Around midnight, my husband quietly opened the sunroom door, thinking I was asleep beneath the old quilt on the sofa. I stayed perfectly still, even when the floorboard near the doorway gave its familiar little groan and his shadow fell across my face. Thirty-four years of marriage had taught me the sound of Mark Bennett’s footsteps, but that night I realized I had no idea who the man inside those footsteps really was.
Chapter 1
He stood there for several seconds, watching me. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of my head with the same tenderness he had shown me through hospital rooms, chemotherapy, our daughter’s college graduation, and every ordinary Sunday morning in between. I almost opened my eyes out of habit, almost reached for his hand, but the memory of another woman’s voice kept me frozen.
Three hours earlier, Mark had come home from work practically glowing. His hardware-supply company had landed the largest contract in its history, and at sixty-two, after building that business from a rented storefront and a secondhand delivery van, he looked twenty years younger.
“We finally did it, Claire,” he’d said, lifting both hands as if he’d just won the World Series. “All those years. All those lousy months when I thought we’d go under. It paid off.”
I had been proud of him. Whatever had changed between us in recent years, I could still remember the shy nineteen-year-old who once crossed a busy San Antonio street in the rain because the college cafeteria had run out of the cinnamon rolls I liked. He had come back soaked, breathless, holding a warm pastry in a paper bag as though it were a diamond. That was Mark. Or at least, I had believed it was.
“Go tell Pete,” I’d said that evening, nodding toward our neighbor’s house. “If anybody deserves to hear you brag, it’s the man who listened to you complain about suppliers for twenty years.”
Mark laughed, kissed my forehead, and left. Ten minutes later, his phone started ringing on the kitchen table.
I nearly ignored it. Mark forgot that phone everywhere, and I had never been the kind of wife who searched pockets or checked messages. Trust had always seemed simple to me. Either you gave it or you didn’t.
The caller ID said Michael P.
The phone rang four times in less than ten minutes. On the fourth call, irritation overcame manners, and I answered.
“There you are,” a young woman said immediately. “I’ve been calling forever. Bad news. My passport expired, so unless your guy can work a miracle, Cyprus may have to wait.”
I said nothing.
She laughed softly. “Mark? Come on, baby. Don’t tell me you’re backing out now.”
My fingers tightened around the phone.
“This is Claire,” I said. “Mark’s wife.”
Silence came down the line so abruptly that I could hear my refrigerator humming across the room.
Then the woman gave a small, almost embarrassed laugh.
“Well,” she said, “I guess now you know.”
She hung up.
I stood in my kitchen staring at the phone. On the wall beside me was a photograph of Mark and me on our wedding day, both of us painfully young, both smiling as if life had already promised to be kind. I threw the phone before I knew I had decided to do it, and it struck the bookshelf hard enough to crack the corner of that frame.
Now, hours later, Mark believed I was sleeping.
He walked quietly toward the stairs, stopped, and pulled another phone from inside his jacket.
I had never seen it before.
My eyes remained closed as he stepped into the hallway. His voice dropped to a whisper, but our house was silent, and every word traveled back to me.
“I can’t talk long,” he said. “She’s downstairs.”
A pause.
“No. She doesn’t know everything.”
My heart began pounding so hard I was certain he would hear it.
Another pause.
Then Mark whispered, “Kiss him for me. Tell him Daddy will see him Sunday.”
I opened my eyes only after he had gone upstairs.
Daddy.
