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Why does he keep⁠—

My hand flies to my mouth, and my stomach turns sour. Chills fire through my spine. The memory of me kicking a receipt farther under the bed appears sharp. I grab the side of the bassinet.

Phoebe's not my wife.

He said it in the yard, plain as anything. And it should have settled every single thing I'd been carrying since the moment Carla told me otherwise.

Phoebe's not my wife. Phoebe's Alexander's.

A small, exhausted part of me is still trying to catch up to that fact while standing in the bedroom with Mama behind the door. Charlie's cry fills every inch of space between us. The more it hits me, the worse I feel.

Eleven months I spent hating a man for choosing somebody else over me. That's almost a year of picturing him coming home to a woman with a ring on her finger, telling himself a stranger from New Year's Eve didn't matter enough to disrupt whatever life he already had waiting.

None of it was true. Not one single piece of the story I built my whole world around was accurate. And a cruel, insistent voice in the back of my head keeps asking, what else did you get wrong?

Jagger nods, his face falling to hurt, repeating, "Yeah, you saw the receipt."

A fresh vision of me trying to find my bra, and all the emotions I felt waking up alone burn in my chest.

Oh my God.

"Wh-what was on it?" I manage to get out.

"I left it on the pillow, and you didn't even care," Jagger seethes, and his voice cracks straight down the center, making my gut hurt worse.

"It was under the bed!" I insist.

Jagger's eyes narrow.

"It's true!" I cry out as Charlie's insistent cry gets louder.

I snap out of it and pick her up, holding her close to my chest. "Shh. It's okay, sweetie," I offer, but my voice isn't steady.

Jagger pins his gaze on Charlie. He clenches his jaw.

I kiss the top of Charlie's head and shush her again, bouncing slightly to try and calm her.

Jagger states, "I wrote it because I didn't want you waking up to an empty bed with no explanation at all. I told you I had a family emergency. I told you not to go anywhere."

I stare at him, insides shaking, not calming my daughter very well because she's probably feeling my unsteadiness.

He continues, "It must have fallen off the pillow. Lainey, I swear to you, I left you a note."

I close my eyes, unable to stop tears, and turn from him, holding our daughter as close to me as I can.

He didn't abandon me.

He didn't roll over, decide I wasn't worth a goodbye, and vanish back into a life with somebody else already picked out.

I kicked his explanation under a bed because I was too proud, too hurt, too convinced of the worst version of him to actually read it.

Eleven months.

"I've been searching for you," he quietly says.

More tears fall down my cheeks.

Is this all true?