After 24 Years of Marriage, My Husband Got His Costar Pregnant and My Son Asked Me to Accept Her novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Folder
A clip nobody should have seen plays at her son's film screening, and she learns that her husband told her son she had agreed. The date on his phone is the night she cancelled their anniversary.
At my son's graduation screening, I watched my husband kneel on a twelve-foot screen and kiss another woman's stomach.
She was his costar, Danica Delaney.
Last spring I had smiled into a magazine camera.
I had said I fully supported the two of them playing up their romance for the show.
My husband sat beside me.
He stood so fast his knee knocked over his water bottle.
Water ran down the sloped floor toward the row in front of us.
"Turn it off," he said.
He stepped over the puddle and walked straight to the control booth.
On the screen, he kept smiling up at her.
It was a dressing room, with open boxes of takeout under the mirror.
Danica sat in a chair, running her fingers through his hair.
His palm stayed flat against her stomach.
A man behind the camera asked, in an easy voice, when the two of them were going public.
Danica looked down at him. "Ask Daddy."
Randall took her hand. "Once things settle down. Our baby..."
"I said turn it off!"
The speakers squealed, and the screen went black.
I was still holding Bennett's program.
At the bottom of the first page it said: Special thanks to my parents.
Ten minutes earlier, Randall had pointed to that line and asked me to photograph it for him.
He had sounded proud.
When he handed me his phone, he had also swapped my ice water for his, which had sat out all afternoon.
Cold drinks upset my stomach, and he had remembered that for twenty-four years.
Now that same hand was gripping the edge of the control desk.
At the back wall, his assistant Darren stood with his phone raised.
He was filming the room, not the screen.
When he saw me looking, he lowered it and came down the aisle with a bottle of water.
It was room temperature. Darren never got that wrong.
"Thank you," I said, and I drank half of it.
At the booth, the student running the video pulled off his headphones.
His face was bright red.
"Mr. Alder, I didn't know that was in there. The folder Bennett gave me had more files after the graduation message."
"Dad." Bennett came up from the front row and stepped between them. "I didn't check everything. Don't blame him."
I looked at my son's back.
He was wearing the shirt I had ironed yesterday, and his collar sat crooked.
When I tried to fix it before we came in, he ducked away and said he wasn't twelve anymore.
Randall came back and bent down to me. "Let's talk outside, Helena."
I stayed in my seat.
"Is the baby yours?"
He glanced toward the booth. "This isn't the place."
Bennett stopped in the aisle. "Mom, there's a small conference room. I'll ask someone to bring you water."
"Darren sent me that folder," he added. "It was supposed to be Dad's graduation message. I forwarded all of it. I didn't think..."
He stopped talking.
He had spent a whole year on that film.
"Bennett," I said. "Did you know she was pregnant?"
The color left his face, and Randall put a hand on his shoulder.
Bennett did not move.
He looked at me, and for the first time he understood that I needed an answer.
"Dad said you'd agreed," he said.
His voice dropped.
"He told me not to mention the baby. He said it would hurt you."
I stood up.
In the conference room, there was a pitcher of water and a stack of paper cups still in their sleeve.
Randall poured one and pushed it across the table.
"The baby's mine. She's fourteen weeks."
I pressed my nails into my palms until I could speak.
"How long?"
"A little over a year."
Bennett's head came up. He had not known that part either.
"There are professors out there," Randall said. "We walk out together, we talk to them, we go home. No decisions tonight."
"I'm not walking out there beside you."
"Helena."
"I'm not posing for anything tonight. Not with you."
So that was my decision, and I said it out loud in front of my son.
Bennett was still standing by the door, and I held out my hand.
"When did he tell you about her?"
"Two months ago. He took me to dinner and brought her."
"Show me the messages."
Randall leaned in to look at the screen. "What difference does the date make?"
Bennett handed me his phone.
Randall had written: What do you want for dinner? Then he had sent a restaurant address.
Bennett had answered that if there were three of them, he would reserve a table.
The date was September seventeenth.
It was our twenty-fourth anniversary.
I had booked a table that night too.
At the last minute, Randall had told me the production needed him for overnight reshoots and not to wait up.
I had washed off the makeup I'd just put on and canceled our reservation myself.
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