4. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
I’ve been planning this moment for three days.
The ultrasound is framed, wrapped in tissue paper, sitting in a gift bag by the door.
Dinner is warming in the oven, Kirk’s favorite, the rosemary chicken he always requests for his birthday.
I spent an hour this morning practicing what I’d say, standing in front of the bathroom mirror while my face cycled from nervous to hopeful to terrified.
I have news.
No, too ominous.
We need to talk.
Worse. Way worse.
So, funny story-
Jesus, Andrea, it’s not a funny story. It’s a baby. Get it together.
Kirk’s flight doesn’t land until 6 PM. He’ll be home by seven, seven-thirty at the latest. I’ve timed everything. Dinner will be ready, the lighting will be soft, and I’ll be wearing the green dress he loves because I read once that you should anchor good memories to sensory details.
I’m arranging flowers on the dining table when the front door opens.
I check the clock. 10:30 AM. That can’t be right. His flight doesn’t even leave Seattle for hours.
“Kirk?”
He appears in the kitchen doorway, and my heart stops.
He looks like a stranger. His face is gray, carved from a cold and unforgiving material. Shadows bruise the skin under his eyes, and his hands, his hands are clenched into fists at his sides, knuckles white with strain.
“You’re early.” My voice sounds wrong. Too bright. “I wasn’t expecting-”
“Pack your things.”
The words knock me back a step, into the counter behind me.
“What?”
“You heard me.” He doesn’t move from the doorway. Doesn’t come any closer. As if he can’t bear to breathe the same air. “I want you out of this house by tonight.”
“Kirk, I don’t understand. What’s going on? What happened?”
“Don’t.” His voice cracks. “Don’t you dare stand there and pretend you don’t know.”
I reach for him instinctively, the way I’ve always reached for him when the world goes wrong, and he recoils. Flinches away from my touch as if it burns.
“Kirk-”
“I know about the affair.”
The word refuses to make sense. I hear it, but my brain keeps bouncing it back. A syntax error.
“What affair? What are you talking about?”
“Clarence Wright.” He spits the name like poison. “Your old friend from college. The one you’ve been fucking behind my back.”
“I haven’t - Kirk, I saw Clarence three days ago for the first time in eight years. At the farmers market. Your mother sent him there-”
“Don’t you DARE blame my mother for what you did!”
His voice echoes off the kitchen tiles. I’ve never heard him yell like this. Never, not in six years of marriage, not even during the worst of our near-divorce. He’s always been controlled, measured, even in anger.
This isn’t anger. This is devastation wearing a mask of rage.
“Kirk, please.” Tears stream down my face, and I hate myself for them. “Please just listen to me. I didn’t have an affair. I would never-”
“I’ve seen the photos.” He pulls out his phone, throws it onto the counter between us. The screen lights up with an image I recognize: Clarence lifting me off my feet at the market, my arms around his neck, both of us laughing. “I’ve seen the texts.”
“What texts? Kirk, I never-”
He swipes the screen. Shows me a message thread that freezes my blood.
I can’t stop thinking about you.
Miss you so much. When can I see you?
Our baby. Our secret. He’ll never know.
The words sit in blue bubbles, sent from my number, my phone, my name. But I didn’t write them. I would never write them.
“I didn’t send these.” My voice shakes so hard I can barely get the words out. “Kirk, I swear to God, I didn’t send these. They’re manufactured-”
“That’s how I found out my wife is pregnant.” He laughs, and the sound is hollow, jagged, nothing like my husband’s laugh. “A text to another man. ‘Our baby. Our secret.’ Three years, Andrea. Three years we tried, and I find out from THAT.”
“It’s YOURS.” The room spins. “The baby is yours, I was going to tell you tonight, that’s why the dinner, that’s why-”
“My mother warned me.” He shakes his head slowly, and the pity in it is worse than the shouting. “She told me from the beginning you were only after my money. After my name. I defended you for six years, Andrea. SIX YEARS.”
“Because I love you! I married you because I love you, not your money-”
“And I believed you.” His voice breaks. “I believed every word. And you were laughing at me the whole time.”
“I wasn’t! Kirk, please-” I grab the gift bag from the counter, the one with the ultrasound inside, and shove it toward him. “Look at this. LOOK AT IT. This is what I’ve been planning for days. This is how I wanted to tell you. You. First. Only you.”
He opens the bag. Pulls out the frame.
I watch his face as he looks at it. The grainy image, the tiny seahorse shape, the text at the bottom: Baby Burke-Graham, 7 weeks.
“Seven weeks.” His voice goes dead. Empty. “That’s about how long you’ve been ‘reconnecting’ with your old friend, isn’t it?”
“There is no reconnection! I saw him ONCE, three days ago, at the market! Your mother set it up. She called him, she gave him my schedule-”
“She warned me you’d blame her.” Kirk shakes his head. “She said you’d try to turn me against my own family.”
“Because she’s manipulating you! Kirk, think. Have I ever given you any reason to doubt me? In six years of marriage, have I ever-”
“I don’t know.” He meets my eyes, and there’s nothing behind his. No love. No trust. Just a stranger staring back at me. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Believe ME.” I grab his hands, hold on even when he tries to pull away. “Call Clarence. Ask him what happened. He’ll tell you-”
“I’m sure you’ve already coordinated your story.”
“We haven’t! I haven’t even talked to him since the market! Kirk, please-” I’m sobbing now, ugly and desperate. “Six years. We rebuilt everything. You promised me. You promised you’d always believe in me.”
His eyes flicker. Doubt. The desperate wish to believe.
I see it. I see the crack, the opening, the place where my husband still exists beneath all this manufactured pain.
“Kirk.” I soften my voice. “It’s me. It’s Andrea. You know me better than anyone in the world. Look at me. Look at me. Do I look like a woman who’s been having an affair?”
He looks. He searches my face for truth or lies or anything to hold onto.
For one eternal moment, I think he’s going to believe me.
Then his phone buzzes. He glances down at the screen, and whatever waits there slams his face shut.
“My lawyer will be in touch about the divorce.” He pulls his hands from mine. “I want a paternity test when that baby’s born. Because I will not raise another man’s child.”
“It’s YOUR child!” I’m screaming now, all pretense of control abandoned. “Kirk, it’s yours! I have never touched another man since the day I met you!”
He doesn’t respond. He walks toward the stairs, toward our bedroom, toward the life we built together that he’s about to dismantle.
“You have until morning to pack your things. Leave your key on the table when you go.”
“Kirk-”
He’s already gone. His footsteps echo on the stairs, then down the hall, then the bedroom door slams with a finality that reverberates through my bones.
Frozen in the kitchen, hands pressed over my stomach where our baby grows, I look down at the ultrasound he left on the counter.
The frame cracked when he set it down. A line runs right through the image, bisecting the tiny seahorse shape.
Our baby, cut in half by a lie.
***
Melissa’s couch is too short for me to sleep on comfortably, but comfort stopped mattering about a week ago.
I’ve been here for seven days. Or six. Or eight. The numbers blur together when you spend most of your time staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how your life imploded in the span of a single morning.
Kirk changed the locks the day after I left.
I know because I tried to go back, just once, just to grab a photo album from our wedding, and my key didn’t work.
I stood on my own porch, a stranger jiggling the lock, until a neighbor came out to stare at me, and then I drove back to Melissa’s and didn’t try again.
He blocked my number. Changed his email password. Filed for divorce, citing infidelity. The papers arrived three days ago.
Petitioner alleges respondent engaged in an extramarital affair, resulting in pregnancy of uncertain paternity.
I read those words until they stopped making sense. Until they became shapes on paper, meaningless and absurd.
Melissa found me reading them for the fifth time and took them out of my hands.
“Nope. Done. You’ve memorized it, it can go in the drawer.” She scanned the front page, and her jaw moved the way it does before she says things at volume. “‘Uncertain paternity.’ He signed a document that says ‘uncertain paternity’ about his own kid.”
“His lawyer wrote it.”
“His hand signed it.” She flipped to the last page, read the firm’s name, and pulled out her phone.
“Mel. What are you doing?”
“Leaving a Google review.” She dialed, listened, and when the after-hours voicemail beeped, my sister stood in her kitchen in yoga pants and delivered, in the warm professional tone she uses on difficult patients, sixty seconds on the subject of firms that let a mother-in-law’s fiction into a legal filing without one phone call of due diligence, closing with her name, spelled twice, and the words “see you at the deposition, sweethearts.”
She hung up. Straightened her shirt.
“Feel better?” I asked.
“Marginally.” She sat down across from me and took my hands, and the volume went out of her all at once.
“He’s going to find out the truth, Andrea.
Lies this stupid don’t hold. And when he does, he is going to read his own signature under ‘uncertain paternity,’ and he will have to live in the same skin as that signature for the rest of his life.
” Her thumbs pressed into my knuckles. “That’s not comfort, exactly.
But some days justice is just arithmetic that hasn’t finished yet. ”