While I Watched Their Kids, He Lived a Secret Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What He Paid

Ian learns he has sent his ex-wife sitting money for Maggie every weekend and Maggie never saw a cent; that night the album shows Shannon wearing their dead mother's pearls.

I sent the boys to the backyard with the sprinkler and a bag of pretzels.

Then I let Ian Maddox into my kitchen.

He stood by the counter with his jacket still on and didn't sit.

"How long?" he asked again.

"Eighteen months," I said. "Maybe longer. That's how far back I've seen."

"Seen what?"

I picked up my phone, found the festival photo and turned it toward him.

Kristen stood in the front of a crowd with a drink in her hand and her head thrown back, laughing.

The date in the corner was the day I'd spent in a pediatrician's waiting room with her son.

Ian looked at it for a long time.

"He had a cough that day," he said quietly. "She told me it was bronchitis and she couldn't leave him."

"She didn't. I did."

His thumb went to the edge of the screen and stopped.

"There are more?"

"Hundreds. Neil is in most of them."

"Neil's your husband."

"Yes."

"And he knows you babysit for her."

"He knows I babysit for everyone," I said. "He thinks it's my hobby."

Ian made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.

He took off his jacket, hung it on the chair and finally sat down.

I poured him coffee because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

When I set the mug in front of him, my fingers brushed his knuckles.

Neither of us moved for a second. Then he picked up the mug, and I took my hand back.

"I need to ask you something," he said. "Did she ever pay you?"

"For what?"

"For the weekends. Every time I worked a double, she said you'd offered to watch him.

"I told her fine, as long as I covered it."

He put his hand flat on the table.

"A hundred and fifty dollars, every weekend. I sent it to her. She said she passed it along to you."

I waited for the feeling to come.

"I never got a cent," I said.

"Not once?"

"Once she brought me a candle."

He closed his eyes.

"That's about seventy weekends," he said.

I did the math myself.

It came to more than ten thousand dollars in Kristen's pocket, for my time.

"She told me you wouldn't take it," Ian said. "She said you were too proud, so I stopped asking."

He looked at me.

"I should have asked you myself."

I said nothing to that. It wasn't the moment, and it was still true.

Outside, the sprinkler hissed and one of the boys screamed with joy.

"What are you going to do?" he said.

"Nothing yet."

His eyes opened. "Nothing?"

"If you go to her tonight, she'll warn the others. They'll delete the album before I can copy the rest."

"The album," he repeated.

"It's a shared album. They post photos of every trip. They call it Grown-Up Hours."

His jaw tightened. "She's been laughing about this."

"All of them have."

He sat there with both hands around the mug.

"Give me your number," I said. "I'll send you the dates, and you can check them against your shifts.

"But please don't say anything to Kristen."

"For how long?"

"I don't know yet. Weeks."

"I can do days," he said. "Maybe."

"Days will do."

I typed my number into his phone, and he sent me a text so I'd have his.

At the door, he lifted his son onto one arm.

"Thank you," he said. "For all of it. For watching him."

It was the first time anyone had said it to me in a year and a half and meant it.

I stood on the porch until his truck turned the corner.

Cody and I ate waffles for dinner, and he fell asleep on the couch with his rabbit under his chin.

I didn't want to wake him, so I sat in the dark beside him.

At nine the TV woke up.

It was the screensaver, cycling through the shared albums as it did whenever the room was quiet.

The first picture was new. A porch at dusk, strings of lights, a lake behind it.

Neil sat on the railing with a bottle in his hand.

Beside him stood my sister, laughing, her hair pinned up.

I zoomed in on her ears.

She wore small pearl earrings with a tiny gold clasp.

They had belonged to our mother.

They had been in my jewelry box upstairs since the day she died.

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