Chapter 3
The next morning, Madison found a bookshop wedged between a bakery and a shop selling umbrellas. She pressed her nose to the window, where a row of illustrated animals marched across a display.
“Can we go in?”
Connor glanced up from the message he’d been reading on my phone—the one from Bradley, still unanswered. “Can I look around by myself?”
“Inside the shop, yes. You stay where I can see you.”
He nodded, already reaching for the door.
The bell above it gave a bright little chime. Warm air, paper, and the sweet smell of something baking next door wrapped around us. Madison disappeared toward the picture books. Connor moved to a shelf of graphic novels, shoulders slightly hunched, as if asking for space and company at the same time.
I stayed near the front window and called Grace.
She answered on the second ring. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m not sure yet. Can you help me compare the agreement date with the transfers?”
A pause. “You have the agreement in front of you?”
I pulled the envelope from my bag and set it on the narrow counter. The pages were creased from the flight and handling, the agreement clipped beneath the records. I turned to the signature page.
“January twelfth,” I said.
“Read me the first transfer date.”
“February third. Then another in March.”
Grace was quiet while I checked the pages again. Through the glass, Madison held up a book with a whale on the cover. I gave her a thumbs-up. She hugged it to her chest and kept browsing.
“Those transfers came before the date Bradley gave his family for when he and Tiffany started seeing each other,” Grace said at last.
My thumb pressed into the agreement’s edge. “That’s what the dates say.”
“It doesn’t tell us what Tiffany knew. It doesn’t tell us what the agreement was for. It tells us what it tells us.”
I looked at Bradley’s signature. His name seemed too familiar for the strange, cold shape it made on the page.
The story he’d told his family had been tidy: a new relationship, a new beginning, no messy overlap. I’d heard the dates from him often enough to remember them. January. February. March. A timeline arranged so no one had to ask what he’d been doing while we were still married.
I had once thought that if I learned the truth, I would feel triumphant. Instead, I felt the old bruise of being made a fool of—and, beneath it, the harder knowledge that the children had been living inside his lies too.
“Sarah?” Grace asked.
“I’m here.”
“Don’t turn dates into conclusions they can’t support.”
“I won’t.”
I meant it. The agreement was evidence of something, but I didn’t know what. And I wasn’t going to use Tiffany’s pregnancy as a weapon. Whatever Bradley had hidden, the baby hadn’t chosen any of it.
Connor appeared at my elbow with a book tucked under his arm. He looked at the pages spread across the counter, then at my face.
“Is it about the money?”
“Yes.”
“Are we in trouble?”
“No,” I said, and heard how carefully I’d chosen the words. “I’m trying to understand what happened. That’s different.”
He studied me for a moment, then glanced at his book. “Can I get this?”
“Of course.”
He didn’t smile, but he relaxed enough to turn toward the register. Madison brought her whale book over and placed it beside his.
“Two books,” she announced. “One for each of us.”
“Good choice,” I said.
Grace lowered her voice. “Keep the agreement and the transfer pages together. I’ll check the dates against what I have when you’re back on the line.”
“Thank you.”
I ended the call as my phone began to ring again.
Bradley.
I stepped outside beneath the striped awning. Rain tapped the canvas overhead, and warm bakery air drifted out each time the door opened behind me.
“You asked what the doctor said,” Bradley began.
“I asked what dates.”
“The ultrasound measured Tiffany almost four weeks farther along than the date I gave my mother and Brittany for when we started seeing each other.”
I gripped the phone more tightly. “So the doctor asked about the dates.”
“Yes.”
“You told them you and Tiffany started later than you did.”
“I told them what I thought they needed to know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Sarah. It wasn’t—” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. “The doctor said the measurement can vary. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“The way you’re talking, you sound like you’ve already decided what this means.”
“I haven’t decided anything. A date is a date. It isn’t proof of paternity, and it isn’t the whole story.”
“You always did know how to make a sentence sound like an accusation.”
I watched a bus crawl past the curb, its windows blurred with rain. There it was: the familiar invitation to argue about my tone instead of his choices. For years, I would have followed it, trying to sound gentle enough that he might finally answer.
I let the silence sit.
“Did you tell Grace about this?” he asked.
“She knows you said the doctor asked about dates.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one I’ve told.”
“Keep it that way.”
The words landed with the old force of an order. I felt the sting, then the urge to send him a photograph of the agreement, to make him feel as exposed as I did.
I put the papers back in the envelope instead.
“I’m not going to trade the children’s peace for a fight,” I said.
“They deserve to know the truth.”
“Then tell it to them when you can do it without making them carry your fear.”
His breath came hard over the line. “You’ve changed.”
“I have.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. Behind me, the bookshop bell chimed. I turned and saw Connor waiting by the window, his graphic novel held against his chest, watching to see whether I was coming back in.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” Bradley said.
“I’m not the one who made the dates different.”
He hung up.
I went back inside and paid for the books. Madison tucked the whale under her arm. Connor carried his own, refusing the paper bag when the clerk offered it.
On the walk back to the hotel, Grace called again.
“Bradley just contacted me,” she said. “He asked whether I authorized your trip and whether I’d helped you leave.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I reminded him that he gave written permission for the trip.”
My phone buzzed as she spoke. A new message from Bradley filled the screen.
You were supposed to come back quietly. Now people are going to hear that you took the kids out of the country.
The rain stippled the glass beside us. Connor and Madison walked ahead, each holding a book, their shoulders nearly touching.
May you like
I read Bradley’s message again.
The attack had begun.
