When My Son Called His Mistress Mom

Twelve years to the day. That's what today was.

Gerardo came downstairs already dressed, scrubs on, gym bag over his shoulder. Not a suit. Scrubs. He hadn't worn scrubs to actual work in years — he had people for that now, a whole surgical team, residents who did the parts he used to do with his own hands. But there he was, green cotton and rubber-soled shoes, checking his phone like it had already started ringing.

"Emergency," he said, not quite looking at me. "Patient can't wait. I'm so sorry, Aud. Today of all days."

"Okay," I said.

He kissed my cheek, quick, like a stamp on a form. "I'll make it up to you. I promise."

The door closed. I stood in the kitchen for a while, listening to the house settle around me, and I thought about the anniversary card I'd bought two weeks ago and never given him, still in my nightstand drawer, unsigned.

I didn't cry. I made dinner for Kohen. I put on a movie. I told myself it was fine, that surgeries don't wait for anniversaries, that I of all people should understand a schedule that doesn't bend.

Riley called at 8:47 p.m.

"Audrey." Her voice had a flatness I didn't like. "Where are you right now?"

"Home. Why?"

"I need you to sit down."

I sat down.

"I'm in a parking lot," she said. "Seattle Reproductive Medicine. I had a work thing near here, I wasn't — I wasn't looking for anything, I just saw his car."

My stomach dropped before my brain caught up. "Whose car."

"Gerardo's." A pause, the kind that costs something. "He's in the waiting room. Carmen's with him."

"Maybe it's nothing. Maybe they're there for—"

"Audrey." Her voice cracked, just slightly. "His hand is on her stomach."

The phone buzzed against my ear a second later. A photo. I made myself open it.

Through a window, grainy, telephoto-shaky: Gerardo in a waiting room chair, still in his scrubs — the costume he'd worn out the door for a surgery that didn't exist. Carmen beside him, her hand over his, his palm flat against the front of her sweater like he was checking for something. Both of them smiling at something a nurse must have said.

I looked at that photo for a long time.

I didn't scream. I didn't call him. I sat on the edge of my bed with my phone in my lap and the house dark around me, and I stayed like that until the sky outside the window went from black to a thin, dishwater gray. I didn't sleep. I didn't cry, either, not really — just a slow, cold burning that started somewhere behind my ribs and didn't stop.

At some point around five, I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

At seven, I got in the car.

---

Nordstrom opened at ten. I was in the parking garage at 9:52, engine off, hands on the wheel, watching the doors like they might not actually let me in.

They did.

I don't remember choosing the dress so much as the dress finding me — deep green, sleeveless, the kind of cut that assumes a woman knows exactly what she's worth. The saleswoman didn't ask if I was sure. She just pulled my size and a size up, just in case, and said, "This one. Trust me."

I trusted her.

After that, the beauty counter. A woman named Priya sat me in a chair under bright round lights and looked at my face the way Sylas looked at a case file — like there was something worth uncovering under all the paperwork. She didn't ask why I hadn't done this in ten years. She just went to work. Foundation, contour, a red lip I would never have picked for myself. When she turned the chair around to the mirror, I didn't recognize the woman looking back at me, and for the first time in a very long time, that felt like a good thing.

Four figures. I didn't blink at the total.

---

I drove home with the windows cracked, my new heels on the passenger seat, the folder from the safe deposit box sitting beside them like it had been waiting its turn.

Gerardo's car was already in the driveway. Home early. Guilt does that to a man — makes him want to be seen doing something normal.

He was in the kitchen when I walked in, still in his scrubs, a beer sweating on the counter in front of him. He looked up, already halfway into some line about the surgery, about how sorry he was, and the words just stopped in his mouth.

His eyes went over me once — the dress, the hair, the face he didn't put there. Something flickered across his expression, quick and unguarded, before he caught it and smoothed it into irritation.

"You look —" He stopped. Started again. "Where were you all day?"

I set the folder on the dining table. The sound it made against the wood was small and final, like a door closing somewhere far away.

"Sit down, Gerardo," I said. "We need to talk."