I heard the clink of silverware from the kitchen pass-through. The hiss of bacon on a grill. A Christmas song playing too softly over the speakers. Everything normal. Everything wrong.
“How do you know?”
“I overheard him talking to Gerald. Eight weeks, maybe nine. He said they’d present it as evidence of a stable future home if custody got ugly.”
I stared at him.
Stable future home.
My daughter hadn’t even been born yet, and Nathan was already building a legal fantasy where the woman he had been cheating with became part of the argument for why he deserved more of her.
I put both hands flat on the table because suddenly the room felt tilted.
For ten seconds, I couldn’t think like an accountant or a wife or even a person. I could only feel.
Betrayal has layers. The affair was one. The money was another. But there is a particularly obscene layer reserved for the moment you understand someone is trying to replace you while you are still carrying their child.
“I’m sorry,” Tobias said quietly.
I nodded once. “You did the right thing.”
When I got back to Sandra’s office the next morning, I was running on maybe two hours of sleep and the kind of hollow anger that makes coffee taste metallic.