My Husband Left Me in Labor to Be My Best Friend's Groom, So I Prepared for His Return novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Access Denied

Brennan comes home to a locked door and a story about a show wedding, until the groom Bridget jilted arrives with the license he signed as witness.

Two days after my daughter was born, Hazel drove us home with the car seat belted in the back and her eyes on the rearview mirror the whole way.

Brennan had come to the hospital twice. Both times the nurse stood in the doorway and told him no.

He had left a bouquet of white roses at the desk. The nurse put them in the staff room.

Home smelled like the lemon soap Hazel used on everything.

She had packed Brennan's things while I was in the delivery ward.

Four cardboard boxes sat inside the front hall, taped shut, with his name on each in her square handwriting.

His good suits hung in a garment bag on the banister.

"I didn't throw anything out," Hazel said. "I'm not a barbarian."

I carried my daughter upstairs in my robe and sat in the nursery chair, where the window looked over the porch.

I had been sitting there for ten minutes when headlights swung into the drive.

I knew the car by the sound.

Brennan got out in the same tuxedo he'd worn to the altar, a day and a half older.

He had a rolling suitcase in one hand and a small cardboard box of baby clothes in the other.

On the porch steps he set both down and fixed his tie in the dark glass of the door.

Then he typed the code into the keypad.

My phone buzzed with the lock app's alert.

ACCESS DENIED, the little screen said, in red.

He tried again, slower, and got the same red.

He put his thumb on the fingerprint reader. Red.

I stood at the nursery window with my daughter in the crook of my arm, and I watched my husband learn that he was locked out of my house.

He looked up and saw me.

His whole face changed, and he put both hands up, palms out.

I opened the window two inches.

"Emmy," he said. "Emmy, thank God. Something's wrong with the lock."

"Nothing's wrong with the lock."

"Let me in. Please. I need to explain this."

"Explain it from there."

The doorbell speaker clicked on in my pocket, so I heard him as well as saw him, a half second late.

"It wasn't what it looked like," Brennan said. "Bridget's father had a heart attack in March. The doctor told him another shock could kill him. He needed to see her married before anything else went wrong."

"To Alastair."

"To somebody. And Alastair backed out last week. He's done this to her before, you don't know how he is."

I had met Alastair six times, and he had never once backed out of anything.

"So you stood in," I said.

"It's a show, Emmy. It isn't legal. A priest, a ring, a nice day for an old man. I'll be home in a week and none of it counts."

"The church was full of people who watched you say I do."

"They don't know it's pretend."

"Neither did I."

Brennan pressed his palm flat against the glass of the door.

"I would never leave you. You know that. I did it for her family, and for us, because her father is going to put money into our future."

My daughter shifted against me and made a small sound.

His eyes went to her.

I saw them change. I saw him decide what to do with his face.

"Can I see her?" he said. "Just see her."

"You can see her through the window."

I turned my daughter outward and held her up to the glass, in her little white hat.

He cried. He really did. He covered his mouth, and his shoulders shook.

For one second, the part of me that had married him wanted to open the door.

Behind him, the side gate opened and Hazel came around the house with a hand truck.

She had a cast-iron pan tucked under one arm.

She said nothing. She loaded the four boxes onto the hand truck and rolled them down the steps and out onto the lawn.

She set his garment bag on top of them.

Then she plucked the baby clothes from his hand, said, "Those are hers," and carried them back up the porch.

"Hazel," Brennan said. "Come on."

"Lawn's good for you," she said, and went around the side of the house.

I closed the window.

Headlights came up the street slowly, and a gray sedan stopped at the curb behind Brennan's car.

A man got out. He wore a charcoal suit, the same one from the front pew, and he held a thin folder against his chest.

Alastair Rainsford looked at Brennan. Then he looked up at my window.

He walked up the path to the porch, past the boxes on my grass, and held up the folder so I could see it.

"Mrs. Montgomery," he said. "The license is real. I signed it as the witness."

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