Chapter 5
I found out about her pregnancy the way I found out about everything in that house—by accident.
I was going through his jacket before the wash, mechanically, not really looking. A slip of paper folded in four fell out of the inside pocket. I unfolded it—just so I wouldn't launder it.
An ultrasound scan. Black and white, a date in the corner and a caption: eleven weeks along. A last name. Not mine.
I turned the scan over, as if the back might say it was a mistake. It didn't. Eleven weeks. While I walked around the house with his child under my heart, coaxing myself with maybe it'll glue us back together, he'd been carrying someone else's ultrasound in his pocket.
I sat down right there on the floor by the laundry basket, that slip of paper in my hands, and for a long time couldn't work out what I felt.
My belly was four weeks ahead of hers. We were carrying children by the same man—almost at the same time.
She—in the apartment by the river that he'd rented for her.
Me—here, in the house he kept leaving to go to her.
Strange, but I didn't want to cry. I wanted to laugh—that terrible laugh you're ashamed of afterward. Two. He'd managed to get two women pregnant at once—and still looked at me like I was the one complicating everything.
And once he'd been overjoyed about Noah—pressed his ear to my belly, argued with me over names. That Dominic I'd been burying piece by piece all these years. Today, with a stranger's scan in my hands, I buried the last piece.
Now there were two of them. Two pregnant wives, only one with a stamp in her marriage license, and the other—with his future.
That evening I waited up for him. I didn't shout, didn't throw things—I just laid the scan on the kitchen table, in front of his plate.
He glanced at it. No surprise, no alarm—only irritation, like at a bill that had come at a bad time.
"Went through my pockets," he stated, and pulled his plate closer. "Not nice."
"She's pregnant."
"Pregnant." He started in on his dinner, like we were discussing the electric bill. "And now what?"
"By you."
"By me." He shrugged. "It happens, Leah. Grown adults."
"We're having a baby." My voice broke. "We are, Dominic. And you—you got her an apartment, you carry her ultrasound around..."
"You want me to carry yours too?" he smirked. "Would that make you feel better?"
"'Get rid of it,' you told me. About ours." I didn't take my eyes off him. "And her baby you carry in your pocket. What's different about them, Dominic? They're both yours."
"What's different," he said, chewing, "is that she'll have mine gladly. And you—out of spite. You're even having it to tie me down. You think I don't see that?"
It was so twisted inside out that I couldn't breathe. He always knew how to do that—swap the executioner and the victim, casually, plain as two and two.
"You're a monster," I said quietly. Without a tremor—just naming it, the way you name an object.
"I'm a realist," he corrected. "A monster is when a man's so miserable at home he runs anywhere he can. Be grateful I still feed you."
The doorbell rang.
I went to answer it just as I was—dish towel over my shoulder. And on the doorstep, in an expensive coat hanging open, a belly barely showing now, stood her. The one. Come to my home. To me.
The perfume—heavy, sweet. I knew it at once: it was what his shirts smelled of, the ones I'd stopped ironing.
"Is he here?" she asked, peering past my shoulder. "Dominic. We had plans."
I didn't get to answer—he was already coming out into the hall. And what finished me completely: he wasn't the least bit flustered to see the two of us there, face to face, both with his children inside us.
"What are you doing here?" he asked her. Almost tenderly. He hadn't spoken to me like that in years.
"You weren't answering. I got worried." She laid a hand on her belly—right in front of me, looking me in the eye. "It's bad for us to be stressed. Isn't it, baby?"
Baby. In my hallway.
"How much longer are you going to drag out this divorce?" she asked—now not him, but me, businesslike, as if we were discussing a deal. "A child needs its father around, not these games of yours. You'd do the decent thing and let go."
"And do you know this 'man' has two kids at home and a wife who's due herself?" I asked.
"I know. He said—everything's been dead between you for ages. You're just living out of habit." She shrugged, without a shred of embarrassment.
"Out of habit is when two people are simply tired," I said. "With us it isn't habit. With us, he hits, and I take it. Did he tell you that part? Or only the part where I 'don't understand him'?"
She flinched, just for a second. Then she turned back to him, as if she hadn't heard. But I caught it. And I filed it away: one day it'll get through to her.
And then, in the kitchen doorway, my mother-in-law appeared—she'd come by to drop off treats for the kids and, evidently, had heard it all. I thought: now. Now his own mother will say one word to her son.
She said one. To me.
"Well, don't just stand there like a post, Leah," she said, pursing her lips. "You drove your husband to it. The young one there doesn't nag, doesn't greet him with a sour face. Men don't leave good wives."
"So they leave pregnant ones?" I asked. "Your son abandons his pregnant wife for his pregnant mistress, and I'm the one to blame?"
"Don't twist it. You'd have had the baby and sat quiet."
I looked at the three of them—at my husband, at his pregnant mistress, and at his mother, who in my own home had taken their side—and understood that I was alone. Completely. Against all of them at once.
No mother of my own, no family close by that evening. One woman against her husband, his girl, and his mother—and all three looked at me like an inconvenient obstacle to their shared happiness.
"Get out of my house," I said. Quietly, but so that all three of them fell silent for a second. "All of you. Out."
"Yours?" My mother-in-law threw up her hands. "Why, this house—"
"Mom, don't," Dominic cut her off—not defending me, just to keep it from dragging on. He took his jacket off the hook, calmly, matter-of-factly. "I'm going." And—to her, the other one: "Come on, I'll walk you out. No sense standing here getting worked up, in your condition."
There it was. In your condition. He cared about her condition. Mine—he never once remembered.
They left together—he slid an arm around her shoulders in the doorway, in front of me, in front of his own mother. My mother-in-law shifted her feet, muttered something about "come to your senses before it's too late," and left too, offended at me—as if I were the one who'd wrecked the family.
The hallway still held the smell of her perfume and his cologne—mingled, alien, victorious. I threw the window wide open and stood by it until the night cold had aired it all out.
The door shut. I was left alone in the middle of the hall, dish towel over my shoulder, two children asleep in the room and a third inside me, one he didn't even count as his.
Now there were two of them. And me—one.
I looked in on the kids. Noah was sprawled out; Mia had her arms around her rabbit. Two I was responsible for. And a third—beneath my heart, still nameless, still no one's to his own father.
"It's okay," I said to all three of them, quietly, into the dark. "I won't give you up. Any of you."
I stood and listened to his car pull out of the lot—carrying him to her, to their future, to their apartment by the river. And for the first time in all these years, I didn't cry.
The tears had run out somewhere between the kitchen and the hall—drained away, over the years, to the last drop. What was left was a dry, cold clarity: I'd been crossed out. Out of his life, his plans, this house. Crossed out—but no one had thought to ask whether I agreed to disappear.
I knew: this wasn't the end. Something told me—she wouldn't leave me alone. A woman who comes into another woman's home to demand another woman's husband will come again. And not for him.
For me.