I lost my fifth baby the week my husband set a wedding date with my sister — and my nine-year-old walked into that wedding carrying his worst secret.
Chapter 1 - The Phone Call I Wasn't Supposed to Hear
Derek and I had thirteen years behind us.
Four kids. A fifth one due in the spring. A small house on the east side of Millbrook that never got quiet before nine at night. I used to lie in bed listening to all of them breathing through the walls and think I was the luckiest tired woman in the county.
I believed we were happy. I want that on the record, because of everything that came after. I believed it all the way down.
Then one Tuesday in February I came home from the grocery store forty minutes early, because they were out of half my list and there was no point walking the aisles twice.
Derek's car was in the driveway. He was in the kitchen with his back to the door, phone against his ear, and he didn't hear me come in.
"I love you too. I do." A pause. "Same room at the hotel, yeah. Like always." Another pause, and then he laughed — soft, easy, the laugh he used when he was pleased with himself. "Relax. I'll tell her I'm covering a shift. She never checks. She believes whatever I put in front of her. Thirteen years and the woman still doesn't have a clue."
I set the grocery bags down on the floor.
They didn't make much noise. But he heard that.
He turned around.
And here's the thing I keep coming back to, even now. He didn't jump. He didn't go white. He didn't fumble the phone or start explaining. He looked at me the way you'd look at bad weather through a window — a mild inconvenience, nothing to do with you.
"I have to go," he said into the phone, and hung up.
"Who was that," I said.
"You already know, or you wouldn't be standing like that."
"Say it."
He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms, like we were about to go over a bill. "It's Nicole. It's been Nicole for about a year now." He shrugged, one shoulder. "I didn't plan it. It happened, and it kept happening, and honestly — I'm happier than I've been in a long time. You want me to lie about that too?"
Nicole. My sister. Nine years younger than me. The one I used to pick up from middle school. The one whose security deposit I covered two years ago and never once asked about again.
"I'm pregnant," I said. It was all I could get out.
"I know," he said. "I know the timing's bad."
The timing's bad.
I filed the following week. I'm not going to pretend I did it with my head held high. I did it crying in a parking lot, on the phone with a lawyer whose name I'd gotten off a flyer at the library. But I did it.
The betrayal had two faces and I couldn't look at either one. My husband, who I'd loved since I was twenty. My sister, who I'd half raised.
Derek didn't even wait for the divorce to finish. He and Nicole announced the wedding while our case was still working through the county. They were just going to run out the clock on the paperwork and walk straight to an altar.
My parents called me — together, on speaker, which should have told me something.
"You need to find a way to be okay with this," my mother said. "Nicole deserves happiness too. She's your sister."
"So am I," I said.
"Don't be dramatic," my father said. That was his whole contribution.
The relatives whispered. The family group chat went quiet whenever I started typing. I'd walk into a room at a cousin's birthday and watch three conversations stop at once.
Three weeks after I found out, I started bleeding, and I lost the baby.
I don't have good words for that stretch of time. I'm not sure good words exist. I had four living children who needed breakfast, and a fifth I would never meet, and a body that didn't feel like mine, and a phone full of people telling me to be gracious.
Then the wedding invitation came in the mail. Cream-colored envelope. My name and the kids' names in gold.
I said no out loud, alone in my kitchen, before I'd even opened it all the way.
But Sophie — my oldest, nine years old, the most serious child I have ever met — came to me that night and said she wanted to go to her dad's wedding.
I didn't argue. He was still her father, and he was going to keep being her father, and I wasn't going to be the one who made her choose. I told her she could go.
The morning of the wedding, my mother came to pick her up. She stood on my porch in her good dress, looked me over, and said, "You should be ashamed of yourself. Your whole family is showing up for your sister and you can't set your feelings aside for one afternoon. What kind of sister does that?"
"The kind you raised, apparently," I said, and shut the door.
Then I did the only thing I had the strength for. I got under a blanket on the couch with my other three, put on the cartoon with the singing crab they all liked, and waited for the hours to pass.
I was not thinking about the ceremony. I was working very hard at not thinking about the ceremony.
My phone rang a little after two. My cousin Renee — the one person in that entire family who had picked up every time I called for six straight months.
May you like
Her voice was shaking so hard I almost couldn't understand her.
"You won't believe WHAT your daughter just did! Get over there right now. You can't miss this! YOU HAVE TO SEE IT WITH YOUR OWN EYES!"
