Her smile slid right off her face. “I’ll get the doctor.”
Nobody gets the doctor over a missing husband. My pulse began to climb.
The doctor came in with his hands folded in front of him and looked at me strangely.
“Yes, your husband saw the babies.” He paused. “You really don’t know why he left?”
“Left?” My mouth was dry. “What are you talking about? Where is he?”
He pulled a chair close. “While you were still asleep after the surgery, Neil came to talk to me. He told me something I absolutely wasn’t expecting.”
“What did he say?”
He exhaled slowly. “He said his mother had called. She said she had proof the girls weren’t his.”
“What?” I stared at him. “He knows everything we went through. He was there for every single shot.”
Something hot rose in my chest and shoved the disbelief aside. Neil hadn’t answered any of my calls. So I scrolled to his mother’s name and hit call, my thumb shaking. She picked up on the second ring.
“What did you tell him?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
“I really don’t. What did you say to my husband?”
“Don’t raise your voice, it isn’t good for you.” She sounded almost kind, which was worse. “I’ll come and show you, since you’re so confused. Stay right there.”
She hung up. Stay right there. As if I could go anywhere.
I tried Neil again while I waited. Voicemail. “Enough!” I pushed back the blanket and tried to swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Pain hit like a hot wire through my belly. I gasped and nearly folded in half.
“Whoa, easy.” The nurse was at my side in a second, lowering me to the pillows. “You just had major surgery. You can’t go anywhere yet.”
I lay there breathing hard, tears stinging. Was this what it came to? Ten years of fighting, and I couldn’t even chase down my own husband. I couldn’t fetch him and make him look at me, and I had two newborns who needed me, in a body that wouldn’t obey. This was the very moment I’d planned to lean on Neil, and he was the one who’d walked out.
One of the girls began to cry, a thin, furious wail. I reached for her bassinet, and my stomach screamed.
“Let me,” the nurse said gently.
I hated how badly I wanted to say no. I said, “Thank you,” instead, and watched a stranger settle my daughter against my chest.
Then I called my mother.
“Hi, sweetheart! Are they here? Are they…”
“Mom.” I’d planned to sound calm. I’d practiced it. “Neil left. He got a call from his mother and he left, and he won’t pick up, and I can’t…” My voice broke clean in half.
“I’m coming,” my mother said. “Don’t move. I’m getting my coat.”
She arrived in twenty minutes, her hair half pinned. She’d barely kissed the girls when the door swung open again.
My mother-in-law walked in wearing her good pearls, a large envelope under her arm.
“Well,” she said, looking at me and not the babies. “Here we are.”
“Show me,” I said. “Whatever you told him.”
She laid photographs on my blanket one by one. The first were of the newborns, pictures Neil must have sent. She held one beside her phone. “Look at that nose. Do you see it?”
“See what?”
“Dennis’s nose, Dennis’s chin.” She smiled triumphantly. “You’ve obviously been having an affair with him.”
Dennis. Our friend of twelve years. Dennis, who had cried at our wedding.
“They’re three hours old,” my mother said, her voice cold enough to freeze soup. “They look like potatoes.”
My mother-in-law ignored her and pulled out one more photograph, cropped tight: Dennis and me, heads close, his arm around my shoulders, my face tipped up, laughing. It looked intimate.
“I found this last month,” she said. “I sent it to Neil today. I couldn’t stay quiet after seeing those babies. He’s gone to speak with Dennis.”
The room tilted. “He’s what?”
“He wanted answers, dear. Somebody had to give them.”
Neil was out there discussing my faithfulness with someone else while I sat here, cut open, begging his voicemail to love me.
I looked at the photograph again. The gingham tablecloth. The paper plates. Neil’s cousin’s birthday barbecue, last summer. Dennis had hugged me while the crowd sang.
“Neil was right beside us,” I said. “You’ve cut him out.”
“And that makes the way you’re looking at Dennis all right?”
“It makes your proof a family photograph.” I turned to my mother. “Mom, find the original in the family group chat. The whole picture.”
She scrolled, then held her phone toward me. There was Neil, holding the birthday cake.
