that came to me after that was ugly and calm.
Is Caleb even the father?
Three nights later, I got part of my answer.
Rain had just started when someone knocked on the front door of the bungalow. I looked through the peephole and saw Tessa standing under the porch light without makeup, her hair damp, her shoulders curled inward as if she had finally become the fragile woman she used to imitate.
I opened the door but didn’t invite her in.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She looked past me into the house and then down at her shoes. “He lied to me too.”
I said nothing.
“He told me your name was on the paperwork temporarily,” she said. “He told me once we were in the house, you’d calm down and there would be nothing you could do. He said you always folded when things got messy.”
That almost made me smile.
“I have a question,” I said. “And I want a truthful answer for once. Are you sure the baby is his?”
She flinched so visibly it felt like watching a glass crack.
For a long second, only the rain spoke.
Then she sat down on the porch swing as if her knees had given out. “No,” she whispered.
The word hung between us.
She told me there had been someone else around the same time—a man she’d met in Phoenix named Dean, then kept seeing whenever he came through Charlotte for work. He had ghosted her the week she found out she was pregnant. Caleb, meanwhile, had been confiding in her for months about how exhausted he felt by my schedules, my spreadsheets, my need to plan everything. She had liked being the reckless woman who made him feel thrilling instead of accountable. When she told him the baby might be his, he didn’t panic. He leaned into it.
“He said maybe this was a sign,” she said, staring at the wet porch boards. “He said maybe we were supposed to stop pretending and build something real.”
“Real?” I asked. “He was buying a house with me the same morning.”
Tessa’s eyes filled. “I know.”
I looked at her and understood something bleak: neither of them had stolen each other because of some overwhelming, tragic love. They had chosen each other because each one made the other’s selfishness feel justified. She wanted stability and attention. He wanted escape without guilt. The pregnancy story gave them both a script.
“You don’t get to stay here,” I said quietly.
She nodded as if she had expected that from the moment I opened the door.
The next afternoon Caleb showed up anyway.
He didn’t knock. He came striding up my driveway with the furious energy of a man who had finally run out of lies that worked. I stepped outside before he could ring the bell.
“You talked to her,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She’s upset. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“She knows enough.”
His face tightened. “You think filing a police report helps you? You think making me the villain fixes anything?”
I almost admired the audacity. “You forged my signature.”
“I was trying to solve a problem.”
“By putting debt in my name?”
“By making sure there was money for the house, for the baby, for
