The Night He Chose Her Over Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ours

Cora finds Lydia's clothes in her closet and an ultrasound of Lydia's baby in Dalton's locked drawer, leaves her ring on the cutting board, and learns her bank card was frozen the hour he left her room.

We went to the house on Lake Drive at two that afternoon, because Dalton's car was never in the driveway on weekdays.

Agnes parked the bakery van across the mouth of it and turned off the engine.

"Ten minutes," she said. "In and out. I carry, you point."

"I can walk."

"You can hobble. I'll take the pointing."

On the drive I had turned Gabriel Hollander's card over and over in my coat pocket.

A stranger had paid eleven thousand dollars and left before I woke, and I could not think why.

I put the card away. The house came first.

The crutches sank into the salted snow on the path.

I had a key, but the alarm panel was already beeping its countdown.

I typed the code, and the light went green.

The house was warm and smelled of lemon polish, and it had never been mine.

Every table held something Dalton's mother had chosen.

"Where do we start?" Agnes asked.

"Upstairs. My clothes. Then the kitchen."

The bedroom closet was long and white, with my side on the left.

I stood in front of it, and I could not make myself take anything down.

Then I noticed the right side.

On Dalton's half, behind his suits, there was a row of women's clothes I had never bought.

A cream silk robe.

Two cashmere sweaters in a size smaller than mine.

A pair of low black boots with a worn left heel.

Agnes had stopped beside me with an armful of my sweaters.

"Those yours?"

"No."

She did not say anything.

I opened the robe's collar and found the tag stitched in gold thread.

L. Sayre.

In the bathroom a second toothbrush sat in the holder beside Dalton's, and the pink razor on the edge of the tub was not mine either.

I went down the hall to his study with my ribs screaming.

Dalton kept the top drawer of his desk locked, and the key lived under the stapler.

He had shown me that on our second week of marriage, as a kind of joke about trust.

I unlocked it.

There was a clean folder inside, and a gray photograph on top of it, printed on glossy thermal paper.

An ultrasound.

The bean-shaped dark space in the middle, and a tiny white curve inside it.

Across the top was a name, a date and a number.

SAYRE, LYDIA.

11w2d.

Under the picture, in Dalton's blocky handwriting, he had written: Ours.

I read it twice.

Then I took out my phone and photographed it, front and back, because I did not trust my hands to hold it still.

The date on the print was three days before our anniversary.

He had sat across from me at that table, and he had eaten my favorite appetizer, and he had known.

Agnes read the paper over my shoulder.

She was quiet for a long moment.

"That's the man's baby," she said. "Isn't it."

"I think it is."

"And last night she wasn't at the ER for her father."

"She was bleeding," I said. "That's why it was so urgent. She wasn't dying, but she was pregnant."

My voice came out flat, so flat that it frightened me.

"Do you want me to burn the place down?" said Agnes. "I'm sixty-three. They'd go easy on me."

I laughed, and it hurt, and then I was crying.

She held me with her flour-smelling arms until it passed.

"We take what's yours," she said into my hair. "Only what's yours."

I put the scan in my coat pocket.

I took my mother's cake pans from the bottom cabinet, the dented tin box of her handwritten recipes, and the cast-iron skillet she had left me.

I took my passport and my birth certificate from the safe.

I took the two cardigans I actually liked, and my winter boots.

It all fit in four paper bags.

Then I stood in the kitchen and looked at my left hand.

The ring was a plain gold band.

I pulled it off over my swollen knuckle and set it on the cutting board where he would see it.

Beside it I left the anniversary card from the restaurant, still in its envelope, with the candle wax on one corner.

I did not write anything on it.

We were halfway down the front steps when the phone buzzed in my coat.

Dalton.

Then it buzzed again.

Where are you?

Cora, call me.

Don't do anything you'll regret. We can fix this.

I turned the phone face down in my palm and let it ring out.

Agnes stopped at the pharmacy on the way home for my pain pills.

I handed the cashier my debit card, and the machine whirred.

"I'm sorry," she said, frowning at the screen. "It says declined."

"Try it again."

She did, with a kind smile.

"Declined."

I stood there under the fluorescent lights with a bag of painkillers in front of me.

I opened my banking app.

The joint account was closed.

My own card had been frozen at noon, an hour after he walked out of my hospital room.

Agnes slid two twenties across the counter without a word.

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