My Husband Had a One-Year-Old Daughter While I Was Still Pregnant! Oops, Marriage Over Chapter 02

My Husband Had a One-Year-Old Daughter While I Was Still Pregnant! Oops, Marriage Over Chapter 02

The screen lit up. Password required.

I typed in my birthday. Wrong. I typed in our anniversary. Wrong.

I paused. My fingers trembled as I entered the date he’d posted in that Quora reply—the birthday of his little girl.

The screen unlocked.

His iMessage was clean. A few work group chats, a handful of buddies. I didn’t bother searching through those haystacks. Instead, I went straight to his Amazon app and his DoorDash app.

I tapped into his saved addresses.

Below the office and our home, pinned right at the top and set as the default, was an address I had never seen before.

Lakeview Estates, Building 8, Unit 2, Apartment 1102.

The recipient name alternated—sometimes Derek Ashford, sometimes Megan Holloway.

Below it, the order history stretched on and on: same-day deliveries of baby supplies, fresh groceries, high-end toys. All going to that address.

The most recent order was from last night at eleven p.m. A warm apple crumble with cinnamon.

I read the address one more time, locked his phone, and placed it back on the nightstand exactly where I’d found it.

He hadn’t even bothered to hide any of it.

He’d been banking on ten years of blind, unconditional trust—so confident in it that he didn’t even feel the need to cover his tracks.

I grabbed my car keys and walked out the door.

Lakeview Estates was only three miles from our house. It was one of the most exclusive gated communities in the city.

Years ago, when Derek’s company was just starting to take off, I’d dragged him out to tour a unit here. He’d said it was too expensive—promised he’d buy me one when we could afford it.

I parked on the street outside the gates and slipped through behind a resident.

The central courtyard was bathed in morning sunlight. Elderly folks sat on benches, watching their grandchildren play on the manicured lawn.

I followed the signs toward Building 8.

I hadn’t even made it to the entrance plaza when I stopped dead.

Under the shade of a tree, not thirty feet away, an older woman was pushing a pink stroller—an expensive one. She held a little rattle in her hand, cooing and shaking it at a baby who looked about a year old, her face lit up with pure, unfiltered joy.

It was Derek’s mother. My mother-in-law.

The same woman who had sworn up and down that city air made her sick, that she couldn’t stand living in a high-rise, that she absolutely had to stay out at the old farmhouse in the country because it was the only place she could breathe.

She was wearing a tailored silk sundress. Her hair had been freshly permed into fashionable curls. She bent down, pulled a baggie of sliced apples from beneath the stroller, and fed a piece to the little girl with exquisite care.

“There you go, sweetheart. Slow down, take small bites.”

I stood behind a landscaping tree less than thirty feet away, and my hands and feet went completely cold.

This wasn’t just one man’s betrayal.

His entire family had already moved into this luxury community, happily spending our marital assets, and they’d been doing it with a clear conscience—perfectly content to treat me like a fool who would never find out.