Chapter 6: What the Silence Confirmed
"There's someone else," I said.
It wasn't a question.
The way he couldn't look at me had already answered it.
"It's not—" He stopped.
Started again.
"It ended."
"When?"
"Eight months ago."
Eight months ago.
One month after I told him I was pregnant.
I stood up from the stool.
"Her name," I said.
"It doesn't matter—"
"Her name, Daniel."
He looked at the ceiling.
"Justine.
She worked in my building.
It was six months, maybe seven.
It's over.
It has been over."
Cara made a quiet sound from across the kitchen.
Not surprise.
Something closer to recognition.
"You knew," I said to her.
"I suspected.
He went quiet for a while.
Stopped responding to texts.
When he started again, something was different." She shook her head.
"I didn't know for certain."
I walked out of the kitchen.
Not because I had somewhere to go.
Because I needed to not be standing still.
The living room.
The nursery down the hall with the pale yellow ceiling.
The black confetti still on the garage floor.
All of it the same house it had been four hours ago, and none of it the same.
Daniel followed me.
"I ended it when you told me about the baby," he said.
"I swear to you.
The moment you told me, I ended it."
"You want credit for that."
"No.
I'm just—"
"You want me to understand that finding out I was carrying your child was the thing that made you stop." I turned around.
"Do you hear yourself?"
"I know how it sounds."
"A child with another woman.
An affair that lasted seven months.
Four years of lies." I looked at him.
"What else?
Is there more?
Because I need you to tell me right now, Daniel.
All of it.
Whatever is left."
"There's nothing else."
"You've said that twice tonight and been wrong both times."
"There is nothing else." His voice broke slightly at the end.
"I promise you.
There is nothing else."
From the living room, a small voice said, "Mama?"
We both turned.
Noah was sitting up on the couch, the throw blanket bunched around his waist, looking at the doorway with wide, uncertain eyes.
Cara was beside him in three steps.
"I'm here, baby.
I'm right here."
He looked past her.
Directly at Daniel.
Children that age don't understand what they're seeing.
They just see a face that looks like their face, and something in them responds to it before their brain can explain why.
Noah pointed at Daniel.
"Who's that?" he asked.
The room went completely still.
Daniel's face did something I had never seen it do before.
It collapsed inward.
Not dramatically.
Just quietly, like a wall that had been holding too much weight for too long.
He crouched down to Noah's level.
"I'm Daniel," he said.
Noah considered this.
"Do you live here?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Noah looked around the room, apparently satisfied.
Then he looked back at Daniel.
"Do you have any juice?"
Cara let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
Almost.
I walked down the hallway to the nursery.
I sat on the floor with my back against the crib we had assembled three weeks ago, in this room that smelled like fresh paint and new wood and everything I had believed this life was going to be.
Renee called.
I answered.
"Tell me," she said.
So I did.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"I'm coming over," she said.
May you like
"You don't have to—"
"I'm already in the car."
