I reached for the doorframe.
“I never got tested last spring,” he said. “There was no test. I lied to you. I lied to you, Claire. I knew. The whole time. Every month you cried in the bathroom, I knew. Every time you said you were sorry, I knew. Every pill you took, every needle, that dye test, I knew it wasn’t you. I knew it was me. And I let you think it was your body. I let you blame yourself for six years.”
My hand slipped off the doorframe.
My knees gave out.
I don’t remember falling. I just remember the floor of my parents’ hallway suddenly being very close, the cold tile against my palms, and my mother’s voice behind me, far away, like it was coming through water.
“Claire? Claire! Claire, honey, look at me!”
I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t do anything.
I could only stare at my husband, on his knees on the welcome mat, his face wet and broken.
And slowly, slowly, the pieces started falling into place.
The way his face went white when I showed him the positive test.
How.
The phone call at midnight in the backyard. I’m choosing to believe it.
Do you think she’ll look like me?
The laptop snapped shut at the kitchen table.
And the hair. My daughter’s copper-red hair. Neither of us had it. Nobody in his family had it. Nobody in mine that he knew of.
He thought I’d cheated on him.
He’d spent nine months trying to believe in a miracle. And then he looked down at our daughter’s head, and the doubt he’d been holding back broke through all at once.
This isn’t the baby I wanted.
I can’t believe you did this to me.
