“Wow,” she called. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Laura said nothing.
At her feet was a plastic sack filled with crushed soda cans.
Serena looked at it and smiled.
“Recycling now?”
“Enough.”
Serena glanced at me.
“What? I’m just saying hello.”
Then she opened her purse.
I watched her pull out a fifty-dollar bill.
“Don’t.”
She smiled at me.
“Oh, relax.”
Before I could stop her, she crumpled the bill and tossed it through the open window.
It landed in the dirt near Laura’s feet.
“For diapers,” Serena called. “Or formula. Whatever you need.”
Laura stared down at the money.
Then she looked at me.
I expected fury.
I almost wanted fury.
Instead, there was something in her expression I couldn’t understand.
Pity.
As if I were the one standing beside the road with nothing.
She bent down, picked up her bag of cans, and began walking away.
She left the fifty in the dirt.
I reached for my door.
Serena caught my arm.
“Grant.”
I looked at her hand.
“What?”
“You’re not seriously going after her.”
“Those babies…”
She squeezed my sleeve.
“Could belong to anyone.”
I looked through the rearview mirror.
Laura was getting smaller in the distance.
One tiny head rested against her chest.
And suddenly a thought entered my mind that I had spent eleven months making sure I never had to consider.
What if I had been wrong?
A year earlier, I had believed Laura was destroying our marriage.
The evidence had seemed overwhelming.
It began with money.
I owned Whitmore Development, a commercial real estate company my father had founded twenty-seven years earlier.
Laura had access to several household accounts and one investment reserve we occasionally used for charitable projects.
One morning, my accountant called.
Six transfers had been made over three months.
$18,000.
$22,000.
$31,000.
$14,500.
Then two larger withdrawals.
Nearly $140,000 in total.
Every transaction appeared to have been authorized using Laura’s credentials.
When I confronted her, she stared at the statements as if she had never seen them.
“I didn’t do this.”
I laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because I was angry enough to mistake disbelief for confidence.
“Your password. Your authorization.”
“Grant, I swear to you—”
Then came the photographs.
An envelope appeared at my office.
Inside were pictures of Laura entering a boutique hotel outside Durham.
In one photograph, she was beside a tall man.
In another, the two appeared to be walking through a side entrance together.
