Another sister.
Another baby.
I closed my eyes.
Everyone pretending there had not been another wife first.
And immediately heard Ryan’s voice from the day my marriage ended.
“Honey, I love you so much. I’ll see you soon at our usual hotel.”
***
I had come home early carrying grocery bags.
He hadn’t heard me.
“Honey, I love you so much. I’ll see you soon at our usual hotel.”
“I’ll make something up for her,” Ryan had said into the phone, laughing. “She believes everything I say like a complete idiot.”
The bag in my hand had slipped against my wrist.
One jar of pasta sauce hit the floor.
Ryan turned.
For half a second, neither of us spoke.
“She believes everything I say like a complete idiot.”
Then he looked down at the broken jar.
Not at me.
Not at my pregnant stomach.
At the sauce spreading across the tile.
“Who’s on the phone?” I asked.
He exhaled. “Annie…”
“Who?”
He didn’t even try to lie.
“Lina.”
My brain simply refused to understand the confession.
“My sister?”
He didn’t even try to lie.
Ryan sat down.
“We didn’t mean for it to happen.”
People love that sentence when they have already done the thing.
As though betrayal fell through the ceiling and landed on them.
I stared at him.
“How long?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Almost a year.”
“We didn’t mean for it to happen.”
I was pregnant with our fifth child, with four children upstairs, and almost a year of Ryan’s lies suddenly had one name attached to them.
Lina.
***
I filed for divorce.
Ryan moved out.
Lina stopped calling me.
And somehow, I became the person everyone expected to behave gracefully.
I was pregnant with our fifth child, with four children upstairs.
My father said, “You can’t force a man to stay where he isn’t happy.”
My mother kept reminding me Lina was still my sister.
Then I lost the baby.
There was no dramatic scene.
No doctor blaming stress.
No neat explanation that made the timing easier to live with.
“You can’t force a man to stay where he isn’t happy.”
One day I was still carrying my child.
Then I wasn’t.
I went home from the hospital with empty arms and four children asking when the baby would come back.
Ryan cried when I told him.
He said, “I’m so sorry.”
I hung up.
I went home from the hospital with empty arms and four children asking when the baby would come back.
