9. Avery
AVERY
Three days after Declan dropped our baby’s yellow sock onto a conference-room floor, I return to the same office ten weeks and two days pregnant, and he arrives with a typed timeline thick enough to require a binder clip.
His attorney places it between us and keeps one hand on the top page until my attorney confirms she has the matching copy.
Declan sits across from me in a black button-down without his cut, the sleeves rolled far enough to show the old burn near his wrist. I used to rub that scar when he couldn’t sleep.
Today I look at it and wonder how many nights he lay beside me after Sasha put her mouth there.
“The meeting is being recorded by agreement,” my attorney says, setting a small recorder near the center of the table. “Avery may stop at any point. Declan will answer the submitted questions first. If either side needs a break, say so.”
I don’t want a break. I want the whole thing out of him before I lose the nerve to hear it. My nausea has been vicious since dawn, and the crackers in my purse taste like dust, but I straighten the blank pad beside my copy of the timeline and look at Declan.
“Start with the first time.”
He puts both hands flat beside the pages.
There is ink along the side of his right hand, the kind he gets when writing requires more concentration than he wants anyone to see.
“April twenty-fifth. At the safehouse. Sasha had read a shipping manifest for me. I kissed her in the office. We went to the bedroom.”
I write the date though I will never need the paper to remember it.
April twenty-fifth was the day I made Declan’s mother’s soup for the hospice fundraiser and sent him a picture of flour on my face.
He replied with a black heart. I had stood in our kitchen smiling at that stupid little shape while he was learning how another woman sounded in the bed where I would find them.
“Did you use a condom?”
“Yes. Every time. I bought them with cash and kept them in the safehouse and her apartment.”
The answer should help. Instead, all I can think about is the planning. Condoms required a store, a place to hide the box, and the belief that there would be enough future betrayals to need more than one. I draw a line through the date, then write cash beside it.
“Where did you have sex with her?”
“The safehouse bedroom and her apartment. Once in the safehouse office.”
The office is where I read for him the first time he let club work into my hands, months after he told me at our kitchen table that words moved on him when he was tired.
He had shoved the manifest away, called himself stupid, and tried to leave.
I locked the door, sat on the desk between his knees, and made him listen while I told him nothing on that page could make me see him as less.
Years later, Sasha spread the same papers under her hands, and he put her on the desk where I taught him he was safe.
My pen bites through the sheet. “Did you ever bring her to our house?”
“No. She was never inside.”
“She knew where it was.”
“Yes. From the family file and from following me once. I didn’t know she followed me until I found a picture on the burner.”
“You knew she had my address before I found you.”
Declan looks at the timeline. “I knew the week before. I told her never to go there. I should have told you, Cruz, and Gage that night. I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Telling you she knew our house meant explaining why she was close enough to follow me. I wanted to keep the affair and the club breach contained until I figured out what she had.”
Contained. The word makes my stomach roll. I put the pen down before I break it. “You found out your girlfriend knew where I slept, and your solution was to keep me asleep there.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend.” The old answer leaves him before he can stop it.
His face changes, and he drags a hand away from the pages as though the movement might take the words back.
“Fuck. Avery, I know that makes it worse. I wasn’t correcting you to protect anything with her.
I never called what we had a relationship. ”
“You gave her a key, rent, my sheets, your mother’s mug, my Tuesdays, and six months of your body. I don’t care what name made you comfortable.”
“You’re right.”
“Don’t agree with me to get past it. Answer the question.” I find the next line while anger keeps me from being sick. “Did you tell her you loved her?”
“No.”
“Did she tell you she loved you?”
“No. She said once that I needed her more than I admitted. I told her knowing my secrets didn’t make her important. Then I kept giving her more of them.”
“Did you promise to leave me?”
“Never. I told her from the beginning I wouldn’t leave you. I told her you were my wife and that wasn’t changing.”
My attorney shifts beside me, keeping herself from reacting aloud. Heat climbs into my face. He told the woman he was fucking that I would always be his wife, as if keeping the title meant he hadn’t broken every promise underneath it.
“Did you talk about me while you were with her?”
“Yes.”
My hand closes around the edge of the table. “What did you tell her?”
Declan’s eyes meet mine and hold, though shame pulls at every part of his face.
“That you handled the money. That you read for me. That you wanted a baby. That we had been trying. She knew about the fertility app after she saw a message from you on my phone. She asked why you tracked everything if we had agreed to let it happen.”
The room narrows to the recorder’s red light. “What did you say?”
“That you worried when you couldn’t control something.”
I can hear myself laughing in our bathroom the first month I began tracking, telling Declan I knew it was ridiculous but I wanted to understand my own body.
He kissed my forehead and said I could make a spreadsheet if it made me happy.
I did. He must have seen the app more than once and never asked why I was afraid to bring it to him.
“Did she mock me?”
His fingers curl against the table. “Yes.”
“Say what she said.”
“Avery—”
“You gave her the information. You don’t get to protect me from hearing what she did with it now.”
He looks toward his attorney, who keeps his eyes on his own notes. “She called the app your little breeding calendar. She said you could schedule sex all you wanted, but you couldn’t make my sperm cooperate.”
The baby is far too small for movement I can feel, but my whole body curls around the life Sasha turned into a joke before any of us knew it existed.
I remember Declan coming home after midnight, leaning in the bathroom doorway while I deleted another failed month, asking whether I was coming to bed.
I told him I had a headache. He said okay and left me there.
He had already let another woman laugh at the thing breaking my heart.
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her to shut her fucking mouth and never speak about you that way again.”
“Then what?”
His jaw works before the answer comes. “I stayed. We had sex later that night.”
I stare at him until he looks away. There it is. He got angry on my behalf, then stayed and fucked her anyway. “Which night?”
He gives me the date. It is on the timeline, marked beside a safehouse meeting. I find the same day in my phone calendar. Declan and I had sex when he came home. I had put a star beside it, one more hopeful mark tied to my cycle, and gone to sleep with my head on his chest.
“You came home after her.”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“I went home after most meetings. Sometimes you were asleep. Sometimes we ate. Sometimes I showered and got into bed. We had sex after five of those nights.”
My attorney says my name, giving me the opening to stop, but I raise one hand. I need to know the rest. “How long between her and me?”
“Hours. Once less. I showered every time. I used condoms with her and never used them with you after we agreed to try.”
The practical answer is as ugly as the act. He showered, washed off the proof, then came into our bed knowing I believed he was sleeping only with me. I was trying to make a baby with a husband who planned enough time to clean up on the drive home.
“Did you ever touch me while thinking about her?”
“No.” His answer comes fast enough to be instinct.
Then he closes his eyes for a moment and corrects himself.
“Not sexually. I thought about what I had done while I was with you. I thought about whether you could smell her, whether you had seen my phone, whether I had left anything in the truck. I used being close to you to convince myself I had protected the marriage.”
“You thought about me while you were with Sasha too.”
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Yes.”
“When?”
“Before. During. After. Not every second, but every time. Your messages. The time. Whether you were waiting. What excuse I had already given you.”
I can’t keep telling myself he forgot me while he was with her. Being forgotten would have hurt, but it would have separated the man who loved me from the man who touched her. Declan thought about me in every room and chose the affair anyway.
“Then why didn’t thinking about me stop you?”
His eyes redden. He lets me watch it happen. “I thought loving you meant I couldn’t really lose you. I told myself the affair couldn’t touch our marriage if you never found out. I counted on your love to keep you from leaving while I did whatever I wanted.”
I push my chair back so hard the legs scrape. My attorney catches the recorder before it tips, and Declan’s hands lift from the table and stop halfway, palms up.
“You loved me while you did it.” I stand with one hand over my stomach and the other pressed against the tabletop. “Every morning you kissed me, every Tuesday you gave her my papers, every night you knew I was tracking a baby you acted bored about—you loved me.”
“Yes.”