⸻
“I don’t understand,” I said slowly.
“I don’t either,” Corinne said, tears still falling. “I promise you, Theo, I have never once been unfaithful to you. I need you to believe that, especially right now, before anyone else gets the chance to plant a different idea in your head.”
⸻
I looked at both boys again, working through genetics I only vaguely remembered from a high school biology class decades earlier.
⸻
“I believe you,” I said, and found, sitting there, that I genuinely meant it. “I don’t understand it. But I believe you.”
⸻
Word spread through both our families within days, the way word always does, and by the time we brought the boys home, I could feel the whispers trailing behind us at every family gathering, every pediatrician’s waiting room, every trip to the grocery store with two car seats balanced in the cart.
⸻
My own mother pulled me aside at Owen and Malcolm’s two-week checkup gathering. “Theo,” she said carefully, “I love you, and I love those boys already. But you understand people are going to talk.”
⸻
“Let them talk,” I said. “Corinne told me the truth, and I believe her.”
⸻
“Belief isn’t proof,” my mother said gently.
⸻
She wasn’t wrong, and I hated that she wasn’t wrong, hated that even my own certainty in my wife wasn’t going to be enough to quiet an entire extended family’s whispered speculation.
