Chapter 3

Our house was a modest three-bedroom place with a backyard Owen loved.

I worked from home doing freelance design. Blake contributed eight hundred dollars a month toward household expenses and told me the rest went back into his software business.

“We're comfortable,” he always said. “That's more than a lot of people have.”

When I suggested a private school for Owen, he'd argued that pressure ruined childhoods. I'd agreed to tour the local public school instead.

Now Brielle was listing tuition payments like trophies.

I turned to Candace.

“Does he do the same for your children?”

She wiped her face.

“He said the girls would run the business one day. He bought properties for them. Accounts in my name. He took care of my parents before they died.”

My mother had helped Blake start that business. Her money had become the floor beneath two households she hadn't known existed.

Brielle unlocked her phone.

“His mother puts my boys in the family Christmas cards. They're included in the family trust. Can you say that?”

She shoved a photograph toward Candace. I leaned just enough to see.

Gloria. My mother-in-law. Arms around three boys in matching sweaters.

The date was from a week when Owen and I had both had the flu. I'd asked her for help. She had been too busy.

Apparently she had been.

“Gloria takes them every week,” Brielle continued. “She and I go shopping. She knows who her real family is.”

Candace looked stricken.

I went cold.

This wasn't a man keeping two secrets from his wife. His mother had been helping him organize them.

Every time Blake defended me to Gloria, every performance of choosing me, had given us a convenient reason to keep our households apart.

And I had thanked him for it.