PART 2
For several seconds, I couldn’t hear anything except the blood pounding in my ears.
The schoolyard was still full of parents taking photographs, children laughing, teachers calling names, car doors slamming in the parking lot.
But all of it seemed impossibly far away.
Rebecca’s last sentence stayed between us like something poisonous.
“Your husband came to my house last night.”
I stared at Luke.
He had stopped walking toward us.
For the first time in eleven years of marriage, I saw something on my husband’s face I had never seen before.
Fear.
Not embarrassment.
Not irritation.
Fear.
“Luke?” I said.
He looked at Rebecca.
Not me.
That was the moment my stomach truly dropped.
“Lori,” he said quietly, “we shouldn’t do this here.”
Rebecca let out a humorless laugh.
“You said she knew.”
Luke’s jaw tightened.
“Rebecca.”
“No,” she said. “You came to my house after ten o’clock last night and told me Lori knew everything.”
I looked from one of them to the other.
“Knew what?”
Neither answered.
Then Kayla appeared beside us.
She had abandoned the enormous bouquet somewhere near the gate.
Her face had gone completely pale.
“We need to leave,” she said.
I stared at her.
“You knew about this too?”
“Lori—”
“Did you?”
Kayla’s lips parted.
No answer.
That was answer enough.
I stepped backward.
Ethan was inside the building.
His first day.
His new classroom.
His new friends.
Ten minutes earlier, I had been worried about whether he would remember where his lunchbox was.
Now three adults were standing in front of me looking like they had been waiting years for something terrible to happen.
Rebecca glanced toward the school doors.
“I have class in five minutes.”
“You’re not walking away,” I said.
She hesitated.
I heard my own voice shaking.
“You asked whether Kayla told me. Then you said Luke came to your house last night. I want to know why.”
Rebecca looked at Luke.
He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
I saw it.
So did she.
And something changed in her expression.
“You’re still doing it,” she whispered.
Luke’s eyes hardened.
“Doing what?”
“Trying to control which version people hear.”
Kayla stepped between them.
“Please. Ethan is inside.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said.
Then she looked directly at me.
“And that’s why Lori deserves the truth.”
My chest tightened.
“What truth?”
Rebecca opened her handbag.
She took out an old photograph.
Her fingers trembled slightly as she handed it to me.
I almost didn’t take it.
Then I looked down.
The photograph had been taken years ago.
Luke looked younger—maybe twenty-four or twenty-five.
Rebecca stood beside him.
Her hair was longer.
Her arm was around his waist.
Between them stood a little boy.
He looked about six.
Dark curls.
A small dimple in his left cheek.
Gray-green eyes.
My breath stopped.
Because I had seen that face every morning for seven years.
Not exactly.
But close enough.
Ethan had those curls.
That dimple.
Those same strange gray-green eyes that nobody in my family had.
I looked at Rebecca.
“Who is this?”
Her voice softened.
“My son.”
Luke stepped forward.
“Lori, listen to me.”
I moved away from him.
“What’s his name?”
Rebecca swallowed.
“Noah.”
“How old is he now?”
“Eleven.”
I did the calculation instantly.
Luke and I had been married for eleven years.
My eyes moved to my husband.
“When was he born?”
“Lori—”
“When?”
Rebecca answered.
“Eight months after Luke and I broke up.”
I felt the pavement shift beneath me.
“You dated?”
Rebecca nodded.
“For almost three years.”
I laughed once.
It came out broken.
Luke had told me about women before me.
A college girlfriend named Hannah.
Someone named Brooke he dated briefly after graduation.
