The Call My Husband Never Ended

I did not scream. I did not honk. I eased into the gravel and let the car roll to a stop, and I sat there with my hazards ticking while my whole life came apart in real time over a Bluetooth speaker.

“She has no idea,” Merlin said. “She thinks I’m out here building something for us. For our future.” He laughed, short and ugly. “She’s living off her daddy’s dirt and doesn’t even know it.”

“I’m tired of hiding,” Nolabelle said. “I’m six months along, Merlin. I can’t keep telling people the father just up and left. It’s humiliating, pretending I did this to myself.”

“Just hold on a little longer,” Merlin said, and his voice dropped into something colder than I had heard from him in eighteen years of marriage. “The trust clears next month. Once that money lands, I move it, I file, and we’re gone. We take the baby. She keeps the house and the mortgage and whatever’s left of her nerves.”

My vision went white at the edges.

“She couldn’t even manage to give me a son,” he said. “You’re doing what she never could.”

That was the sentence that took the air out of the car. He knew about the fertility clinic in Columbia. He knew about the two losses, the second one bad enough that I had bled through the sheets before he woke up. He had held me both times and told me it was not my fault, and I had believed him, because I did not yet know he was capable of lying that well.

Then I heard it through the speaker, small and rhythmic and unmistakable.

A heartbeat on a monitor.