…She’s my daughter.”
The silence that filled the garage was heavy enough to crush us both. I stared at Lance, waiting for the punchline. Waiting for him to tell me this was a sick joke to cover up an affair.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “We’ve been married for eight years. You don’t have a daughter.”
Lance slumped against the side of his truck, looking more defeated than I had ever seen him. “I didn’t know either, Sarah. Not until four months ago.”
He reached into the passenger seat and pulled out a manila envelope I hadn’t noticed before. He handed it to me with shaking hands. Inside were DNA test results and a photo of a little girl with curly hair and Lance’s exact nose.
“Her name is Chloe. She’s seven,” Lance said, his voice cracking. “That bracelet… she made it for me last weekend. It fell off my wrist.”
I felt the world spinning. “The guys’ trips…?”
“There were no guys’ trips,” he admitted, tears finally spilling down his cheeks. “I’ve been driving three hours north to foster care. Her mother—my girlfriend from college before I met you—she passed away six months ago. The state tracked me down as the biological father.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” I screamed, slamming my hand against the truck. The betrayal of the secret hurt more than the initial thought of cheating. “You let me think you were out drinking with the boys while you were raising a secret child?”
“Because of us, Sarah!” Lance shouted back, desperate. “We’ve been trying to get pregnant for three years. We’ve had two miscarriages. Every time we see a baby, I see you break down. I was terrified that if I brought this home—a child I had with someone else—it would destroy you. I wanted to be sure she was really mine, and then I wanted to figure out how to tell you without breaking your heart.”
I looked down at the bracelet in my hand. It was made of cheap, colorful plastic beads. It wasn’t the jewelry of a mistress; it was the art of a child trying to connect with a father she just met.
The anger drained out of me, replaced by a complex mix of grief and shock. Lance wasn’t cheating on me with a woman; he was cheating on me with a life he was too scared to share.
“Take me to her,” I said quietly.
“What?”
“If she’s your daughter, Lance, then she’s family. And you don’t keep family a secret. Take me to her.”
The next weekend, there was no “guys’ trip.” We drove three hours north together. When we walked into the visitation room, a small girl looked up from a coloring book. Her eyes went wide when she saw Lance, but then they shifted to me, filled with apprehension.
I walked over, knelt down, and held out the plastic bead bracelet.
“I think you left this in the car,” I said softly.
Chloe’s face lit up. “I made it for my Dad. So he wouldn’t forget me.”
I looked at Lance, who was watching us with held breath, and then back at the little girl who looked so much like the man I loved.
“He didn’t forget you,” I said, sliding the bracelet onto Lance’s wrist. “And neither will I.”
It wasn’t the path I thought our marriage would take. It was messy, and the months that followed involving lawyers and custody battles were hard. But a year later, when we finally signed the adoption papers to bring Chloe home for good, I realized that the “other woman” in Lance’s car didn’t break our marriage. She completed it.
