My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 05

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 05 – The Man Who Came Home

drove home with a photocopy of the certificate on my passenger seat, because I made her let me use her printer. She stood in the doorway of her own kitchen and watched me do it and didn’t stop me. I think she was in shock. I think we both were, in different flavors.

At the door I turned around. “Don’t tell him.”

“Nora-”

“He’ll move money. He’ll move fast. Don’t tell him, Mara.”

She looked back into the house, where a three-year-old was singing to a rabbit. “What are you going to do?

“I don’t know yet.”

“Poppy didn’t do anything,” she said.

“I know that.” And I did. That was the sickest part. The only innocent person in the whole story had his

eyebrows.

I got home at one. I vacuumed. I cannot explain this. I vacuumed the entire downstairs and cleaned the bathroom grout with a toothbrush and made a lasagna, because if my hands stopped I was going to start screaming and not stop.

At 7:40, headlights swung across the front window.

Grant came in with his laptop bag and a bunch of grocery-store tulips, and he kissed the top of my head, and he smelled like his cologne and, faintly, like someone else’s fabric softener.

“That smells incredible,” he said. “God, I missed this house.”

I said, “How was Halvorsen?”

–

“Brutal. They want the whole model rebuilt by Thursday.” He loosened his tie, and I watched his hands – the hands that had held my hair back at the fertility clinic and held someone else’s baby in my grandmother’s quilt

– and I thought, I still love you. What is wrong with me.

We ate lasagna. He talked about a coworker’s divorce. He put his foot against mine under the table like he’s done for eleven years.

And then he set his fork down and said, “Hey. So. I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I know we said we were done trying.” He reached over and took my hand. His eyes went shiny – actually/ shiny, actual tears, I watched them form. “But I’m not done. I want a baby with you, Nor. I want us to call St. Anne’s after the holidays.”

Llooked at my husband.

I thought about a three-year-old in strawberry pajamas ninety minutes north, and a certificate with a raised – seal in my glove compartment, and a woman in a bathrobe who thought she was the kind one.

And I understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, exactly what this was.

It wasn’t love. It was maintenance. He needed me sedated, hopeful, busy with hormone shots and calendars, too grateful to look up. He’d been dosing me with hope for six years like it was Ambien.

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

His whole face opened up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I squeezed his hand. “Let’s call them in January.”

He kissed me. I let him. I counted the seconds until it was over, and then I got up and washed the dishes, and my reflection in the black window looked like a woman I’d never met.

That night, when he was asleep, I took his phone off the nightstand.

His passcode is Poppy’s birthday. He changed it three years ago and told me it was his mom’s anniversary. I typed it in and it opened, and that alone almost took me out at the knees.

Fourteen months of messages with M. Good morning texts. Grocery lists. Kiss the peanut for me. Photos, dozens, of a life. A message from six weeks ago: I don’t want to miss another first. Almost done with all this. Just need Friday to go through.

Friday.

I scrolled up.

Friday. Repeated. Circled in his life like a red date on a calendar. Friday, 10 a.m., closing.

Closing on what?

And then, at the very top of a thread from that afternoon – while I was sitting on Mara’s porch – a message from Grant to a name I didn’t recognize:

Confirming Friday. Both signatures already handled on my end.

Both signatures.

had not signed anything.