Chapter 1
I stood outside the prison gates with a clean shirt for my husband and eight years of promises in my head.
When Adrian walked out, I forgot every hard day that had brought me there.
I ran to him. He held me so tightly I could barely breathe.
“I’m coming home, Naomi,” he whispered. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you.”
I believed him.
For eight years, I had sent money to his prison account before paying my own bills. I had skipped meals to buy him warmer clothes. I had visited whenever I could, even when the drive meant losing a day’s wages.
People told me to move on.
I told them Adrian was still my husband.
Three weeks after he came home, my niece Tessa stopped answering my calls.
She was twenty-two, but I still remembered teaching her to braid her hair at our kitchen table. She had eaten dinner with us every Sunday since Adrian’s release. Then she missed one dinner. Then another.
When I asked Adrian if they had argued, he said he barely knew what to say to her.
Yesterday morning, Tessa appeared at my front door.
She held a folded piece of paper with both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked as if she had been crying all night.
“Aunt Naomi,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”
I brought her inside.
She gave me the paper. It was an ultrasound picture.
I smiled for one confused second.
“Are you pregnant?”
Tessa nodded.
I reached for her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She pulled away.
“I’m so sorry.”
I heard Adrian’s footsteps behind me.
He had been upstairs when Tessa arrived. Now he stood in the hallway, looking at the picture in my hand.
His eyes went to Tessa’s stomach.
Then he crossed the room and moved between us.
“She’s keeping my baby,” he said.
I looked at him. I waited for him to say I had misunderstood.
He didn’t.
“Tessa?” I whispered.
She pressed her fist against her mouth. Tears ran down her face.
The kitchen seemed to tilt.
Adrian put a hand on her shoulder, as though I might hurt her. I had spent half my life protecting that girl.
“How long?” I asked.
Neither of them answered.
“How long have you been together?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Tessa said.
Adrian spoke over her. “Naomi, let’s stay calm.”
“Take your hand off her.”
He looked surprised. Then he moved away.
Tessa kept her eyes on the floor.
I counted backward. Adrian had been home for three weeks. The date printed on the ultrasound put the pregnancy much further along.
“How?” I asked.
Adrian glanced toward the window. “I had a furlough before my release. A few days away from the prison.”
“You told me you had no furlough.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You found a way to see Tessa.”
My voice sounded strange to me. I could hear every word clearly, but I could not feel my feet.
Tessa said, “I met him through the reentry program. I was volunteering. He told me you knew we were friends.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know that now.”
Adrian reached toward me. I stepped back.
His phone lay on the kitchen counter where he had left it while making coffee. The screen lit up.
A message from an unsaved number filled the top of it.
She found the ultrasound. Tell her about the house before she checks the deed.
I read it twice.
“What did you do to my house?”
Adrian turned toward the counter. I picked up the phone before he could reach it.
“Naomi. Put that down.”
“Whose number is this?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then why does this person know Tessa is pregnant? Why are they talking about my deed?”
Tessa stared at Adrian.
“You told me you’d already talked to her about the paperwork.”
“What paperwork?” I asked.
Adrian’s jaw tightened. “Not in front of her.”
“She brought me the ultrasound,” I said. “She can hear your answer.”
He looked from one of us to the other. The gentle voice he had used at the prison gate disappeared.
“I needed money to get started again. I arranged a loan.”
I thought of the house my mother left me. It had been mine before I married Adrian. It was the one thing I had always believed no one could take from me.
“You used my house?”
“I was going to pay it back.”
“I never signed for a loan.”
Adrian said nothing.
Tessa took a step away from him.
“You said she signed it before you went inside,” she whispered.
Before you went inside.
I stared at her. “When did he tell you that?”
“Last month. He asked me to bring him a folder from your study during his furlough. I thought it was his.”
My stomach tightened. I kept copies of my mother’s deed and my identification in that study.
Adrian held out his hand for the phone.
“Give it to me. We can talk privately.”
I backed toward the hall table and took out my own phone.
“Whoever sent this knows what you did,” I said.
His face changed.
I called my sister Denise. I knew Tessa would be afraid of telling her mother, but I would not leave either of us alone with Adrian.
Denise answered on the second ring.
“Naomi?”
“Come to my house. Please.”
“What happened?”
I looked at Adrian. Then at Tessa, who was shaking beside the door.
“Adrian has been lying to both of us.”
Denise said she was on her way.
Adrian folded his arms. “You’re going to turn a family problem into a spectacle.”
I had thought we were rebuilding our family from the day he came home. I had cooked his favorite dinner and cleared half my closet for his clothes. I could still see the shirt I had brought to the prison lying over the back of a chair.
I set his phone on the counter, out of his reach.
“Get out of my house,” I said.
He gave a short, disbelieving laugh.
May you like
Then he looked at the ultrasound in my hand.
“You should check who owns it first.”
