It didn’t. “Leave. Now.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Once the driveway was empty, Walter walked me inside and told me the real reason he’d come by that day. He’d heard from his son about the fertility struggles and had driven over to offer to cover the cost of IVF — only to arrive in time to find something far worse waiting on the lawn instead.
He made good on everything he’d said. The deed to the house was transferred into my name within the week, paperwork he handled personally. Brett’s access to the family’s accounts closed the same afternoon.
Word travels the way it does in a town that size. Paige didn’t stick around long once the money disappeared. Brett spent the following weeks couch-surfing between increasingly reluctant friends — which I heard about secondhand and felt almost nothing about, which surprised me more than anything else that had happened.
He showed up on my porch eight days later looking like he’d aged a decade, asking if I’d call his grandfather for him, certain Walter would listen to me even though he wouldn’t take Brett’s calls.
There was no apology in it. Not for the mistress. Not for the lawn. Not for any of it. Just the particular desperation of a man who’d lost the only thing he’d actually valued — which had never been me.
“You made your bed,” I told him, and closed the door before he could answer.
I heard him shouting through it for a while. It rolled off me easier than I expected.
Walter still calls every Sunday, the way he started doing after that week. The IVF conversation eventually happened too, on different terms than either of us had imagined that day on the lawn — terms that didn’t include the man who used to live in the house I still call home.
