Lorenzo helps me into my Honda—not that I need the help, but it keeps up the pretense. It also gives him the opportunity to talk to me without Lin hearing.

“Have you told him?” he says.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“He’s a medical doctor. He’ll know the baby can’t possibly be his.”

Lorenzo’s face distorts into a question mark.

“We haven’t—we weren’t very active for a few months,” I say.

He relaxes into a smile. “I see. So there’s no doubt?”

“None at all.” I already feel the slight bulge, sense where the waistband of my skirt cuts in more than it did two weeks ago. Sooner or later—sooner, I think—I’ll have no choice but to tell Patrick.

He won’t, in Steven’s words, rat me out. I know that. Even if he wanted to, the news would run the kids over like a freight train. That train would keep coming, unexpectedly, in the form of an intruder while Sonia watched cartoons, during a soccer match, in between CNN news segments. School, for them, would become a daily trek into hell. Patrick would know this, and he would keep silent.

But the thing, that unspeakable It, will always hang over us like a storm cloud. No, that’s not true. It won’t hang. It will crawl and toddle and walk and laugh and be a living reminder of how I spent a cold March afternoon fucking Lorenzo. And fucking up everything else.

“That other matter I said I was working on—I may know something by Monday,” Lorenzo says, snapping me back to the parking lot. “Hold on until then, okay?”

“What is it?”

Lorenzo straightens, pulling his hand away from mine.

“You two,” a voice says. “What’s going on?”

Poe is standing in front of the Honda, arms folded across his massive chest, aviator glasses masking his eyes. I hate Morgan, but the only person I’m scared to death of is this quiet giant named Poe.

I manage a smile, throw the car into reverse, and back away without meeting his stare.

Chapter Forty-four

FORTY-FOUR

Never let a child visit a farm, I think as I drive Sonia back home from the Rays’ place. They’ll want to stay forever.

Sonia, only two days free of her counter, has developed the gift of gab. Nonstop chatter about Aristotle the mare—who is really a girl horse with a boy’s name, Sonia informs me—is interrupted only by a narrative about brown chickens laying brown eggs and white chickens laying the normal white ones. She can’t wait to go back tomorrow, and I wonder if I should have left her at the Rays’ overnight.

No, it’s better to bring her home. If Delilah Ray’s trial goes well on Monday, I may not have more than a week’s talking time with my daughter.