He Hid His Secret Wife So I Stole His Sister's Boyfriend novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two Buses

Jerome rides the bus with Willa, a real scan shows her baby is small but fine, and Dot makes three copies of the video, until Tate arrives at midnight threatening to take the baby.

Margo's smile stayed exactly where it was until I reached the lobby doors.

When I looked back she was still sitting at the corner table, with the envelope in front of her and her hand empty.

Jerome walked beside me out to the street.

"My car's in the garage," he said.

"I take the bus."

"Then I'll take the bus."

The 14 came in four minutes.

He paid his own fare, and he didn't flinch when the doors shut and the whole bus smelled like wet coats.

We sat in the back.

I told him the rules before he asked.

"I'm not sleeping with you. I'm not marrying you. I want people to see you with me, every place Margo can hear about it."

"Why?"

"She squeezed your hand without looking," I said. "She's sure of you. I want her to find out how it feels when someone else decides."

He turned that over for a stop or two.

"And Tate?"

"Tate gets to watch his sister lose the one thing she didn't buy."

Jerome looked out the window.

"That's a long way to go for a hurt feeling," he said.

"It's eleven months."

He let it go.

"Margo booked you a doctor for two o'clock," he said. "A friend of hers."

"I'm not going near anyone with her name on a favor."

"My cousin's wife runs a clinic across the river," Jerome said. "She doesn't know a Winfield from a parking ticket."

I should have asked why a man who dated a Winfield had a cousin who didn't know the name.

I was too tired, so I only said, "Fine."

The clinic was a converted dentist's office with a plastic fern.

A woman in purple scrubs ran the wand over me while Jerome stood by the door and kept his eyes on the ceiling.

"There she is," the woman said, and the speaker filled the room with a fast, wet heartbeat.

I covered my mouth.

"She's fine," said the woman. "She's small, that's all. You're a small person making a small person. Your dates were off by ten days, so she's right on schedule."

"The free clinic said two weeks behind."

"The free clinic has forty patients before lunch."

She printed the picture and handed it to me.

Jerome stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his jaw set.

He kept his eyes on the screen until the picture was gone.

Then he went out to the hall.

I paid her with three of the folded twenties.

She wouldn't take the fourth.

My landlady's house sat at the end of a street of crooked porches, over a laundromat.

Dot was on the stoop with a bag of tomatoes and her reading glasses pushed up into her silver hair.

"Who is the tall one?"

"Jerome," I said. "He's my boyfriend."

Dot looked at him over the tomatoes for a long time.

"Since when?"

"Since two o'clock."

"Well," said Dot. "Wipe your feet, both of you."

She sat Jerome at her kitchen table and put a bowl of soup in front of him that he hadn't asked for.

She had spent thirty-one years as a court stenographer, and she asked questions one at a time and waited for each answer.

"Where do you work?"

"I'm a structural engineer."

"Where do you live?"

"The east side. A one-bedroom."

"Parents?"

"Both gone."

"Brothers or sisters?"

His spoon stopped.

"A sister," he said. "We lost touch."

"Mm," said Dot.

She turned to me. "Show me what you've got."

I gave her my phone, and she watched the twenty seconds twice with her glasses down.

Then she emailed it to herself, to me, and to a man at the county courthouse she called "my backup."

"Three places," she said. "In my day we called that a chain of custody."

Jerome watched her do it.

"Why three?" he asked.

"Because the first one always gets lost," said Dot, "and the second one gets bought."

He left at dusk.

I walked him out to the stoop, where the streetlight buzzed over the laundromat sign.

"I'll hold up my end," he said. "Tell me where you're going. Every time. I don't want to hear it from Margo."

"Nothing real," I said. "This is for show. Until the baby has a name and she's lost her crown."

"Nothing real," he said, and put out his hand.

I shook it.

His palm was warm, and he held on a half second past a handshake.

I told myself it was the first kind thing a man had done for me all day.

He walked down the street, and I watched until the corner took him.

I did not sleep.

At midnight a car door shut outside.

I looked down from my window.

Tate stood under the streetlight in a dark suit, holding a long white envelope.

I went down in my robe, and Dot's porch light came on behind me.

He didn't look caught.

He looked calm, as if he had already decided how this would go.

"Willa. Babe."

"Don't."

"Fifty thousand. A cashier's check, today, and fifty more when you sign." He held out the envelope. "Linnea can't have stress. The doctors were very clear. You know I care about you."

I took the envelope.

I tore it in half and then in half again, and I dropped it at his feet.

"You told me you were single," I said. "She was in your bed every night I wasn't."

His face went flat.

"Then here's what happens," he said. "You keep the baby, and my father's lawyers take it the day it's born."

"You can't."

"I'm a Winfield, and you have two hundred dollars and a landlady." He glanced at Dot, who stood in the doorway with her arms folded. "Who do you think wins?"

"Say that again," said a voice from the dark at the end of the street. "Slowly. She'd like it on tape."

Jerome stepped into the light with his phone raised.

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