He Raised the Cup With His Mistress, But the Boy Was Mine novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: What Was in the Bags

Lena finds the locks changed and her things in trash bags on the lawn, hires a lawyer, and a leak says her baby belongs to another man.

At eight the next morning Pete drove me to the house on Lakeview Drive, because I wanted my own clothes.

The key I had carried for ten years did not fit the front door.

I tried it three times, and then I pressed the doorbell.

Nobody came.

"They changed the lock," Pete said.

"On the same day they won the Cup?"

"Somebody had it planned."

That was when I saw the lawn.

Eight black trash bags sat in a row beside the mailbox, knotted at the tops, with the morning dew already on them.

Pete walked over and tore one open with his hand.

My winter coat was in it, and my maternity jeans, and the shoes I had bought for the baby shower.

He opened the next one.

Cookbooks, a toaster, my grandmother's quilt balled up with a wet towel.

"Who does this?" Pete said, very softly.

I was already looking in the third bag, because I knew what I was afraid of.

My keepsake box was at the bottom, a blue shoebox with a ribbon.

Inside it were the things from the March we lost him: the hospital bracelet, the little knit hat, and an index card with two inked footprints on it.

Baby Boy Dolan, it said. Born 6:52 AM. 7 lbs 2 oz.

I held it against my chest.

For five years, whenever I had missed him, I had taken the card out and put my thumb on the tiny feet.

Now someone had dumped him on a lawn in a garbage bag.

"Hey," a voice called from the next yard.

An older woman in a bathrobe stood at the fence, holding a phone.

She had lived next to us for six years, and she had never once spoken to me about anything but her tomatoes.

"I didn't know if I should tell you," she said. "But my doorbell camera caught the whole thing. They started on Tuesday."

She turned the screen toward me.

A moving truck backed up our driveway at six in the morning, three days before the Cup final.

Four men carried out my sofa, my sewing machine and my bed.

And on the front steps, in a navy coat, with her thermos in her hand, stood Bernadette.

She was pointing at things.

"That goes in the bags," she was saying. "The rest to storage. And change the locks before Friday."

I watched my mother-in-law direct them for twenty minutes.

I watched her carry a jewelry box out of my bedroom herself.

"Send me that video," I said.

"I already did," the neighbor said. "I got your number from your brother's bar."

Pete looked at her.

"Lady, you're my favorite neighbor of all time."

"Don't tell my husband," she said, and went back inside.

I checked the jewelry bag next, my hands shaking.

My grandmother's gold cross wasn't in it.

She had given it to me the day I turned twenty-one, ten days before my wedding, and I had worn it at every important moment of my life.

I stood on the lawn of the house I thought was mine and said, "Pete, I need a lawyer."

"I know a guy," he said.

"I need one who isn't a guy."

By noon, a woman in a gray suit was sitting at the end of Pete's bar with a legal pad and a club soda.

She had spent twenty years suing athletes, and she drank at Sobczak's every Thursday for the wings.

Pete had called her on the way home.

"First thing," she said, "the house is in his mother's name, so there's no marital property to split there. But you gave him forty thousand dollars?"

"My grandmother left it to me. I gave it to Ty for his last season of junior hockey, so he could afford a trainer."

"Wire?"

"From my savings account. I have the statement. The house down payment, too. I put in another thirty."

"Then it isn't a gift, it's a loan with no paper, and he has been collecting the interest for ten years." She wrote it down and underlined it. "He also filed before the baby was born. That helps you. In Ohio, a child born to a married woman is presumed her husband's."

"So he can't make me take a test?"

"He can ask. He can't make you do anything today. But Lena, they won't ask. They'll leak."

"Leak what?"

"Whatever makes you look like you deserve it."

Pete's phone chimed on the bar.

Then another phone chimed from the kitchen, and the register tablet, and the cook's phone in his back pocket.

Everyone in the building had gotten the same alert at once.

Pete picked his up, read it, and slowly put it face down on the wood.

"Don't," he said. "Lena, don't look."

I took it out of his hand.

It was a sports gossip site, and the headline was in red capital letters over a photo of me at the glass in section 114.

DOLAN'S WIFE PREGNANT BY ANOTHER MAN? SOURCES CLOSE TO THE CAPTAIN SAY THE BABY ISN'T HIS.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend