On Halloween, My Husband Chose Her Family Over Ours novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Locks

Her brother changes the locks, Derek's mother arrives with a custody petition and the claim that Lily is Derek's daughter, and the doorbell app shows Colleen let herself in eleven times since August.

My brother changed the front and back locks before eight the next morning.

He worked with his tools spread across the porch boards, in the jeans he had slept in on my couch.

I stood in the doorway in my robe with a mug of tea and watched him pull the old cylinder out.

"Who else has a key?" he asked.

"Derek. The neighbor for emergencies."

"The garage code?"

"I'll reset it." I stopped. "Colleen has that one."

He looked up at me and didn't say anything.

Upstairs, Maddie was drawing at her desk with the door open.

She had asked for pancakes and then not eaten them.

At eight-fifteen a gray sedan pulled into the driveway.

Derek's mother got out with a suitcase in one hand and a blue folder under her arm.

She was sixty-three, she wore pressed slacks even on Sundays, and she had never once come to our house without calling.

"Hannah," she said from the bottom of the steps. "We need to talk."

"Not on my porch."

"Then in the house."

"No."

My brother stood up with the screwdriver in his hand.

She looked at him, and then at the lock in pieces on the boards.

"Derek's staying with me," she said. "He asked me to bring you his things, and to give you these."

She held out the folder.

I did not take it.

My brother took it instead and opened it.

His eyes moved down the first page, and his jaw went tight.

"It's a petition," he said. "For temporary custody of Maddie."

"It's a precaution," his mother said. "The court needs to see she's in a stable home."

"She is in her home," I said.

"She's in a home where her mother screamed at forty people on Halloween."

"I never screamed."

"There's a video."

She took her phone from her purse and held it up to me.

It had been posted at six that morning.

It had sixty thousand views.

The clip began with me taking off my mask.

It showed me pointing at the door and saying, "One minute to leave my house."

It did not show Derek calling Colleen and her daughter his family.

It did not show the red suits, or my husband at all, until the end, when he looked small and tired and said, "Fine."

"Someone cut that," I said.

"It's what people saw."

"It's what someone wanted them to see."

Her mouth tightened.

"Hannah, I'm not here to fight with you. I'm here because of the little girl."

"Which little girl?"

"Lily." She said it carefully, as if I should have known. "Derek told me on Tuesday. He's been carrying it alone for a week."

I did not feel my hands go cold until the mug slid sideways and tea spilled over my wrist.

"Told you what?"

"That she's his."

My brother swore under his breath and glanced up at Maddie's window.

"Eight years old," his mother went on. "Born that September. Derek was away on a work trip the winter before, and Colleen was there. She has told him everything. A man can't be blamed for a child he never knew he had."

"He was in Tucson for three months that winter," I said. "I was alone with a baby. I remember every night of it."

"I'm only telling you what he told me."

"He never once mentioned her name."

"Perhaps that tells you something."

"It tells me he has not shown me one piece of paper."

I took the folder from my brother and held it against my chest, over the baby.

"Tell Derek to send his lawyer. Not you. Not a video. Not a suitcase on my porch."

She set the suitcase down on the top step.

"A child shouldn't grow up without her father," she said. "You of all people should understand that."

She walked back to her car.

Upstairs the pencil had stopped.

My brother brought the suitcase inside and left it in the hall.

"He's been planning this," he said. "Not a night. Weeks."

"Colleen was in my kitchen yesterday afternoon."

"She had a key."

"She had the garage code."

"You said she knew where everything was."

I sat down on the bottom stair with my phone and opened the doorbell app that Derek had set up for us in March.

I had never looked at the history.

It kept ninety days.

I scrolled back through the little gray thumbnails of the porch, the mail carrier, a delivery of my grandmother's old chairs.

Then I saw her.

Colleen, in her blue school nurse jacket, at the garage side door, typing the code.

The date was in August, a Tuesday, at ten-forty in the morning.

I was at school that day with thirty second-graders and a kiln.

I scrolled further.

I counted the thumbnails with my finger.

Eleven times since August, always on weekdays, always between ten and two, and Derek's car was in the driveway for every one of them.

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