I was trying to protect—"
"Don't." The word came out flat.
"Don't tell me you were protecting me."
Eli was watching us.
Not with satisfaction, not with cruelty.
He looked like someone who had rehearsed this moment a hundred times and found that the real version felt nothing like he'd imagined.
"I'm not here to cause problems," he said.
"I want you to know that.
I just — after my mum d*ed, I found the letters.
His name, his address.
I needed to see him.
I needed to know if he was real."
"Letters?" I looked at Richard.
He said nothing.
"What letters, Richard?"
"Carol wrote to me.
A few times, over the years.
Updates.
I never — I never wrote back."
"But you kept them."
Silence.
"Where are they?"
He looked toward the hallway.
May you like
Toward his study.
I walked past him without another word.
