I enlarge the photo, expanding it to full-size on my screen, and zoom in on the caption, which I’ve actually never read. It says, Trick or treating with my best little buddy, Aiden.

This isn’t just some patient. This is Aiden. This is Gemma’s son. And it’s also the same kid from Debbie’s pool party last week. The one who charged into the house, like he knew his way around the place, and requested a pool noodle.

The revelation that Brian knows hits like a dodgeball hurled straight to the stomach. He claimed he knew Gemma, but I didn’t think he still knew her. It takes away any appetite I may have had and replaces it with a sickening emptiness instead. I look again at the photo. Now I know what Brian was compensating for—and who he was covering for.

I screenshot the photo and get ready to fire the smoking gun off to Brian. How could he not mention this? He saw me struggling to piece this all together and this whole time he knew? All this time and I was never worth the truth?

Let it crumble rises once again to the forefront of my thoughts and I set the phone down on my nightstand, taking a few deep breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth. I’ve finally figured out who the “they” were that Gemma referred to. I thought it was just two people. Debbie and Kurt. But it was Brian, too.

I’m so mad, I begin to cry. Hysterically. I cry the way I’ve wanted to cry since the urn came back, but was too afraid to be heard. I don’t care anymore, though. I’m so mad, and even more so because I’m not entirely sure at whom. The picture confirms what I didn’t want to believe: people who I thought were in my corner this whole time were working together to keep a huge secret from me for years.

All because of Decker. Decker who had a kid and kept it from me. This is his secret mess that others have been cleaning up and hiding from his wife. But are you even allowed to be mad at someone who isn’t alive anymore?

I wipe my nose on my forearm and head over to my laptop. The home page of my algorithm is pulled up. The cursor is blinking at me, taunting me. I’m only a few keystrokes away from exporting the results of a “Decker-and-Charlotte-stats.xls” report. A part of me is curious to know what percent match we truly were.

The thought of running a script I’m so familiar with against a person who I was already in a relationship with has never crossed my mind. Not until everything I knew about him imploded before my very eyes. Of course, I’ve worked with the algorithm enough times that I can sit here and make a fairly educated guess where the two of us would shake out, but frankly, I could see it going both ways. We married each other, therefore we could—and probably should—be a 100 percent match. Then again, Decker was a guy who got a girl pregnant and never told anyone. But does it matter now anyway? He’s already dead—it’s not like divorce is an option.