“Nothing.”
“Then why mention it?”
His shoulders sagged.
“He said I didn’t deserve you.”
I stared at him.
“When?”
“Before the dinner party.
A few weeks before.”
“Why would he say that?”
Michael didn’t answer immediately.
Then he admitted that Brian had noticed how little Michael was helping as my pregnancy became harder.
Brian had stopped by one afternoon and found me struggling to carry laundry upstairs while eight months pregnant.
Later, he confronted Michael privately.
Brian told him to stop acting as though becoming a father was something happening only to me.
Michael had taken it as an insult.
Then, at the dinner party, he watched Brian make me laugh.
Instead of hearing his brother’s criticism and changing his behavior, Michael had turned the humiliation into suspicion.
“That’s what this was?” I asked.
“Brian called you out?”
“He was acting like he understood you better than I did.”
“So you decided that meant I was sleeping with him.”
“I didn’t decide.”
“You demanded a paternity test.”
He had no answer for that.
The truth was uglier than jealousy.
Michael had felt inadequate.
Brian had said something that confirmed the fear.
Instead of confronting his own behavior, Michael had found a version of events in which I was the guilty one.
If our marriage was failing, it wasn’t because he had withdrawn.
It was because I had betrayed him.
If he felt disconnected from the baby, it wasn’t because he had refused to bond with his son.
It was because perhaps the baby wasn’t his.
The accusation had protected him from looking at himself.
And I had paid for that protection.
The monitor at my waist crackled.
A small cry came through the speaker.
I stood immediately.
Michael rose too.
“Can I see him?”
I stopped.
Whatever had happened between us, Michael was still our son’s father.
The test had not created that fact.
It had only confirmed it.
I also knew that divorce would not erase his role.
“Yes,” I said.
“But you don’t get to use him to fix this.”
Michael swallowed.
“I won’t.”
We went upstairs.
Our son was awake in the bassinet, his face scrunched with the furious outrage only a hungry newborn could produce.
Michael stood a few feet away.
For the first time since the birth, he looked at the baby without suspicion.
That should have made me feel relieved.
Instead, it hurt.
Because our son had deserved that look from the beginning.
“Pick him up,” I said.
