Then the girl answered before he could say anything else.
“I’m his daughter.”
Suddenly, everything made sense and absolutely no sense at all.
Adrian and I had been together for eight years and married for six.
Until recently, I would have called our marriage solid.
We rarely fought.
He still brought me coffee in bed.
And when our twins, Noah and Eli, finally arrived after years of hoping for children, Adrian was attentive, gentle, and loving.
He knew which baby preferred being rocked and which one settled faster with white noise.
That was why the first lie felt so strange.
One afternoon, I checked our shared location because we were almost out of formula.
His location was unavailable.
When he came home, I asked whether he had turned it off.
“No. Probably a glitch.”
But it happened again.
And again.
Every time Adrian left the house, his location disappeared within minutes.
When I asked him to test the app with me, he became defensive.
“You’re exhausted, Claire. Maybe you’re overthinking everything.”
Then he started taking his phone into the shower.
He changed the passcode.
Twice, I woke after midnight and found him missing from bed.
One night, I found him standing between the twins’ cribs, staring at a photograph on his phone.
A dark-haired teenage girl stood beside a woman I didn’t recognize.
“Who is that?”
Adrian immediately locked the screen.
“Something from work.”
“Work sends family pictures after midnight?”
He refused to answer.
A few days later, his phone lit up while we were sitting in the pediatrician’s office.
I saw part of a message.
**I can’t keep being your secret. Mom died believing that…**
Adrian snatched up the phone.
“Wrong number.”
I stared at him.
“Wrong numbers don’t complain about being your secret.”
He promised we would talk later.
We never did.
