Intimately.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
The footage continued.
Mark and the woman walked Ava toward the daycare entrance together.
Then they returned to the car smiling at each other.
I rewound the video with trembling fingers and zoomed in on the woman’s face.
The air vanished from my lungs.
Lauren.
Mark’s coworker.
The same woman from his company Christmas party.
The same woman whose name kept lighting up his phone late at night.
The same woman he always had explanations for.
Suddenly every strange moment from the past year crashed into place.
Late meetings.
Locked screens.
Midnight “client emergencies.”
The night I walked into the kitchen and caught him texting in the dark.
“Who’s that?” I’d asked.
“Lauren from work,” he answered too quickly. “Just business stuff.”
I trusted him.
God, I trusted him.
I called Miss Greenwood immediately.
“She seemed comfortable around your husband’s coworker,” the teacher admitted quietly. “That’s part of why the footage bothered me.”
Comfortable.
Meaning Ava had met her before.
Meaning my husband brought his affair around our daughter behind my back.
I replayed the footage again.
And this time I noticed details I missed before.
Mark checking around nervously.
Lauren avoiding the cameras.
The speed with which he rushed her away afterward.
He wasn’t hiding Lauren from daycare staff.
He was hiding her from me.
Mark came home around seven carrying takeout neither of us touched.
The second he saw me sitting in the dark living room clutching my phone, he froze.
“Emily?”
I stood slowly.
“What was Lauren doing at Ava’s daycare?”
The color drained from his face instantly.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then quietly:
“How do you know about that?”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“That’s your concern?”
“Emily, listen—”
“No. You answer the question.”
He rubbed both hands down his face.
And suddenly I knew.
Not suspected.
Knew.
Because innocent people don’t react like that.
Finally, he sat heavily onto the couch.
“We were seeing each other,” he whispered.
Everything inside me shattered all over again.
Five days earlier we buried our daughter together while he stood beside me hiding this secret.
“How long?” I whispered.
“About six months.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“You brought another woman around our child?”
“It wasn’t serious at first,” he rushed out. “Lauren wanted to meet Ava, so I picked her up before daycare. She bought coffee for me and a smoothie for Ava.”
A horrible feeling crawled up my spine.
“What kind of smoothie?”
“Strawberry banana.”
My voice came out hollow.
“What was in it?”
Mark looked down.
“I don’t know. Fruit… yogurt maybe…”
“And dairy.”
Silence.
Ava had a severe dairy allergy.
Life-threatening.
Everyone close to us knew it.
Especially Mark.
“She drank dairy?” I whispered.
“She didn’t know!” he cried desperately. “Lauren didn’t know about the allergy!”
But he did.
He knew.
