He held my hand and asked me to take a paternity test. The results were already in his desk drawer.
When our daughter was three days old, my husband swabbed her cheek while I was in the shower and mailed our baby’s name to a lab. On day seventeen, the answer came back: 99.99%. His. Obviously. I could have told him for free.
On day thirty-one, he sat across from me — with the envelope eleven feet away — and asked me to take a test "to put the rumors to rest." Rumors his mother started before our daughter was born.
So I wrote my daughter’s name on the birth certificate alone. Then I packed one bag, took the crib mattress, and left him standing in the driveway holding a car seat he suddenly couldn’t figure out.
He can see her whenever he wants. He can see me when he figures out what he did.
But this isn’t a story about burning a marriage down.
It’s about what it costs a man to rebuild one.
Because Evan Marsh is about to quit the family company, sit in a therapist’s parking lot at seven in the morning, stand up in front of the whole county at a christening, and read out his own punch list — every date, every lie, his mother’s included — with no guarantee I’ll ever come home.
A marriage-in-crisis, second-chance romance featuring a groveling husband who earns every brick of his way back, a mother-in-law who finally gets the bill, the baby who was always his — and the flowers he brings when he no longer needs a reason.
No cheating. No other man. Hard-won happily-ever-after guaranteed.
A standalone novella you can finish in one sitting.
