“All those appointments,” I said quietly. “All that time on your phone.”
“I was looking for work.”
“And you said nothing. To either of us.”
“I was terrified, Nora.”
June made a small sound from the bassinet. Neither of us moved.
I looked straight at him.
“You used your own daughter as a way out.”
He closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“Say it properly.”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Say it, Daniel.”
His voice finally broke all the way open. “I used my daughter’s diagnosis as an excuse, because I was drowning in debt and too ashamed to tell my wife I’d been lying to her for four months.”
The truth sat there on my kitchen counter between us. Ugly. Cowardly. Finally real.
I thought back over the last four months with new eyes. The dinner where he’d ordered water instead of his usual beer and joked he was “cutting back.” The way he’d stopped mentioning his coworkers by name. The Tuesday he showed up at my place at 2 p.m. because he said he’d taken a half day, when I now understood there was no day, half or otherwise, to take off from. None of it had looked like a lie at the time. All of it had just looked like my brother, a little tired, a little distracted, expecting his first child. That was the part that scared me most — not that he’d lied, but how easy it had been to believe him.
