The accusation

Alexandria’s POV

He was good for about four hours.

I know because I counted. After I told him, he’d been careful and measured and almost gentle in a way that sat uncomfortably on him, like a suit that didn’t quite fit. He’d asked if I was hungry. He’d made sure I had water. He hadn’t pushed for details or made it about himself and I had sat with the strange novelty of it and tried not to read too much into it.

Four hours later I was in the guest room when I heard him on the phone.

I wasn’t trying to listen. The house had always carried sound in odd ways — something about the high ceilings and the hard floors — and his study was directly above the guest room and his voice when it dropped into that particular register, low and clipped and controlled, traveled through the floor like it was looking for me specifically.

I couldn’t hear words. Just tone.

And the tone was the one he used when he was building a case.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor and waited.

He came down forty minutes later. I heard his footsteps on the stairs — not the careful measured ones from this morning, the other ones, the ones with decision in them — and I had about three seconds to prepare myself before he appeared in the doorway of the guest room.

His face had changed.

The careful gentleness was gone. In its place was something I recognized. The calibrating look, but colder than usual. Colder than I’d seen it in a while. He was holding his phone loosely at his side and his jaw was set in the way it got when he’d already decided something and was now simply delivering it.

“How long have you been seeing Kendrick,” he said.

I stared at him. “What?”

“It’s a simple question, Alexandria.”

“It’s an insane question.” I stood up. “What are you talking about?”

“I had someone look into the timeline.” His voice was very even, which was somehow worse than if he’d been shouting. “You started working for him fourteen months ago. The account opened around the same time. You’ve been meeting him regularly, in person, at his office.” He paused. “And now you’re pregnant.”

The room went very quiet.

“Say it,” I said. “Whatever you’re implying, say it out loud.”

“I’m not implying anything.”

“You absolutely are.”

“I’m asking you a question about the paternity of a child you hid from me for ten weeks.” His voice stayed level but something underneath it was fracturing. “That’s not an implication. That’s a reasonable question.”

I felt the fury come up fast and clean, no warning. “You think I’m carrying Kendrick’s baby.”

“I think the timeline raises questions.”

“The timeline.” I laughed, and it came out wrong and hollow. “Jamie, we slept together two and a half months ago. You were home late from that conference in Phoenix and you came into the guest room at midnight and we—” I stopped because my voice was threatening to do something I wouldn’t forgive it for. “You know what happened. You were there.”

“I remember,” he said. And something moved behind his eyes quickly, like he was acknowledging that and filing it away. “I also know that you’ve been lying to me for over a year. I know you had a secret phone and a secret job and a secret plan to disappear. So forgive me if my confidence in what I know is currently limited.”

“Those are not the same category of secret,” I said. “I was planning to leave a marriage that was making me disappear. I was not sleeping with someone else.”

“You were meeting him every week.”

“For work. To write. Because it was the only place I felt like a person.” I pressed my hands together to stop them from shaking. “Kendrick is my friend. Was my friend, before you bought his company out from under him, which I’m sure he’s absolutely thrilled about.”

“He’s been in love with you since secondary school.”

“That’s his problem, not mine. I have never touched him.” My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it. “I have never touched anyone since I married you. Not once. Not even when you made me feel like furniture. Not even when you went weeks without looking at me. I stayed faithful to a man who treated me like a liability and I will not stand here and be accused of cheating.”

He was watching me. The calibrating look had shifted into something harder to read.

“The baby is yours,” I said. Flatly. Finally. “I know you don’t trust me right now and I understand why because I kept it from you and that wasn’t fair. But that is the truth and I need you to decide right now whether you’re going to believe me or whether you’re going to let whatever Sarah just told you on that phone call win.”

The silence that followed was very long.

His eyes dropped briefly to my stomach again. Then back up.

“What makes you think it was Sarah,” he said.

“Because it’s always Sarah,” I said. “And because whoever you called forty minutes ago said exactly the right thing to make you walk down those stairs looking like that. And Sarah always knows exactly the right thing.”

Something shifted in his face. Not agreement — Jamie didn’t concede things easily — but a crack in the certainty. Small. Real.

He looked at his phone. Then set it face down on the dresser beside the door like he was removing it from the equation.

“I need you to understand,” he said slowly, “that I am trying. I know what I said this morning. I know what last night was. I am trying to be different and then I get a call and I—” He stopped. His hand went through his hair. “I defaulted. I know I defaulted.”

“You accused me of carrying another man’s child hours after I told you I was pregnant,” I said. “That’s not defaulting, Jamie. That’s who you reach for when you’re scared.”

He flinched.

Good.

“I’m not asking you to be perfect,” I said. “But I am telling you that I cannot survive more of this. I have nothing left to absorb.”

He stood in the doorway and looked at me and for once I could see it clearly — the war going on inside him. The part that had been trained to control and suspect and manage, fighting with whatever had sat with me on those stairs this morning and stood in that hallway with crackers and asked are you okay like he meant it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Second time in two days.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed.

“I know,” I said quietly.

But sorry and different were still two separate countries.

And I wasn’t sure he had a passport for the second one yet.