“No,” I said.
“Megan, please.”
There it was.
The word he rarely used with me.
Jack Walker asked for things by making them sound reasonable. He didn’t beg. He arranged reality until everyone else moved where he needed them.
“Go on your trip,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s your decision.”
“Our children are here.”
My chest tightened.
They were not my biological children. Jack had two from his first marriage: Lily, thirteen, and Noah, ten. Their mother lived in Colorado and saw them during school breaks. For most of the year, they were with us.
I had packed lunches, signed permission slips, waited through piano recitals, sat beside feverish beds, and learned the difference between Lily’s quiet sadness and Noah’s loud one.
I loved them.
That was the part of this betrayal that cut deepest.
Because Jack hadn’t just hidden a woman from me.
He had taught the children to hide her too.
“They shouldn’t have been put in this position,” I said.
His voice cracked. “I know.”
“Do they know who she is?”
He didn’t answer.
“Jack.”
“They know she’s… a friend.”
I stared at him. “A friend you kissed in front of them?”
His shoulders slumped.
For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
“I’m going home,” I said. “You need to decide what kind of father you’re going to be in the next ten minutes.”
I ended the call again and kept walking.
By the time I reached the parking garage, my hands had started shaking. The numbness was wearing off, and pain rushed in like weather through a broken window.
I made it to my car before I cried.
Not elegantly. Not quietly.
I sat behind the wheel and folded over the steering wheel as sobs rose from somewhere deep and old. I cried for the woman on the walkway. I cried for the wife who had believed every gentle lie. I cried for every dinner I had kept warm, every apology I had accepted too quickly, every time I had let Carol make me feel temporary in my own home.
