Chapter 2 - The Whiteboard
Six hours earlier, my phone had rung with a Fairlawn number I didn't know. A nurse told me Daniel's car had been hit at the Larkspur Avenue intersection on his way home. I don't remember hanging up. I remember carrying both boys across the grass to Pam's house, shoving the diaper bag into her arms, saying the word accident, and driving the whole way to the hospital with my hands trembling on the wheel.
Dr. Reyes met me in the waiting room. "Your husband is going to be okay." I nearly folded right there in the chair.
Then a nurse stopped me before I reached his room.
"Mrs. Hale?"
"Yes."
She held out a clear plastic bag. "These are the things the paramedics took off your husband at the scene."
Wallet. Silver wedding band. Cracked phone. Car keys. The plain furniture of his ordinary life.
Until the wallet slid sideways in the bag, and I saw the folded paper tucked underneath.
That night, I brought the twins home alone.
Eli fussed while the bottle warmed. Jasper drummed his heels against his car seat. Normally Daniel would have scooped one of them up so I wasn't outnumbered. The empty chair across the kitchen looked enormous.
I fed Eli and stared at the whiteboard beside the fridge.
Jasper — 4:30 bottle
Eli — 5:00 bottle
Laundry
Daniel home — 5:15
The lists had started during IVF. I couldn't make the treatments work, but I could control the dosing times, the appointments, the calls. Schedules were how I kept from going under.
One line bothered me now.
Daniel home — 5:15.
Except there had been late nights. A lot of them.
"Come on, Corinne," I whispered. "What did you miss?"
I opened the laptop.
Everything was shared. If he'd been keeping Ivy in his life for eighteen months, I wanted to see exactly how much of that he'd kept off mine.
It took fifteen minutes.
Small charges, every couple of weeks. I'd seen a few of them before. He'd always waved them off — "just miscellaneous stuff." Now I opened them one at a time.
School supplies. A pair of kids' shoes. A dental bill. A payment for a summer camp.
I sat back. Eli made a soft, sleepy sound against my chest.
May you like
"Your dad's been busy," I told him, and the words tasted terrible in my mouth.
Because paying for those things wasn't wrong. That was the part that hollowed me out. I wasn't finding proof that Daniel was a bad man. I was finding proof that he'd quietly been turning into a good father to Ivy while looking me in the eye and pretending she didn't exist.
