Page 6 of Broken Trust

“So don't.”

She says it lightly, like she's handing me back something I keep dropping, and she crosses to me, slowly, one hand under the bump, until she's close enough that I have to look down into Gia's face worn by the wrong sister.

“Stop driving back there to suffocate,” she says. “You've talked yourself into believing what you have with her is love.”

“That's my wife you're…”

“You said it yourself. You don't love her. I heard it in your voice last night.” Her hand settles on my chest, over the shirt, over the scent that started all of this, and the warmth of it comes through the cotton and I hate that I don't step back.

“That isn't what I said.” Even as it leaves me, I feel the ground tilt, and there it is, the thing she does, the way she can take my own words and hand them back bent until I don't trust my own memory. “I said Gia doesn't love me the way I love her. She would never cheat on me. Pretend our child was conceived in a lab.”

The moment I say it out loud I feel sick, because I can see Gia's face the day Mia told her she was pregnant. Amazing. First try, too. I'd never seen her so happy. By then it was already too late to tell her the truth, so I told myself the damage was done and kept my mouth shut, and I've been telling myself that ever since.

“We don't need her.” Her voice drops, warm and sure, and it goes straight into the oldest, weakest part of me, the part that came up out of nothing and never once believed it earned the good house on the hill. “That's the thing you won't let yourself believe. We never did. Let her keep the house.” She lifts my hand off the chair, and I let her, and lays it low on the curve of her belly. “This is real. This is yours.”

And then, under my palm, faint and certain, the baby moves.

It goes through me like it's current.

“A blessing, whatever the family wants to call it. Come and have a life with the two of us and stop dying by inches in that house.”

I think of Gia, asleep with my lie still warm on her skin, breathing slowly and even the way I taught her without meaning to.

The pull lets go. I take my hand back.

“No.” I step back, and the cold rushes into the space where I was. “You've got it wrong. I'm not choosing you over her. There's nothing here to choose. I did a filthy thing, and I'm going home to tell her after work, and then I'm going to be sorry for the rest of my life. That's the plan.”

“You won't tell her.” She folds her arms over the top of the bump. “You'll get in your car full of nerves, and talk yourself out of it.”

“Watch me.”

I wrench the door open and the cold of the stairwell hits me like a bucket of water, and I go down two at a time in the dark, one hand on the rail, before she can put another word in me. Behind me she calls my name once, easy, unbothered, a woman who's already done the sum and knows how it comes out. I don't turn around.

Fuck work. I’m going home to tell her now.

Gia can throw me out. She can keep the house and the child and I'll have earned every inch of whatever she does with it, but she'll have the truth, and she'll stop pouring that wide-open heart into a man who's been lying to her in the dark.

I reach for the ignition, and the phone goes off in my hand.

I nearly sent it to voicemail. Then I see the name, and a decade of instinct answers before I can think, and I pull out of the space and take it on the road.

“Marco. I told you that I had stuff to take care of this morning. This had better be the building on fire.”

“It's worse.” He's talking too fast, the way he only does when it's already out of his hands. “Tomás left, and he's taking the financing with him. The bond company's on the phone threatening to pull the plug on the whole thing by morning.”

I put the car to the curb, and I sit there with the engine running and the heater ticking and Gia four miles the other way.

“I'll deal with it later, Marco. I've got a family thing. It can't wait.”

“Dante. If you're not in that room in the next hour, there's no production on Monday. Just a hundred and forty people out of work. Whatever's at home, it's still going to be at home at nine. This won't be.”

He's right, and I feel the honest thing I built the whole drive down curled in my chest, because I've spent my whole life choosing the fire in front of me over the one I lit myself.

I look down the street in the direction of home. Gia, asleep, believing she got me back. The truth I promised her, still whole in my mouth.

“Give me forty minutes,” I say.

I hang up before he can thank me, and I sit there one second longer, telling myself it's a delay and not a choice. Then I check my mirror, and I pull out the other way.