Chapter 2

Dominic was cooking dinner when I came home.

Garlic and butter filled the kitchen, and his sleeves were rolled to his elbows while the pasta sauce simmered on the stove.

He turned when he heard me and smiled as if nothing in our life had changed.

“How was the new school?”

“Busy.”

“I knew you’d do well there.”

He kissed my forehead, then pushed a bowl of strawberries toward me.

“I found the good ones you like.”

For six years, gestures like this had made me feel loved.

Tonight, I looked at the man cutting bread in our kitchen and wondered whether another woman knew this version of him too.

His tablet lay unlocked beside the stove.

A message appeared across the screen.

IRENE FOSTER: James keeps asking if you’ll come Saturday.

My hand tightened around the strawberry.

Dominic carried our plates into the dining room.

“Do you want wine?”

“No, I have a headache.”

The moment he disappeared, I touched the notification.

The conversation opened.

IRENE: The twins were accepted by St. Peter’s. Family Welcome Day is Saturday.

DOMINIC: I’ll be there. I promised him.

For a moment, I wondered whether he recognized the school’s name.

I had told him about St. Peter’s the night the purchase became final, but he had spent most of that conversation answering messages on his phone.

“That sounds wonderful,” he had said without looking up.

Until now, I had assumed he was merely distracted. The truth was simpler: he had never paid enough attention to remember the name of the school I had bought.

I stared at the words and understood that the application had not been a mistake.

No one had stolen Dominic’s identity, and James called him Dad because Dominic had chosen to become one.

I scrolled upward.

There were hundreds of messages, and what I found was worse than a collection of love letters.

Juliet’s fever is back. Can you pick up her prescription?

I’m leaving now.

Then I found a photograph of Dominic crouched beside a birthday cake while James leaned over five candles.

Farther back were years of ordinary family moments—Christmas mornings, preschool meetings, dentist appointments and birthdays I had never known existed.

In another photograph, Juliet was asleep against Dominic’s chest in a hospital chair. Beneath it was a message from Irene asking whether he had remembered the stuffed rabbit Juliet could not sleep without.

His reply had come two minutes later.

It’s already in my car.

This was not a man who occasionally sent money to children he barely knew.

Dominic knew what medicine they took, what frightened them at night and which cake they wanted for their birthdays.

He had been raising them.

I opened their application again and looked at the birth date.

The twins were five years old. Before I could stop myself, I calculated what that meant: three hundred sixty-five days a year, for five years.

1,825 days.

For 1,825 days, my husband had been someone else’s father.

For those same 1,825 days, he had come home to me and let me believe he had sacrificed fatherhood because he loved me.

I scrolled farther back until I reached the month after our wedding.

IRENE: You married Audrey a month ago. We need to stop before someone gets hurt.

Dominic’s answer was underneath.

I don’t want to stop. Marrying her didn’t change anything between us.

My stomach turned.

Thirty days after our wedding, I had still been waking beside him and smiling when I saw his ring.

He had already decided that becoming my husband did not require giving her up.

Footsteps sounded behind me.

I returned the tablet to the recipe before Dominic entered.

He set a glass of water beside me.

“You’re pale.”

“Just tired.”

He touched my cheek gently.

Then, over dinner, he glanced at his phone.

“I forgot to tell you, I have a client meeting on Saturday.”

I looked at him across the table.

“Saturday?”

“It could take most of the day.”

The lie came so easily that he did not even blink.

I lowered my eyes to my plate.

For 1,825 days, Dominic had been their father.

On Saturday, I was finally going to watch him do it.