The Nanny, the Husband, and the Woman They Forgot I Was novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Brunch

Cliff took the page and read the address himself.

"You're sure."

"I painted her bathroom. It was a terrible yellow. She called it butter."

He looked from the paper to me.

"Six years ago," he said slowly. "Before you two were married."

"We'd been dating a year. She came to every dinner. She was at the engagement party." I could hear my own voice getting flat and fast, the way it did in depositions. "Blake used to say she was the only one of my friends he could stand."

Cliff didn't say anything.

He put the certificate back in its envelope, very carefully, and handed it to me.

"Then she's not his girlfriend who got lucky," he said. "She's his partner."

Rosie woke up and announced she was starving.

I fed her in Cliff's truck with the heater running and rain on the windshield.

He sat in the driver's seat and looked straight ahead out of politeness.

"You can look at the rain," I said. "It's not a show."

"I'm looking at the rain."

"You're looking at the rain very hard."

"It's good rain," he said, and I laughed for the second time that afternoon.

That night, after Rosie went down, I typed the watermark into my phone.

harper at home.

It was a lifestyle account with eighty-one thousand followers.

Cream sweaters. Linen sheets. Lattes in a kitchen I recognized, because it was mine.

There was a sponsored post for a baby brand's organic onesies.

The baby in the onesie was Rosie.

I scrolled.

Rosie in her bath, a hand over her face so you only saw her wispy hair.

Rosie's feet in Harper's palm.

Rosie asleep in the nursery, in the crib I'd built myself with an Allen key.

"My girl's first giggle. I'll never forget it."

That was the group's laugh. That was Tuesday. Harper hadn't been there.

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