Chapter 3: What Diane Knows
Richard already had the phone to his ear.
Nicole crossed the kitchen in three steps.
"Richard.
Put the phone down.
Please."
He didn't look at her.
"Diane.
It's me.
I need you to come over." A pause.
"Yes, now.
Tonight."
"You have no idea what you're doing." Nicole's voice had dropped to something that barely qualified as a whisper.
"Then help me understand." He set the phone face-down on the counter.
"Because right now, all I have is a pregnancy test with your name on it, a receipt from yesterday, and the fact that you just tried to blame our daughter for it."
Maya had not moved from her spot beside the counter.
She was watching her mother the way you watch a stranger who has borrowed someone's face.
"Mom." Her voice came out steadier than she expected.
"How long?"
Nicole turned to look at her.
"How long what?"
"However long this has been going on." Maya kept her eyes level.
"How long have you been lying?"
Nicole pressed her lips together.
The calculation was back in her expression — that careful measuring of how much to give away and how much to hold.
"I'm not the only one who's been keeping things from this family," Nicole said.
Richard pulled out a chair and sat down.
Not from calm — from the kind of weight that has no other option.
"What does that mean?"
"It means—" Nicole stopped.
She looked at Ethan, still frozen in the doorway with his backpack straps gripped in both fists.
Something moved across her face, and for just a moment it looked almost like the mother Maya had grown up with.
"Ethan," Nicole said quietly.
"Go upstairs.
Do your homework."
Ethan looked at Maya.
Maya gave him a small nod.
He went.
His footsteps on the stairs were careful and slow, the way a child walks when he wants to hear everything.
The kitchen was very quiet after that.
Richard placed both hands flat on the table.
"Nicole.
I am asking you directly.
Whose name is on that paper, and what does it mean?"
Nicole sat down across from him.
She did not look at Maya.
"It's mine," she said.
"The test is mine."
"You're pregnant."
She didn't answer.
That was answer enough.
Maya pulled out the chair beside her father and sat down.
The three of them were at the table now — the same table where they had eaten ten thousand dinners, argued over homework, celebrated birthdays — and nothing about it felt the same.
"I need to know who," Richard said.
The words were very quiet and very clean.
"Richard—"
"I need to know who."
Nicole folded her hands on the table.
Her ring caught the light.
She looked down at it for a long moment before she answered.
"His name is Paul."
Richard did not move.
Not his hands, not his jaw, not the angle of his shoulders.
He sat exactly as he had been sitting, and the stillness of it was worse than anything else in the room.
Maya stood up.
She didn't know why.
Her body simply decided that sitting was no longer possible.
"Paul," she said.
"Paul who?"
Nicole finally looked at her.
The calculation was gone now.
What was left underneath it was something Maya didn't have a name for — not shame exactly, not relief.
Something in between.
"Paul Garrett," Nicole said.
The name meant nothing to Maya.
She turned to her father to see if it meant something to him.
Richard's chair scraped back from the table.
He stood up slowly, picked up the folded paper from the counter, and walked out of the kitchen without another word.
The front door didn't slam.
It closed with a quiet, deliberate click that was somehow much worse.
Maya stood in the silence her father had left behind.
Her mother was still at the table, hands folded, not crying.
Maya's phone buzzed.
A notification.
She didn't look at it.
"Who is Paul Garrett?" she asked.
May you like
Nicole was quiet for a long moment.
"He's Diane's husband," she said.
