Chapter 4 - Coffee With Ren
For ten days we barely spoke except about practical matters. My blood pressure. The baby's appointments. Bills. Our dog.
On the third day, Ren texted me. I nearly deleted it. Instead I read: Dana, I need you to know I thought Dad had told you from the beginning. He talked about you constantly. He showed me the nursery. He told me how hard you both fought for this baby. I would never have agreed to meet him secretly if I understood what he was doing. I'm sorry.
Dad. The word still felt strange. But something else mattered more — she wasn't defending him. She was embarrassed by what he'd done.
Two days later I met Ren at a coffee shop. Her newborn slept beside her in a carrier. She looked completely different from the woman in labor — younger, exhausted, less like a threat and more like someone who'd lost her mother, found her father, been abandoned by her baby's father, and somehow ended up caught inside a marriage she never knew she was being hidden from.
"I almost didn't contact him," she said.
"Why did you?"
"My mom died without telling me the truth. I didn't want to repeat that pattern."
The irony was painful enough that we both laughed. Then she cried. She told me Marcus had never been involved in Bianca's life after high school. No secret affair. No second household. No decades-long deception. Only four months.
Four months was still enough. But it wasn't twenty-five years.
She pulled out her phone. "Do you want to see our messages?"
"I've seen his."
She nodded. "He loves you."
"People can love you and still lie to you."
May you like
She lowered her eyes to her son. "Yeah. I know."
That sentence revealed we had more in common than expected.
