Michael stared at the sealed laboratory envelope as though it might explode if he touched it.
For days, he had been the one demanding certainty.
He had said he needed proof.
He had acted as if a few pages from a laboratory could justify the way he had looked at me in our nursery, the way he had looked at our newborn son.
Now the proof was sitting between us, and he suddenly seemed afraid of it.
“Open it,” I said again.
His fingers hovered over the envelope.
The kitchen was painfully quiet.
The refrigerator hummed behind me.
Upstairs, our son slept in the bassinet beside my bed, the baby monitor clipped to the waistband of my sweatpants.
Michael looked exhausted.
He had been staying with his parents since I threw him out.
His beard had grown unevenly along his jaw, and the work jacket he usually kept spotless was wrinkled at the shoulders.
For half a second, I remembered the man I had married.
Then I remembered the nursery.
“You wanted this,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then open it.”
He tore the envelope carefully along the edge.
I had already decided that whatever the pages said, my marriage was over.
That was the part Michael still didn’t understand.
He seemed to think the result could determine whether we stayed together.
As if a test could restore the nights I had spent alone with a crying newborn while he stayed late at work.
As if numbers on a page could erase his accusation that I had slept with his brother.
They couldn’t.
Michael pulled out the report.
His eyes moved down the page.
Once.
Twice.
Then stopped.
The color drained from his face.
He lowered himself into the chair across from me.
The test confirmed what I had known from the beginning.
Michael was our son’s father.
There had never been any question.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he whispered, “Okay.”
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny, but because the word was so small compared with what he had done.
“Okay?” I repeated.
He looked up.
“I was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“I know that now.”
“You knew enough before.”
His face tightened.
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know whether I slept with your brother?”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
He pushed the paper onto the table and rubbed both hands over his face.
“I got in my head.”
That explanation made something inside me go very still.
“You got in your head.”
“I saw things.”
“What things?”
