“Yes, Jody, I’m serious. We’re on a weekend honeymoon right now,” he said. “She told me a couple of days ago that she’s pregnant, so I’m doing the right thing. We’re moving the trailer to the ranch. It’d be real good if you could get your things out by tomorrow evening. The movers are coming Monday evening to take it away. You can have the travel trailer. I can’t pull it with my motorcycle anyway.”

Her whole world was crumbling beneath her feet. She was going to drop into a deep sinkhole any minute, but he sounded like he was discussing whether they should put in ten or twenty tomato plants that year. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it happened, and I’m not letting my child grow up without a father like I did.”

Her coffee cup crashed to the floor from her hands and broke into dozens of pieces. She opened her mouth to give him a stinging tirade of cuss words, but nothing would come out. She was every bit as frozen as she’d been in the dream.

“Are you there?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Jody. In some ways I’ll always love you, but . . .” He paused.

She could imagine him raising a shoulder in a shrug. A picture flashed in her mind from the Christmas party the year before. Kennedy, the daughter of the foreman on the ranch, had worn a tight red dress that barely covered her underpants. She was curvy, like Jody had been back when she and Lyle first started dating.

Jody hadn’t had a honeymoon, but then Lyle had declared that a marriage license was just a piece of worthless paper that the government used to make money. When she moved in with him, he was living in a one-room garage apartment. They’d lived there for four years while they saved enough money to buy a used trailer house and a couple of acres of ground from his aunt.

“How long has this been going on?” Jody’s knees buckled and she fell backward onto the sofa. This couldn’t be true. She would have known if he was having an affair. She was his wife, even if it wasn’t on paper.

“Since Christmas,” he answered. “We kind of got together out in the barn the night of the Christmas party.”

That’s when she hung up, and tears began to stream down her face like a raging river. She curled up in a fetal position on the sofa and cried until her sides ached, her head pounded, and there were no more tears. Her phone pinged, and she opened it to find two messages. The first one was from Mitzi, asking her if she wanted to join her and Paula for a girls’ night out that evening. The other was from Lyle.