Chapter 3: Be Wise
His name was Kyle Danner.
I’d met him once, at a college friend’s wedding in Dayton, fifteen years ago. Tall. Loud laugh. Sold medical devices. Rachel had dated him for two years at Ohio State and told me, on our third date, that it had ended badly and she didn’t want to talk about it.
She talked about it now. Until almost four in the morning.
The first time was when Ben was eight months old. I was working nights on a hospital chiller contract in Columbus, sixty-hour weeks, and Kyle sent her a Facebook message that said Saw your baby pics. You look happy. Are you?
She wasn’t. Not then. So she answered.
It stopped. Then it started. Then it stopped for three years and started again the summer my dad got sick. A hotel off I-70. His car in a Kroger parking lot. Never for long. Never, she said, because she loved him. Because he was the one person who’d known her before she became Mrs. Mark Hollis, the organized one, the one with the lemon bars.
“Is Ben mine?”
I had to ask. I hated myself for asking.
“Yes.” She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Mark. He was already born. I swear it on my life.”
I believed her. That’s the strange part. I believed her about that, and I didn’t know if I’d ever believe her about anything else again.
“Why did it stop two years ago?”
“Because Mom died,” she said. “And at the funeral I looked at you holding Ben’s hand by the casket, and I thought, I’m going to lose this. All of it. So I ended it. I blocked him everywhere. And I went to see Greg because I didn’t know how to carry it by myself.”
Every other Thursday.
She’d walked into that office with the worst secret of her life, and she’d handed it to him.
I didn’t sleep. At 8:55 the next morning I parked my truck in the same spot behind the fellowship hall.
I didn’t go there to forgive him. I went there to look at him in daylight.
Greg’s office smelled like coffee and old books. There’s a wooden cross on the wall behind his desk that the men’s group carved for his tenth anniversary. I helped sand it.
He’d changed his shirt.
“Mark.” He came around the desk with his arms open. I didn’t move, and he lowered them like it had been his idea. “Thank you for coming. Sit, please.”
I stayed standing.
“I want to start by saying I’ve failed,” he said. “Before God and before you. I’ve already begun a season of repentance. I’ll be meeting with a mentor in Cincinnati.”
“Are you going to tell the church?”
He sighed like I’d asked something childish.
“Mark, think about Lily. Think about Ben. Think about what happens in a town this size when a story like this gets out. Who does it hurt? Not me. I’ll move on. It’s Rachel who walks into Kroger with everyone staring.”
“So that’s the plan. I stay quiet to protect my wife from you.”
“I’m saying grace sometimes looks like discretion.” He folded his hands. “And brother, I say this in love. A wife’s heart doesn’t wander when it’s being tended. You might ask yourself where you were.”
I’d been working sixty-hour weeks. Paying for Lily’s braces. Fixing the church’s furnace for free every November.
“Get to it,” I said. “Whatever you told her to be wise about.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled, very gently, and the gentleness was the worst part.
“Rachel told me about Kyle two years ago. Every detail. I’ve kept that secret for two years, Mark. I can keep this one too.”
He let it sit.
“Or not.”
And that’s when I understood what had really happened in this office on all those Thursday afternoons.
He hadn’t seduced my wife.
He’d collected her.
