Her Husband’s Secret Baby with Another Woman (Her Marriage in Crisis #45)

1. Emily

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Emily

The chicken is getting cold.

I check my phone again. Nothing. No text, no missed call, no little typing bubble telling me he’s about to say he’s running late.

The rule is that I tell him where I am at all times.

I text when I leave the house, when I arrive, when I’m heading back, and Henry doesn’t do the same, because the rule only runs one direction.

I cover the plates with foil so they’ll at least hold their heat, then set the table for two with the good ones.

It’s Tuesday, and Tuesdays used to be our date nights back when we were dating, back when he’d bring me grocery-store flowers and tell me I was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Now Tuesdays are just another night where I cook and wait and he comes home whenever he comes home.

My phone rings on the counter. For one stupid second I think it’s him, and then I see the screen. Mom.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Emily, honey. Can you send me two hundred dollars? I need to hire someone for the front yard.” No hello, no how are you, straight to the ask.

“Mom, I don’t know. My savings is almost...”

“Actually, make it two fifty. So? Can you send it over?”

“My savings is almost gone, I can’t really...”

“Oh, come on. Just ask your husband or something.”

“You know Henry. I can barely get grocery money without him listing exactly what I’m allowed to buy. How am I supposed to ask him for more?”

“I don’t care. He’s your husband. You should know how to handle him by now.”

I grip the phone until my knuckles ache. “I can’t give you anything right now. Maybe I could save something up over a couple months, but...”

“Forget it. You’re such an ungrateful daughter. If I ask Carmen, I know she’d help me.”

The line goes dead.

Always Carmen. I set the phone face-down on the counter and stand there a second, breathing, until the front door opens.

“Hey, honey.” Henry walks in loosening his tie, and I hate that my whole body unclenches at the sound of his voice, like I’ve been holding my breath without noticing. He kisses my forehead with dry, distracted lips, and I smell the restaurant on him, fryer oil and industrial soap.

“Hey. You’re late.”

“Kitchen mishap. One of the line cooks burned his hand.” He’s already walking past me toward the bedroom. “Smells good.”

“It’s gone cold. I’ll heat it up.”

“It’s fine.”

The shower starts. I peel the foil off the plates, sit at the table, and wait.

When we first started dating, he’d text me fifteen times a day.

Updates about his shift, jokes about difficult customers, pictures of desserts that came out wrong.

Thinking about you, he’d write, and I’d feel it press warm in my chest. Now I’m lucky if I get a “running late,” and half the time I don’t even get that.

Henry isn’t a bad man. That’s what makes it so hard to name what’s wrong.

He was so kind when we met. He was the manager back when I waited tables at the restaurant during my final year of college, and he was good at it, patient with the staff, calm when everything went sideways in the kitchen.

He helped me through the worst of my finals panic, sat up with me while I cried over exams I was sure I’d fail.

He even stood up for me when my mother got her claws out, told her to her face to ease up on me.

I fell for him fast, my whole knight in shining armor, and I never once doubted I’d landed somewhere safe.

He proposed inside the first year, and we’ve been married for two now.

Then a while after the wedding, something changed.

I didn’t even notice at first. It started small, a question about a purchase here, a comment about what I’d spent there.

He’s never raised a hand to me, never even raised his voice most days.

It’s quieter than that. He just gets this disappointed look, tells me how let down he is, and I fold every time, fold so fast it scares me.

By the time I went back through it all in my head and saw the real shape of it, I was already living inside it.

He comes back in sweatpants and an old t-shirt, hair damp, and sits across from me. Before his fork even touches the plate, he pulls out his phone and starts scrolling.

“What happened at the restaurant tonight?” I ask, trying to make conversation.

“Huh? Just the usual.” He’s not paying attention.

“Henry, could you put the phone down for a minute? We haven’t really talked in a while.”

For a second I think he glares at me, and my heart drops straight through the floor. Then his face clears and he smiles, sets the phone face-down by his plate. “Of course. I’m sorry, honey. I’ve been distracted with something.”

“Is something wrong?”

He pats my hand. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

I want to push. I don’t. I take a bite instead, and the chicken’s gone rubbery from sitting under the foil, and I think I should’ve just eaten without him. I should’ve stopped waiting a long time ago.

“My mom called before you got home.”

“Yeah? What’d she want?”

“Money.” I leave it there. He already knows how that goes, knows I can’t hand her a dime without him wanting the receipt for it. “Look, Henry. Do you think I should cut my mom off?”

I’ve been turning it over for a while now.

She gets nastier every year, meaner every phone call, and some days I genuinely don’t know how much more of it I can take.

But with Dad gone, we’re the only family each other has left, and there’s a small, stubborn fear in me that if I cut her loose and then something happens to her, there’d be no one.

No one to take care of her, no one to take care of me either.

Just me, alone, in a world that already feels half-empty.

That gets his attention. He actually looks up from his phone.

“What? You can’t do that. She’s your mother.”

“It’s just, she’s been getting worse lately. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”

“She raised you. So she says some rude stuff once in a while. Who cares?”

That one lands like a slap, because he knows.

He knows every word my mother uses on me, every comparison to Carmen, and there was a time he wouldn’t have stood for it.

At our engagement party, when she said my dress made me look cheap, he told her to apologize or leave.

Now he sits across from me defending her, and the same man who once put himself between us has ended up on her side of the table.

“Yeah,” I say. “You’re right.”

I don’t say it because I think he’s right. I say it because I don’t have the fight in me tonight.

I take a bite I don’t taste, then set my fork back down. “Speaking of Mom, she brought up Carmen again. And it just hit me, I haven’t seen her in ages. How is she, anyway?”

His fork freezes halfway to his mouth.

“Carmen? I thought you two weren’t close.”

“We’re not.” We never really have been. We grew up in each other’s orbits because our mothers were friends, but Carmen and I have never liked each other.

“But you know how she is. She always calls to show off whatever she’s just booked, or to brag about some expensive thing she bought.

Lately, though, nothing. Months of it. Almost a year, now that I think about it. ”

Henry goes rigid. “Maybe she’s just busy.”

Carmen is a model, or trying to be. She hasn’t made it big, has trouble booking gigs, mostly local magazine spreads or small regional ads, and she still lives with her parents, last I knew.

None of that’s new. What’s new is the silence.

I haven’t heard a single thing from her in months, which has never once happened in all the years I’ve known her, which is basically my whole life.

I shrug, because on its own I don’t really care whether Carmen calls me or not.

My mother pressured Henry into giving her a job at the restaurant a couple years ago, assistant manager on paper, though I’m not sure what she actually does there.

Our families have been friends forever, the Andersons and the Halters, and my mom has always loved Carmen like the daughter she wished she had instead of me.

It wasn’t this bad when my dad was alive.

He used to balance her out, used to notice when she’d gone too far and pull her back.

After he died, though, it stopped mattering whether she went too far, because there was no one left to pull her back, and Daphne just quietly gave up on me.

Carmen’s mom, Ciara, is the opposite. Ciara’s treated me like her own since I was little, soft where my mother is all edges.

“Busy with what?” I say.

“I don’t know, Emily. I’m not her keeper.”

I let it sit a moment, pushing food around my plate, and the thought drifts out before I’ve really decided to say it. “Ciara’s gone quiet on me too, come to think of it. Maybe I should call her, just to check in. See how the whole family’s doing.”

He slams his hand on the table.

I flinch, the plates rattle, and my heart slams against my ribs.

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“What?”

“Why would you call some woman out of nowhere? If they haven’t reached out, maybe there’s nothing to tell. Did that occur to you?”

“You know Ciara isn’t just some woman.” My voice is shaking, and I hate that my voice is shaking. “She’s like a mother to me, and all I wanted was a little small talk. That’s what people who know each other do.”

“She’s not your mother!” He’s standing now, and I don’t remember him standing. “And maybe she’s busy, and all you’d do is bother her with your incessant nagging!”

“She’s Carmen’s mother, Henry. I’ve known her my whole life. Since when is it strange for me to want to call her?”

I’m flabbergasted. What the hell has gotten into him? Why is he this worked up over one small phone call?

“Why are you so worked up about this?” I ask, confused, and now angry too. “I wanted to make a phone call, Henry. A phone call. Why are you acting like I suggested we commit a felony?”

He stops.

For a long moment he just stands there, chest heaving, and his face shifts, anger first and then a flatness underneath it that I can’t read. He looks almost awkward. He slides a hand down his face, and when it drops the anger is gone, smoothed away like it was never there at all.

“I’m sorry.” His voice goes soft now. “I’ve been having a bad day, and I just, I lashed out at you. Sorry, honey.”

He reaches across the table and takes my hand, his thumb stroking back and forth over my knuckles, steady as a metronome.

I look at the gentle eyes, the thumb moving back and forth, the whole careful show of the man I married. All that, the slammed hand, the screaming, the standing up, over a bad day?

“It’s okay,” I say.

But I’m watching him now.

He’s never yelled at me about a phone call before, not once in three years. I set my fork down and watch him smooth his face back into the man I married, and I don’t believe a single muscle of it.