“Don’t tell Dad I’m here yet.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. There were more questions than answers racing through my mind.
“Just let me in.”
“Do not tell him what? That you came here with your child?”
Ethan flinched as if I had struck him.
“My child? Mom, you know nothing about your husband.”
My stomach turned cold. The baby made a soft sound against his chest, and Ethan looked down at her as if she were the only solid thing in the room.
“Sit,” I said. “Please, just sit.”
“Mom, you know nothing about your husband.”
He didn’t. Instead, he crossed the living room and set the baby gently in my arms. She was warm and impossibly light. Then he knelt, opened the battered suitcase on the rug, and lifted the lid.
The instant my eyes landed on the contents, I screamed and startled the baby! I had to lull her back to sleep while processing what I was seeing.
- Bundles of letters, tied with rubber bands.
- Bank statements highlighted in yellow.
- Photographs of Richard, my Richard, with his arm around a woman I’d never seen before, a little girl between them at a birthday table.
- A folder of legal documents thick enough to be a book.
I screamed and startled the baby!
“Ethan.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “What is this?!”
“Her name is Diane,” he said quietly. “She’s been with Dad for 12 years. They have a daughter. He paid her rent and his daughter’s school tuition.”
I couldn’t breathe. I held the baby tighter, without meaning to.
“And this child?”
Ethan sat down on the floor the way he used to when he was small.
