25. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
I make it to the foyer before my legs give out.
There’s a window seat built into the wall near the front entrance, original to the house, and I sit down on it hard enough that the wood groans in protest. My hands are shaking.
I flatten them against my thighs and focus on breathing, in and out, in and out, like a man who’s just been pulled from a car wreck and is only now realizing he might be bleeding.
Three and a half years.
My son is three and a half years old, and I didn’t know he existed until five minutes ago.
I hear footsteps behind me. Lighter ones, faster, the boy’s sneakers on the hardwood, and then Maren’s voice, deliberately calm, telling someone named Camila to take him for a snack.
There’s a mini-fridge in the contractor’s break area, she says.
Juice boxes. Goldfish crackers. Maybe Rowan can help count them.
Rowan.
His name is Rowan.
“But Mama-” The protest is faint, uncertain.
“I’ll be right here, sweetheart. Just a few minutes, okay? Then we’ll go get ice cream like I promised.”
A pause. Then, quieter: “Okay.”
The footsteps retreat. I hear the boy, Rowan, his name is Rowan, I have to start thinking of him as Rowan, say something indistinct to whoever Camila is. Then the sound of a door opening and closing.
Then silence.
Maren’s footsteps approach. Slower now. She stops a few feet away, and I can feel her looking at me, but I can’t make myself look back. Not yet. I’m still trying to reassemble the pieces of a reality that just shattered in my hands.
“He called you Mama.” The words scrape out of my throat.
“Yes.”
“Bye, Mama.” I close my eyes. “He said bye, Mama, like it was nothing. Like-”
Like she’s his whole world. Like she’s the only parent he’s ever known.
“Rhodes.”
I open my eyes. Look at her.
She’s pale, but she’s not crying. Maren never cries when she’s scared, she only cries when she’s safe again. Right now she’s braced like she’s expecting a blow, her arms wrapped around herself, her jaw tight.
“Is he mine?”
The question waits.
“Yes.” Her voice barely wavers. “Rowan is your son.”
I’d already known. Had done the math, seen the evidence written all over his face. But hearing her say it out loud…
I bend forward, elbows on my knees, and press my hands against my face.
“I need to-” I stop. Breathe. “I need to sit down.”
“You’re sitting down.”
“Right.” I laugh, and it sounds nothing like laughter. “Right.”
The silence stretches. I become aware of the sounds of the building around us, distant voices from wherever Camila took Rowan, the creak of old wood settling, traffic from the street outside. Normal sounds. The world going on like it hasn’t just cracked open beneath my feet.
“When was he born?”
Maren’s arms tighten around herself. “June seventeenth.”
“Was he, was the birth-”
“He was healthy. Eight pounds, two ounces. It was a long labor, but no complications.”
“Eight pounds.” I lift my head. “That’s big, right? That’s, babies are supposed to be like seven pounds or something?”
“He was a big baby. Grumpy about it, too. Screamed for the first two hours.”
I try to picture it. Maren in a hospital bed, exhausted and triumphant, holding a screaming baby who weighed eight pounds two ounces. My son. Our son.
I wasn’t there.
“What’s his middle name?”
“James.” She pauses. “It was my grandfather’s name.”
“Rowan James.” I test it on my tongue. It feels foreign. Like a word in a language I haven’t learned yet. “Does he, is he in school? Is it preschool at three, or-”
“He goes to Little Sprouts three days a week. He loves it. Has a best friend named Oliver who’s obsessed with garbage trucks.”
“Has he ever been sick? Like, really sick?”
“Once. Last winter. An ear infection that turned into bronchitis. He was on antibiotics for two weeks and hated every dose.” A ghost of a smile. “He has opinions about medicine.”
“Opinions?”
“All medicine is gross and also poison and also Mama is mean for making him take it.”
I almost smile. Almost. Then the reality crashes back in, she knows all of this because she was there, every day, for three and a half years. And I wasn’t.
“Does he know about me?”
Maren’s face goes very still.
“Does he know he has a father?”
“He knows.” The words come slowly. “He asked about it for the first time a few months ago. Some of the kids at school were talking about their dads, and he wanted to know where his was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him his dad lived far away. That his dad loved him but-” She stops. Swallows. “That things were complicated.”
“Complicated.”
“I showed him a photo. An old one, from before. He knows your name is Rhodes.”
I stare at her. “He knows my name.”
“Yes.”
“But not that I’m, he didn’t recognize me. In the ballroom. He looked at me like a stranger.”
“He’s three and a half, Rhodes. He’s seen one photograph. He doesn’t-”
“He doesn’t know what his own father looks like.”
Maren flinches. Good. I want her to flinch. I want her to feel even a fraction of what I’m feeling right now, this hollowed-out grief that’s eating me from the inside.
“When did you know?”
She shakes her head. “Rhodes-”
“When did you know you were pregnant?”
Her chin comes up. That stubborn angle again, the one that used to make me want to kiss her or strangle her depending on the day. Right now it makes me want to break something.
“Before I left.”
The words land like stones dropped into still water.
“Before you blocked me?”
“Yes.”
“Before I stood outside your shop for an hour, waiting for you to talk to me?”
“Yes.”
“Before I went to your sister over and over, asking if you were okay?”
Her voice is barely a whisper now. “Yes.”
“Jesus Christ, Maren.”
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing. My body is moving without my permission, pacing the length of the foyer like a caged animal.
“I spent months-” I stop. Start again. “I spent months begging Nora for any sign you were okay. Any sign you were alive. And you were, you were pregnant with my child. You knew, and you let me-”
“I know.”
“You let me think I’d lost everything. You let me think I deserved to lose everything.”
“You did.” Her voice is sharper now. “You did make me feel optional for years, Rhodes. You did choose work over me every single time, did let Rachel Vaughn-”
“I never touched Rachel.”
I say it like it’s the thing that matters.
Maren goes still. When she looks at me, there’s no shock in it - just something worn through.
“Rachel lied.” I can hear how flat my voice sounds, how dead. “I never slept with her. I never touched her. Not once.”
“I know.” She says it quietly, and it stops me cold. “I’ve known since that night outside the shop - you told me through the glass, and Rachel told the rest of the world weeks later. You’re still defending yourself against the one thing I never blamed you for.”
“Then why-”
“Because you weren’t there.” Her voice doesn’t rise; that’s what makes it land. “You didn’t cheat, Rhodes. You just forgot I existed. I could have survived a Rachel. I couldn’t survive that.”
The words go somewhere I can’t defend.
“Three years I spent rebuilding myself around it,” she says.
“Three years.” I stop pacing. Face her. “I spent three and a half not knowing I had a son.” I let it sit. “So maybe we’re even.”
She makes a small, wounded sound. I wish I didn’t care. I wish I could say that and feel nothing.
“I was going to tell you.” Her voice is trembling now. “I was always going to tell you, I just-”
“When? When he graduated college, when he got married? When was the right moment, exactly?”
“I was scared.”
“Of what? Of me? I never, I wasn’t a good husband, but I was never-”
“Not of you.” She wraps her arms around herself again. “Of how much I still loved you. Of how much I knew you’d love him.”
I go still.
“When I found out I was pregnant, I was so angry. At you, at myself, at everything. I thought you’d cheated on me, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t stand to look at you. And then you kept showing up, and I knew if you found out about the baby, you’d never let me go.”
“I wouldn’t have let you go anyway.”
“Exactly.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“But once I left, once I blocked your number and moved back here and started over, I couldn’t figure out how to undo it.
Telling you at three months felt impossible.
Telling you at six months felt worse. And then he was born, and I was alone in a hospital room holding this tiny person who looked exactly like you, and I thought, I’ll call him. Tomorrow. I’ll call him tomorrow.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Tomorrow turned into a week. A week turned into a month. A month turned into a year.” Her voice breaks. “And then it’d been so long that I didn’t know how to explain it. How do you tell someone you’ve kept their child secret for a year? Two years? Three?”
“You just-” I press my hands against my face. “You just tell them. You pick up the phone and say it.”
“I know.” She’s crying now, tears sliding down her cheeks. “I know I should have, know there’s no excuse. I was scared and angry and I made a terrible choice, and then I kept making it because I didn’t know how to stop.”
I want to scream at her. Want to list every birthday I missed, every first step, every word, every nightmare, every fever, every ordinary Tuesday afternoon I should have been there for and wasn’t. But when I open my mouth, something else comes out.
“What was his first word?”
Maren blinks at me through her tears. “What?”
“His first word. What was it?”
“Oh.” She swallows. “It was ‘no.’ He was very emphatic about it.”
“Of course it was.” I almost smile. Almost. “When did he start walking?”
“Thirteen months. He was cautious about it, took his time, and then once he figured it out, he just took off. Ran before he could walk properly. Split his chin open on the coffee table two weeks later.”
“The scar.” I picture it now, the small white line I noticed on his chin. “He has a little scar.”
“Three stitches. He was so brave.”
I close my eyes. Three stitches. My son needed three stitches, and I wasn’t there to hold his hand.