Chapter 4: The Other Husband
He went to work. I sat on the kitchen floor.
That’s the part nobody tells you about. Not the cheating. The paperwork of it. The way a calm man with a good job and a pressed shirt can call your sister and your doctor and your boss and a family lawyer, and suddenly the truth is just your word against a reasonable voice.
I had four clear photos and a business card. He had a story about a grieving woman who wasn’t sleeping.
On Saturday, I took Lily to her game anyway. She’d scored twice in the last three matches and she wanted me there, and I wasn’t going to let Scott take that, too.
Jenna Price was in the bleachers with a cooler of orange slices, ponytail high, red fleece zipped to her chin. Mark was still in Wichita with the boys. Jenna waved at me with her whole arm, the way you wave at a friend.
At halftime, she came down the bleachers and stood next to me by the fence.
“Megan,” she said, low and friendly. “Scott told me you’ve been going through a really rough time. Your mom, and everything. I’m so sorry.”
I looked at her. She smelled like the shampoo on my husband’s collar.
“Whatever you think you saw Tuesday,” she said, still smiling for anyone watching, “you didn’t. I hope you get the help you need. Really.”
Then she went back up the bleachers and handed my daughter an orange slice.
I don’t remember the second half. Lily says they won.
In the car afterward, she was flushed and happy, her cleats in her lap, talking a mile a minute about a through-ball she’d almost scored on. Then she stopped and looked at me. “Mom, are you okay? You look like you did at Grandma’s funeral.”
“I’m okay, baby.”
She studied me for a second longer than a thirteen-year-old usually bothers to. “Dad said you’ve been sad. He said I should be extra nice to you.” She shrugged. “I’m always nice to you.”
He’d gotten to her, too. Gently. Lovingly. The way he did everything.
That night, after Lily fell asleep, I sat on our back steps in my cardigan with a cup of tea going cold beside me, and I asked myself the question I’d been avoiding for a week.
Does Mark Price deserve to know?
Kate said no, when I asked her. “It’s not your marriage, Meg. You tell him, you blow up a family with two little boys in it. Let them sort out their own mess.”
Dr. Patel said it was my decision, which is what therapists say when they think you already know the answer.
And here’s what I kept coming back to. For a year, I had lived inside a lie that two people were holding up together. Scott on one side. Jenna on the other. And somewhere across town, there was a man in a coach’s windbreaker who was standing inside the same lie, being told the same things. I knew it, the way you know a stair is missing in the dark.
If someone had known about Scott and Jenna a year ago, and said nothing, I’d never forgive them.
At 10:52 p.m., I opened the team app and tapped the blue number.
It rang four times. I almost hung up.
“Hello?” A tired voice. Gym noise behind it, a hotel lobby, boys yelling about pizza.
“Mark. This is Megan Cole. Lily’s mom.”
“Oh. Hey, Megan.” Then a pause, too long, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. Quieter. Careful. “Is this about Scott?”
I couldn’t breathe. “Why would you ask that?”
He let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for months.
“Because Jenna keeps telling me I’m imagining it.”
