5 - THE TRUTH EXPOSED
By mid-October, the leaves on the dogwoods had turned the color of rust, and Victoria’s body had turned into something she barely recognized.
She stood in front of the guest bathroom mirror, her nightgown bunched above her belly, and traced the curve with her palm.
Three and a half months. Sixteen weeks, according to the pregnancy app.
The bump was no longer a secret she could hide beneath oversized sweatshirts and strategic posture.
It was a fact now, a roundness that pressed against the waistband of her jeans and announced itself to anyone who looked.
Her breasts were heavier. Her hips had widened.
The nausea had finally faded—replaced by a hungry ache that woke her at odd hours—and her skin had taken on the flushed, luminous quality that pregnancy books called “the glow.”
Victoria stared at her reflection and tried to find the woman she’d been four months ago.
The woman who’d sat in that fertility clinic with her husband’s hand in hers.
The woman who’d believed in second chances.
That woman was a stranger.
Behind her, through the bathroom door, she could hear Joey moving around in the guest room.
The shuffle of his feet. The creak of the dresser drawer.
The soft sigh he made when he checked his phone and found nothing new.
He’d been sighing more often lately. Pausing in doorways like he wanted to say something and then thinking better of it.
Watching her across the dinner table with brown eyes that kept getting sadder.
She’d stopped meeting those eyes.
Victoria let the nightgown fall. Smoothed the fabric over her belly. Took a breath that felt too shallow and too deep at the same time.
Yesterday, Joey had asked if they could go to dinner. Just the two of them. A date, he’d called it, his voice so hopeful it had made her chest ache. She’d told him she was tired. The pregnancy. The hormones. The same excuses she’d been feeding him for weeks.
He’d nodded. Kissed her forehead. Retreated to the living room to watch baseball with his father.
She’d watched him go and felt the distance between them widen by another inch.
—
Downstairs, the coffee maker beeped. Victoria pulled on a pair of maternity jeans—the ones she’d bought last week at the Target in Beckley, the ones Joey hadn’t noticed were new—and a sweater that skimmed her bump.
She ran a brush through her blonde hair.
Pinned it up. Looked at herself one more time.
Today, she decided. They’d tell him today.
The thought landed in her stomach like a stone, and she sat on the edge of the bed until the nausea—not morning sickness, not anymore, just dread—passed enough for her to stand.
Joey was in the kitchen when she came down. He’d already poured her a glass of orange juice, the kind with extra calcium that Dr. Chen had recommended, and set it beside a plate of toast. The gesture was so thoughtful, so Joey, that Victoria had to look away.
“Morning.” He glanced up from his phone. “How’d you sleep?”
“Okay. The baby was kicking a little.”
“Really? Already?” His face lit up. “Can you feel it from the outside yet?”
“Not yet. Soon, probably.”
“I can’t wait.” He said it like a prayer. Like a promise. “I read that by twenty weeks you can hear the heartbeat with a stethoscope. I was thinking maybe we could get one. Listen to it together.”
Victoria picked up the toast. Took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed. The whole time, Joey watched her with the patient, hopeful expression of a man who was trying to find his way back into his own marriage.
“Maybe,” she said.
His smile flickered. Recovered. “I’m heading out early today. The Henderson audit’s finally wrapping up, but there’s a stack of follow-up reports. I’ll probably be late.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe we could do something this weekend? Drive out to the gorge? The leaves are supposed to be beautiful.”
“Maybe.”
Joey’s smile finally faltered. He set his phone down. “Victoria.”
“Mm?”
“Is something wrong? And don’t say you’re tired. You’ve been tired for six weeks.”
Victoria’s hand tightened around the juice glass. The condensation was cold against her palm. She looked at her husband—his brown hair that needed a trim, his glasses that were slightly crooked, the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes—and felt the truth press against her throat like a fist.
“I’m just—” She stopped. Swallowed. “It’s been a lot. The pregnancy. Everything.”
“I know.” He reached across the counter and took her free hand. His fingers were cool from the juice glass. “I know it’s been hard. But you don’t have to go through it alone. I’m right here. I’ve always been right here.”
The sincerity in his voice was unbearable.
“I should let you get to work.” She pulled her hand back. Gently, she told herself. As gently as she could. “We’ll talk later.”
Joey’s hand hung in the air for a moment before he withdrew it. “Yeah. Later. Sure.”
He grabbed his laptop bag. Kissed her cheek—a brush of lips that she barely felt.
The door closed behind him.
—
Victoria stood in the kitchen, the orange juice untouched, the toast going cold, and listened to his car start in the driveway. Listened to the crunch of tires on gravel. Listened to the silence that rushed in to fill the space he’d left.
Her hand drifted to her belly. The baby moved—a flutter, like butterfly wings against her palm.
She’d told Joey it was kicking. That wasn’t quite true.
What she felt was smaller than a kick, lighter than a flutter.
More like a secret. A secret that moved inside her, that grew a little every day, that would demand to be born whether she was ready or not.
Brock’s truck was already in the driveway.
He had the day off. She’d checked his schedule on the refrigerator the night before.
This morning he’d retreated to the garage after breakfast.
She’d heard the clang of tools, the hum of the radio, the familiar sounds of a man who needed to keep his hands busy.
She found her shoes by the back door. Took a breath. Walked outside.
The garage was a detached structure at the end of the driveway, a two-car space that Brock had converted into a workshop years ago.
The main door was open, the afternoon light spilling across the concrete floor.
A pair of denim-clad legs extended from beneath the old Mustang that Brock had been restoring since before Victoria met Joey.
The radio was tuned to a classic rock station—Lynyrd Skynyrd, something about Alabama—and the air smelled like motor oil and gasoline and the metallic bite of rust.
Victoria stepped into the shade of the open door. Her shadow fell across the concrete.
“Brock?”
The legs beneath the car shifted. A moment later, Brock slid out from the undercarriage on a mechanic’s creeper.
He was wearing a gray t-shirt that had probably been white once, dark with sweat and grease, and his hands were wrapped in a rag that had seen better decades.
He sat up. Pulled the rag away. His gray eyes found hers.
“Hey.” He stood. Wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a smear of grease above his eyebrow. “Didn’t hear you. Everything okay?”
“We need to talk.”
His expression didn’t change. The correctional officer’s mask, smooth and steady. But his hands stilled on the rag. “About what?”
Victoria stepped further into the garage. The concrete was cool beneath her shoes. The Mustang’s hood was propped open, its engine a jigsaw of metal and wire, and the radio was still playing, and she could feel the baby moving again—that butterfly flutter, that secret pressing against her ribs.
“About Joey.” She stopped a few feet from him. “About us. About telling him.”
Brock folded the rag. Set it on the workbench. His movements were deliberate, controlled—the movements of a man who’d spent thirty years learning how to buy time when time was all he had.
“I know we said we’d wait,” Victoria continued. “I know we said we’d have a plan. But it’s been a month, Brock. A month since the ultrasound. A month since you said you wanted to raise this baby with me. And Joey still doesn’t know.”
“You’re right,” Brock said. “He’s going to notice something’s wrong.”
“He has noticed. He just doesn’t know what he’s noticing.” She pressed her palm to her belly. The baby fluttered again. “Every day he gets more invested. Every day he talks about baby names and nursery colors and listening to the heartbeat with a stethoscope.”
Brock’s jaw tightened. The muscle flickered beneath his skin. “I haven’t been pushing you, because I’m dreading it as much as you are.”
“I know.”
“He’s my son.”
“I know.”
“If we tell him the truth—if he finds out that this baby is mine, that we’ve been—” He stopped. Swallowed. “He’s never going to forgive me. He’s never going to forgive either of us. That’s not something I take lightly.”
“Neither do I.” Victoria stepped closer.
“But lying to him isn’t protecting him. It’s just making the truth worse. Every day we wait, it gets worse. Every time he calls himself a father-to-be. Every time he buys a book about pregnancy. Every time he talks about the future.”
Her voice cracked. “We’re letting him fall in love with a child that isn’t his. When does that stop being a lie and start being something unforgivable?”
Brock didn’t answer. The radio played on. “Free Bird,” now—the long guitar solo stretching into the afternoon. The Mustang’s engine sat silent, its parts arrayed like a puzzle with no solution.
Then he said, “When do you want to tell him?”
“Tonight. At dinner.”
The words hung in the air between them. Victoria watched Brock absorb them. Saw his shoulders square. Saw his hands curl into fists at his sides. Saw the flicker of fear cross his face before the mask slid back into place.
“Tonight.” His voice was steady, but the word sounded like a death sentence.
“We can’t keep waiting for the right time. There’s never going to be a right time for this.”
Brock looked at her for a long moment. Then he stepped forward, and his grease-stained hands came up to cup her face, and his gray eyes searched hers with an intensity that made her breath catch.
“Okay,” he said. “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” she repeated.