Chapter 2 - The Night Only I Remembered
My husband left the ultrasound room before either doctor could tell me whether our babies would survive.
Marcus picked up his wedding ring, slipped it into his pocket, and walked out without looking back.
"Marcus!"
The door closed behind him. For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the smaller baby's heartbeat.
Dr. Cole switched off the monitor and handed me a towel. "Simone, I know you're overwhelmed, but we need to discuss what happens next."
"Can ultrasound measurements be wrong?"
"They can vary by several days."
"Six weeks?"
Her silence answered me.
Dr. Cole explained that each baby had its own uterus, placenta, and cervix. The larger fetus was developing normally; the smaller one was in a more fragile position. If one uterus began contracting, it might trigger labor in the other.
"You'll need weekly monitoring," she said. "Possibly hospitalization later."
"Can you prove when each baby was conceived?"
"We can estimate. We cannot name a precise night."
When I left the exam room, Marcus was gone. I called him seven times from the hospital lobby. He answered on the eighth.
"Where are you?"
"Don't come home tonight."
"I'm carrying two of your children."
"One of them may be mine."
"They are both yours."
"Then agree to a paternity test."
I stopped beneath the glass entrance. "They haven't even been born."
"There are prenatal tests."
Dr. Cole had already warned me a simple blood test might not reliably separate the DNA of two fetuses — testing each one individually could mean needles entering both uteruses.
"I won't risk them because you've decided to erase a night from our marriage."
"I didn't erase anything."
"You came home."
"No, Simone. I didn't."
The call ended.
I took a cab home through the same kind of rain that had fallen on May eighteenth. I remembered that night too clearly for it to have been a dream. At 12:43 a.m., I'd woken to the security alarm chiming downstairs. Marcus had entered our bedroom wearing the dark coat he kept at the Chicago office, rainwater glistening in his hair.
"I couldn't stay away another night," he'd whispered. He smelled of rain, cedar cologne, and airport coffee. By dawn he was gone.
Now he wanted me to believe I'd imagined all of it.
When I reached the house, Marcus's clothes were missing from the bedroom. His passport, laptop, and the framed photo from his desk were gone too. I opened our joint banking app. The balance was eighty-three dollars. That morning it had held more than forty thousand. My credit card was declined when I tried to book a hotel.
Then Marcus's mother called.
"What have you done?" Louise demanded.
"He already told you?"
"He said you're carrying another man's child."
"You believed him?"
"He showed us his travel records. Marcus was in Chicago for eight weeks."
"He came home for one night."
"Then show me one piece of evidence."
I checked my phone records. No call from Marcus on May eighteenth. No message. No airline confirmation. Nothing in our shared calendar. I searched my photos for the one I remembered taking the next morning — two coffee cups beside the bed, because I'd been happy he came back.
It was gone.
But we had security cameras.
I opened the home monitoring app and selected May eighteenth. The recordings jumped from 10:06 p.m. to 4:17 a.m. Six hours and eleven minutes missing.
I called the security company. A technician confirmed the system had stayed online all night.
"Could the camera have failed?"
"All four cameras stopped recording at exactly the same time. That usually means the footage was manually deleted."
"Can you tell who deleted it?"
"There are two administrator accounts attached to the system."
One was mine. The other was Marcus's.
"Which account accessed the system that night?"
May you like
He hesitated. "The deletion was made from Mr. Hale's administrator profile at 4:12 a.m."
Five minutes before the cameras started recording again. Five minutes before Marcus disappeared from my house.
