“You know what I need, Daniel? New shoes. Wait, the kids want to talk to you.”
I handed the phone to Owen.
“Hi, Dad. Mom bought me the Death Star Lego set. She said you’re paying for it.”
I snatched the phone back before Daniel could use his guilty-father voice to soften the tiny piece of my heart that was still operational.
“Now listen carefully,” I said, walking into a shoe store like I was entering a courtroom. “You have one chance to tell me the truth. Where have you been since Friday morning?”
On the other end, I heard only his breathing. (by:https://best-food.ciifood.com)
Heavy.
Nervous.
The exact breathing he used when he was lying and trying to buy himself time.
“Rebecca…” he began, in the low voice of a man caught with the match still in his hand. “It isn’t what you think.”
I closed my eyes and laughed without humor.
Of course.
That phrase.
A classic.
Almost a national anthem of suspicious husbands everywhere.
“I wasn’t with another woman.”
I stopped in the middle of the store.
The saleswoman, holding two boxes of heels, slowed down when she saw my face.
“Well, that improves things a little,” I said coldly. “Because five seconds ago, I was absolutely sure you were in some cheap motel with a fitness instructor named Madison or Ashley.”
“There are no women here, I swear.”
“Then talk.”
Silence again.
I was about to hang up when his voice came through, broken.
“I was with my father.”
That hit me strangely, because Daniel almost never spoke about his father. In ten years together, I could count the times he mentioned that man on one hand. And whenever he did, it came with anger, dryness, or that hard emptiness of someone pretending an old wound didn’t still hurt.
“Your father?” I asked carefully. “The same father who abandoned you when you were a teenager? The same one you said you wouldn’t visit even if he were dying?”
“Yes.”
I looked through the store window at Owen and Lily sitting on the bench, sharing a pack of cookies from the mall convenience store. So calm. So safe. And my chest tightened, because whatever the truth was, it always ended up touching them.
“Continue,” I said.
