Preston finally appeared at the hospital the afternoon after the twins were born.
He smelled of expensive cologne and a rich dinner I had never been invited to.
He never asked how I was recovering.
He barely glanced at the two newborns sleeping in the bassinets beside me.
On his wrist, I noticed something new.
A matching habit of Sabrina’s, I realized, because she’d been photographed all over town in a brand-new Cartier watch, a “thank you,” Preston had called it, for saving the family home.
He had bought his mistress a Cartier watch to celebrate a rescue she never performed.
I had gotten a text message while I was in labor.
I almost laughed at the arithmetic of it.
A watch worth more than a year of my parents’ old mortgage, pinned to the wrist of a woman who had never written a check, while the real deed sat locked in a file cabinet two hundred miles away with my name on it.
