They Thought I Was Just Her Husband

CHAPTER 1

Theo Hanks's hands just wouldn't stop shaking.

He read the words for a fourth time, as if repetition might somehow change them.

NO BIOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP.

Fifteen good years. Fifteen years of piggyback rides and fevers at 3 a.m. and a gap-toothed voice calling him Baba like it was the easiest word in the world. All of it sitting in his lap now, reduced to a single line of black ink that didn't care how much he'd loved his own daughter.

The steering wheel dug into his palms. He realized he was gripping it until his knuckles turned white.

Sixteen years married to Tracey Teague Hanks. Sixteen years of believing he'd won some impossible lottery, the poor fisherman's son who married the girl every casting director in the city eventually wanted. He'd watched her body change with the pregnancy and somehow come out the other side more beautiful, not less, her face untouched by time in a way that used to make him laugh and call her unfair.

He hadn't known the word for what she really was, but now he did.

Liar.

Theo had nothing when he and Tracey met. No connections, no money, nothing but a scholarship and a stubborn refusal to quit medicine. Tracey had nothing either back then, just a wealthy family she refused to lean on and a stack of rejection letters from every single studio in the city.

For nine years he'd paid her rent on a resident's salary. Nine years of telling her ‘one more audition, you're close, I believe in you’ while his own savings account stayed at zero.

Then the drama hit all of a sudden, the fame followed and then the money hit like a tidal wave, and somewhere in that flood, apparently, so had someone else.

He almost laughed, his heart heavy in his chest. The sound that came out was closer to something breaking.

What am I supposed to do with this?

He had no leverage. Tracey had lawyers who billed more per hour than he made in a week. She had a publicist who could bury a scandal before it finished loading on a phone screen. If he walked in the door tonight and threw the paternity test on the table, she'd hand him a settlement and a smile and he'd disappear from his own daughter's life within the month.

So, Theo shook his head and chose not to drive home.

He drove to the first bar with its lights still on and ordered enough whiskey to stop thinking.

It didn't work, not at first. The betrayal sat behind his ribs like a fishhook, and every glass just dragged it deeper. Somewhere around the fourth drink, the bar's speakers coughed up an old country song— some dead American singing about a cheating heart that would tell on you in the end—and Theo barked out a laugh so bitter the bartender actually glanced up.

He felt like nature was just mocking him right now.

"Play something else," he said, and slid the man a bill he couldn't really afford.

By the last glass, the room had started to tilt. His thoughts came apart like wet paper. He remembered thinking, with great and drunken clarity, I gave her everything I had, and then he remembered nothing at all.

Someone’s hands found him in the dark. Small hands, a soft shoulder wedging under his arm, a voice too quiet to make out over the ringing in his skull. Someone walked him—actually, dragged him—out into the night air, and the last working part of his brain decided, with total confidence, that the hands belonged to his dear, cheating wife.

"Tracey," his own voice sounded like gravel, "Why'd you lie to me?"

There was no reply. Just the click of a car door, the sinking of a leather seat as he dropped into it and the world folding sideways as he was poured into it.

He forced one eye open, squinting as neon lights smeared across the windshield like wet paint. Long dark hair, spilling over a driver's shoulder and that was all he needed. His mind, drowning and furious, filled in the rest.

"Who is he?" The words dragged out of him. "Who have you been sleeping with, Tracey? I've got proof. You understand that? Proof. One phone call and your whole perfect little empire—"

The woman said nothing, didn't so much as glance over.

That silence lit something in his chest like a burning furnace.

"Say something!" His voice cracked against the windows. "I loved you. I gave you every damn thing I had, and you couldn't even—" His throat closed. "It was all lies…all of it."

The car kept moving. He kept talking, or thought he did, until the whiskey finally won and dragged him back under.

When he surfaced again they were underground, in a parking garage, concrete pillars sliding past in gray blurs, and Theo, still certain of exactly nothing except his own righteous fury, decided this too was hers. Another apartment that she must own without his knowledge…another of her secrets.

"So, this is where you take them," he slurred, letting her haul his arm over her shoulders. "All this money and this is what you spent it on. A bloody love nest."

Again, there was no answer. Just the strain of her breathing under his weight as she wrestled him toward an elevator, a door, a hallway that wouldn't stay in focus.

"Why won't you answer me?" he muttered. "You had the guts to do it. Come on, have the guts to say it."

Still nothing. She wasn't even trying to argue with him anymore, and some small sober corner of his mind almost—almost—noticed how strange that was. How the silence didn't feel like guilt. It felt like something else…Effort? Concentration?

He didn't chase the thought, for the fact that he didn't have the strength.

They made it three steps past the front door before her arms finally gave out and they went down together onto a carpet that smelled nothing like his house, nothing like Tracey's perfume, nothing like anything he recognized.

Theo lay on his back, the ceiling spinning slow circles above him, and felt consciousness peel away in long gray sheets.

The last thing he was certain of—the last coherent thought before the dark swallowed him whole—was the feel of her careful hands working at the buttons of his shirt.

My wife, he thought, wondering why she was taking off his clothes.

He was wrong, but he just didn't know it yet.