“Hannah, 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 Maren at a coffee shop.
Her newborn son slept beside her in a carrier.
She looked completely different from the woman I’d seen in labor.
Younger.
Exhausted.
Less like a threat and more like someone who had 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 Adrian had never been involved in Tessa’s life after high school.
There was 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.
Maren pulled out her phone.
“Do you want to see our messages?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve seen his.”
She nodded.
“He loves you.”
I looked at her.
“People can love you and still lie to you.”
