The Wife Isn't Me novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Moving Day

Philippa slid her wrist out of my hand, gently.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Then she walked down the aisle and out the big doors into the cold.

Twice, I thought, all the way back to the car.

Two other women. Two other babies.

Somewhere there were two other worksheets with the wrong name in the box that said mother.

That night the gray sedan was parked across from Trish's house again.

Trish's son saw it from his bedroom window and asked if it was a spy.

"Kind of," I said.

"A good spy or a bad spy?"

"A really bad one. He keeps getting seen."

He thought about that and decided it was hilarious.

In the morning I told Trish I had to move out.

She threw a dish towel at my head.

"Absolutely not."

"He knows where your son sleeps, Trish."

That stopped her.

She sat down on the arm of the couch, and for once she didn't have a comeback.

Andrew solved it before lunch.

There was an apartment upstairs from the birth center, one bedroom, slanted ceilings, a kitchen the size of a phone booth.

He'd used it to sleep on call for three years.

"It has a deadbolt, a fire escape, and a doctor downstairs," he said on the phone. "It also has a family of pigeons. They don't pay rent either."

"I can pay rent."

"You have eleven hundred dollars and a unicorn binder."

"I have nine hundred dollars now. Diapers are expensive."

"Then you definitely can't pay rent."

We moved me on the last Saturday in March.

It was a terrible move and the best day I'd had in a month.

Trish drove my Honda. Her son rode shotgun in charge of the binder.

Two of the birth center midwives showed up with a borrowed pickup and a used dresser they'd found on a curb in Canton.

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