“Caleb?”
“It’s me,” I said.
Dead silence on the other end.
“Jess.” Her voice, when it finally came, was small in a way I’d never heard from her.
“I know,” I said. “All of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you know he canceled our daycare to give Mara our money?”
Caleb started to stand. I pointed a single finger at the chair.
“Sit.”
He sat.
Diane exhaled, long and shaky, through the phone. “I knew he’d used some of it.”
“And you agreed to watch my daughter so I wouldn’t find out.”
“I thought — if I helped with the childcare, he could replace the money before you went back to work. Before you ever had to know.”
“So, yes.”
“Jess, I was trying to keep this family together.”
“No,” I said, and I felt every word land like a stone dropping into still water. “You were helping him hide what he did to me. That’s not the same thing as keeping a family together.”
“I told him to end it.”
“And when he didn’t?”
Nothing. She had no answer for that, and neither did the man sitting three feet away from me with his head in his hands.
Upstairs, Lily started to cry — that thin, urgent newborn wail that reroutes every ounce of blood in a mother’s body toward the stairs. I started to move toward her, then stopped in the doorway and turned back to my husband.
“Caleb. You’re leaving tonight.”
His head snapped up. “What?”
“Pack a bag.”
“Jess, come on—”
“No.”
“We have a newborn upstairs.”
“I’m aware.”
“This is not the time to be making some enormous decision.”
I looked at him, and something in my voice went ice-flat. “You already made the enormous decisions. Weeks ago. Without me.”
He stood up fast, chair scraping the floor. “You can’t just throw me out of my own house.”
“I am not debating this while our daughter is crying upstairs.”
And then, through the phone still sitting on the counter, Diane’s voice cut through the room, steadier than I’d heard it all night.
“Caleb. Go.”
He stared at the phone like it had betrayed him too. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
Her voice hardened into something almost unrecognizable. “You lied to your wife. You took money set aside for your own child and you dragged me into helping you bury it. Go. Go face what you did.”
I watched something shift in Caleb’s face — the exact moment he understood that the one person who’d been shielding him from consequences his whole life had just stopped.
