They Thought I Was Just Her Husband

CHAPTER 3

She was still beautiful when she was lying to him. That was the part that gutted him most.

Forty years old and she still looked like she'd stolen someone else's twenties. Her skin unlined, those almond eyes remained ever bright and youthful, that particular glow money and adoration bought for the very famous people. Theo had spent sixteen years grateful for that face. Now he studied it the way a man studies a forged signature, looking for the seam or some crack in it.

"What's that supposed to be, Theo?" Tracey tilted her head, amused, patient, every inch the woman who'd never once in sixteen years been told no. “You don’t like your food?”

He frowned impatiently when she didn’t look at the paper, "The more I sit here, Tracey, the more sure I get that you've had another man."

The amusement instantly disappeared from her face, replaced by something flat and dangerous. "Watch what you're saying to me." Her voice dropped, the warmth gone out of it entirely. "A joke only stays funny so long, Theo. Keep going and you're going to actually make me angry."

His heart hardened and he tapped on the paternity report, creased now, softened at the folds from being carried and read and reread, pushing it against her wine glass. “Look at it.” He insisted with a fire in his voice she had never heard.

Tracey finally picked it up and his eyes latched onto her face like a leech.

He watched her eyes move down the page, watched them find the line at the bottom. And for exactly one second, something behind her expression flickered, a look of genuine shock that rattled, then it was gone like it never existed.

Then, calmly, without a tremor in her fingers, she tore the report in half.

Folded the halves together and tore it again right.

"What is this," she said, letting the pieces fall onto the tablecloth like confetti at the wrong kind of party, "supposed to prove?" Her eyes came up to his, ice-cold and utterly composed. "Some kind of joke? Because I'm not laughing."

Theo looked at the shredded paper, his rage building up in his chest. Then, he looked at her, and at the sixteen years sitting between them like a bridge with the boards ripped out.

"You want to know how many times I ran it?" His voice stayed low, level, the calm of a man who'd already used up all his shouting the night before, alone, in a bar. "Three separate labs, Tracey. Three separate samples," he held her gaze, "every single one came back the same."

He let the silence hang a beat before he said it.

"Hope, our daughter, isn't mine."

Tracey's face didn't move.

"She's his. Whoever he is." Those words left his throat with a sting.

"Theo—" Her tone shifted, iced with almost no emotion, the same voice she used on directors who missed her mark, or on assistants who got her order wrong. "You went behind my back and had our daughter tested without telling me."

He almost laughed at the sheer nerve of her, the way she'd already rewritten the crime and tried to make the betrayal his. "You lied to me for sixteen years," he said instead, and his eyes burned as he said it, "and you're mad that I checked?"

"Hope is fifteen for crying out loud. Add the pregnancy and that's sixteen years, Tracey. Sixteen years I spent thinking I had a family," his fists closed on the tablecloth, "sixteen years you let me believe a lie."

"Enough."

The word cracked across the table like a slap. Tracey's face hardened expressionlessly, a cold look she wore for people who'd stopped being useful to her.

"You've had too much to drink, and now you're saying something insane with a straight face," she stood, smoothing her dress, already moving into command mode, "you're coming home with me, now. And you are not leaving my sight until you've slept this off."

Something in Theo's head finally snapped and he glared at his all-perfect wife. "What exactly do you think I am?"

Her brows drew tight, genuine confusion cutting through the anger for just a moment, as if the question itself had never occurred to her. As if it had never once crossed her mind that the man across the table might actually stop obeying.

He rose from his chair. Sixteen years of muscle memory told him to sit back down, to apologize, to smooth this over the way he always had, but ignored all of it.

"I'm not going back with you, Tracey,” his hands were shaking now, but his voice wasn't, "and I want a divorce."

For one full second, Tracey simply stared at him, and in that second he saw something he had genuinely never seen on her face in sixteen years of marriage.

Shock. Real, unrehearsed shock.

"A divorce?" Her voice climbed, cracked at the edges. "Have you completely lost your mind?"

The temperature of the room dropped as she lost her cool. This was the version of her the tabloids never got to see, the one beneath the charm, forged by a decade of getting exactly what she wanted the second she wanted it.

Theo Hanks just sat there, numb and hollowed out. A man who had already spent every ounce of fear he had.

That numbness seemed to enrage her more than any argument could have. She snatched her bag off the chair, spun on her heel, and slammed the private room door hard enough to rattle the water glasses on the table.

A strange silence that Theo had no idea what to do with swallowed the room.

He finally let the breath go that he'd been holding since he sat down. He stared at the wall across from him— at nothing, really—and let sixteen years of ordinary Tuesdays and packed lunches and bedtime stories run through his mind one final time, all of it soaked now in a new, terrible light.

A hot tear formed in his eyes and slid down his left cheek. He didn't bother wiping it away. There was no one left to perform composure for.

The door opened again suddenly and he looked up, expecting round two.

Instead, Tracey came back in with her fury visibly folded away, replaced by something soft and coaxing, something he recognized instantly and hated himself for still responding to.

She sat down across from him and reached for his hand gently, "Theo," she was gentle, patient even, like he was the one who needed managing. "Apologize to me."

He stared at her in disbelief, unable to utter a word.

"Say you spoke out of turn," her thumb traced small circles over his knuckles, "and promise me you'll never bring up divorce again."

She smiled, small and warm, the smile that had once made him believe he'd won the lottery of his own life. "You will also cut back on the drinking. Do that, and I'll forget this whole afternoon ever happened," her fingers tightened around his, "we'll go home together and everything goes back to exactly how it was."

Theo Hanks looked at her hand wrapped around his, and, for the first time in sixteen years, felt absolutely nothing at all for his wife.