The Shoes in My Hand: Pregnant Wife’s Nursery Betrayal

He walked past me without touching me, grabbed his keys from the hook by the door, and drove off in his car with the engine roaring louder than it needed to.

Ysolde was still there.

She had picked up the box with the baby shoes and set it on the dresser, and she was standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest.

‘I’m going to go,’ she said.

‘But I need to tell you something first.’

She stopped beside her car, a gray sedan with a dent on the rear bumper, and she looked at me like she was trying to decide whether to speak.

‘I met him ten months ago,’ she said.

‘At the paint store.’

‘He came in to buy primer,’ she said.

‘He was friendly.

He asked my name.

The next week he came back and asked me to dinner.’

‘What did he tell you?’ I said.

She looked down at her shoes.

‘He told me he was divorced,’ she said.

‘He told me he couldn’t have children.

He said it like it was a sad fact he had accepted a long time ago.’

I closed my eyes.

I met Beckett two years ago through my brother Grant, who owned a small contracting business.

Grant had hired Beckett to manage a few jobs, and Beckett had come to a family barbecue and charmed everyone.

We married a year later.

I thought we were building a life.

Ysolde pulled out her phone.

‘This morning,’ she said.

‘He texted me about the nursery.

He said, ‘Can’t wait to see what you do with our room.’

Look.’

She held up the screen.

I read the message twice.

Our room.

Not the nursery.

Our room.

I felt something cold settle in my chest.

‘How long have you been seeing him?’ I asked.

She put the phone away.

‘Ten months,’ she said.

‘I thought he was my boyfriend.

I thought we were starting something real.’

Ten months.

That meant the affair started before I got pregnant.

Before the baby kicks, before the crib, before any of it.

I thought about all the nights he came home late and said he was working.

I thought about the paint store receipts I found in his jacket and never questioned.

‘I didn’t know about you,’ Ysolde said again.

‘You have to believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ I said.

And I did, which surprised me.

She looked at the ground.

‘There’s something else,’ she said.

‘What?’

She looked up at the house.

‘There’s something in the closet you should see before he gets back.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shook her head.

‘I can’t explain it now,’ she said.

‘Just look in the nursery closet.

Behind the baseboard on the left side.’

She opened her car door.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked.

She got in and looked at me through the open window.

‘Because he lied to me,’ she said.

‘And I don’t like being lied to.’

She started the engine and backed out of the driveway.

I watched her car disappear around the corner, and then I turned back to the house.

It was the same house I had left that morning.

The same yellow door, the same flowerpot on the step, the same welcome mat.

But it wasn’t the same house at all.

I walked back inside and up the stairs to the nursery.

The door was still open.

The crib was still empty.

And I stood there in the doorway, eight months pregnant, with the baby shoes in my hand, and I didn’t know what I was going to find behind that baseboard.

But I knew I was going to look.