Chapter 2
“Maybe somebody has a confession to make.”
My stomach tightened.
“Are you accusing me of something?”
She threw both hands into the air.
“Oh my God.
I’m joking.”
Nobody laughed.
That should have ended it.
Instead, Mom leaned toward me afterward and whispered, “Don’t feed her.
You know how Marlo is.”
I did know how Marlo was.
That was the problem.
Because ignoring her had never made her stop.
It only taught her where the boundaries weren’t.
A month later, at my nephew’s birthday party, she handed Elias a gift bag and asked if he wanted a paternity test inside.
At Christmas, she told Aunt Diane that Ren had exactly the same hair as the man who mowed our lawn.
At a spring cookout, she raised her wineglass and said, “Maybe this is finally the year somebody tells us who Ren’s real daddy is.”
She laughed.
People shifted uncomfortably.
I stared at her.
“Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“You know exactly what.”
She sighed.
“You need therapy if a joke bothers you this much.”
That night, Elias barely spoke on the drive home.
A week later, he declined an invitation to another family gathering.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Sit there while your sister calls you a cheater and me an idiot.”
I reached for his hand.
“You know she’s lying.”
“Of course I know.”
But he didn’t look at me when he said it.
That was the first crack.
I wish I could say Marlo caused every problem that followed.
She didn’t.
Marriage is more complicated than that.
Ren wasn’t sleeping.
Elias was working long hours.
I had gone back to my job part-time and felt as if I were failing everywhere at once.
We fought about bottles.
Laundry.
Money.
Whose turn it was to wake up.
But beneath every stupid argument, something else had begun growing.
Doubt.
Not mine.
His.
At first, it was almost invisible.
Then I noticed Elias studying Ren.
He would hold her while she drank from a bottle and suddenly pull her back slightly, examining her nose.
Her ears.
Her chin.
One night, I walked into our bedroom and saw a DNA-testing website open on his phone.
He locked the screen.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“I saw it.”
He hesitated.
“Ancestry stuff.”
I stared at him.
We had been together five years.
I knew when he lied.
But I pretended not to.