Fathers, Brothers, and Sons

An adult stories – Fathers, Brothers, and Sons by NoTalentHack,NoTalentHack It was a letter that upended my world. Not one of the “Dear John” variety; that would have been less painful. Nor was it a “We Regret To Inform,” but the sense of loss, while not as acute, was even more all-encompassing.

No, it wasn’t a letter of the paper-and-ink kind at all. Instead, it was one of the many small sigils that make up those and many other missives, the second of the twenty-six characters that comprise the English alphabet.

The letter that irrevocably changed my life was a simple “B” where it did not belong: in a small field on a medical chart, the one that denoted the blood type of my fifteen year old son, Travis. His mother’s blood type was “O.” Mine is “A.” High school biology was a long time ago, but I recalled enough to quietly ask the nurse in the emergency room whether I had remembered correctly. The pained look on her face told me that I had even before her words confirmed it.

Something so small, and yet it made me question everything.

What had brought Travis to the emergency room was a typical childhood accident: a skateboard trick gone wrong. Even as they were putting the cast on his arm, he was laughing and talking about how “epic” it would have been if he had landed the stunt. I just chuckled and advised him to be more careful, tousling his hair. I was proud of his bravery and athleticism, even if I didn’t always understand its impetus.

That was our relationship in a nutshell. I loved him, and he loved me, I knew. But we were so different from each other. Not physically; until that errant character I barely glimpsed on the nurse’s screen, I would never have doubted he was my biological son. He was tall like me, filling out into a stocky young man like I’d been. I had thought his dark brown eyes and hair were inherited from me, as well. But they weren’t mine; they were my doppelgänger’s. They were the features of the cuckoo that had left its egg in my nest.

I always thought that our differences, psychological and emotional, were due to his mother’s influence. Allison had been impulsive– even impetuous– when we were younger. Our meeting in college had gone almost exactly against the planned events of the day. Her older brother, Jake, had introduced her to my older brother, Evan. They were best friends, both of them on the football team of our small college. Both juniors. Both star players with a chance at the big time after graduation.

Allison was a beautiful, delicate-featured, blonde and blue-eyed freshman that Jake was sure would be perfectly matched with Evan. She threw a monkeywrench into her brother’s plans when she instead took to me, the studious and introverted younger brother.

Jake took it goodnaturedly, only wanting his sister’s happiness. Evan did not; he had stolen more than one girl from me, and it was intolerable that Luke, his nerdy kid brother, would return the favor. Never mind that I hadn’t tried to steal her; she had come to me on her own. It still rankled him, and my amusement at his irritation didn’t help, either.

Why did she pick me? “Because you’re you.” It was as simple as that. She loved me for who I was, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken young man. I could be emotional, especially when surprised; my temper when my brother had stolen a girl from me the first time led to us getting into one of the few serious physical altercations we’d ever had. Evan’s athleticism might have won the day, but my rage let me get my licks in, and he was careful not to gloat the next time. His ego combined with the fact that he was my parents’ favorite, and therefore almost immune to consequences from them, meant there was a next time. Several next times, in fact.

Alli and I were well-suited to each other in so many ways. She was adventurous and outgoing, even if she often thought before she acted. I was a bit stodgy at times, making sure she kept her feet on the ground. I tried so many things in my college years that I never would have if it hadn’t been for her.

I wasn’t her first, but she was mine. Even if I hadn’t been smitten before that, I certainly would have been afterwards. But that affection was mutual; as we laid together afterwards, Alli held me close and told me over and over again how much she loved me, and how she wanted us to never part.

I had wanted that too, then.

“Dad?”

I was shaken from my reverie by Travis’s voice. “Sorry, buddy. What did you say?”

“Um… How mad was Mom?”

Still dazed by the revelation, it took a moment to understand what he was asking. “Oh, um, she was fine, Trav. She was mad at first, but when I told her what happened, that you were wearing your helmet and pads, and it was just bad luck, she calmed down. She’s just glad you’re okay.”

Thank God I had talked to her before I saw that “B.” I hadn’t been the young man with the quick temper in quite some time, but I could feel his influence on me. I wasn’t angry at Travis; what his mother had done wasn’t his fault. But I was furious with her, and I don’t know that I’d have been able to hide it at all if I could hear her voice.

Trying to keep up the charade, I changed the subject. “What do you feel like having for dinner tonight?”

He wasn’t fooled, I don’t think. Trav was so insightful. So empathetic, like his mother. Even with a broken arm, he was more concerned about me than himself. But he played along with a half-smile and said, “How about Thai?”

Travis was my only son; he was bookended in age by his older sister, Julie, at seventeen, and his younger, Megan, at eleven. As we sat at the dinner table that night, I looked between my three children and… Three? No, two, at most. I had raised him as my son, but did that make him my son? He was the son of my wife, but not mine. That made him my stepson, didn’t it? He had a father, but I had no son.

Did I have daughters? Did I have any children at all?

They looked like me just as much as Travis did. And where Travis was now so much more like his mother, they had always been similar to me. I was the primary caregiver in a lot of ways, and therefore the biggest and most constant direct influence on all three kids. Alli had traveled for her work since the kids were young, first in sales and then as a mediator, and my job hours as a contract programmer were flexible. It just made sense for me to handle the bulk of the child rearing.

The fact that the girls were so much like me didn’t come as a surprise. All the kids hand bonded with me when they were younger. We were inseparable. Megan, especially, was still that way, not yet pulling away as the tween years began. She was very much Daddy’s girl. But even Julie never split from me the way that Travis did.

I didn’t think much of it before, because that’s what teenage boys do, right? They try to find the men they want to be by pushing against and away from their dads. But Travis hadn’t even really done that. There was no rebellion; we just weren’t close, and he was so different.

Travis had never been as interested in the things that I liked as the girls were. Videogames and programming and puzzles were a passion for the three of us, but they had never been more than a pastime to him, and they were barely even that now. That distance had now been cast into a new light, one that illuminated nothing but more questions.

Everything. Everything upended.

Alli was away for a week. I wondered if I would still be sane when she returned. I wondered how much more madness was still to come.

I laid in bed that night softly crying so the kids wouldn’t hear. It was all too much. So many questions with only one certain answer: at some point in the past, my wife had fucked another man and let me raise his child. Who? Why? How could she hurt me like that? Was it still happening? Was I a father at all, or just a caretaker for another man’s children? Did she love me? Had she ever loved me, or was it all some kind of cruel ruse?

I barely slept, and when I did, indistinct nightmare images haunted me. Taunted me, with my wife’s infidelity and my foolishness. Their specifics were forgotten in the morning, but not the dread that I felt.

The kids were sent on their way to school, and I sat at my kitchen table, trying to think. It was too big. Too many different possibilities, all of them clashing together in my mind and drowning out any kind of logic I could apply with pure noise. Finally, a moment of clarity came as I remembered my training.

When a programmer can’t figure out a problem and we have no one else to talk to, we’re supposed to still discuss it out loud. The technique is sometimes called “rubber duck programming” from the typical prop that many of us use, but anything can work: an action figure, a stuffed animal, or, if nothing else is available, thin air. It was the act of talking about the problem that made us slow down and collect our thoughts. Explaining it to someone else, even an inanimate object, made us go through the issue in as logical an order as we could.

So, I talked to myself.

“Stop, Luke. Stop. It’s a problem. Just another problem. Debug it. Break it into steps.” After taking a deep breath, I began to do what I did best.

“What do I know, and know for sure?” I sighed. “That Travis isn’t my son. He looks like me, but he’s not. So what does that mean?”

After mulling that over for a few moments, I continued. “He looks like me, at least superficially. Is that useful?” Not really; I looked like a bog standard European mutt with brown hair and eyes. But then a spark ignited, albeit only a small one. “Brown hair and eyes. Dominant traits. His father didn’t have blonde hair, and he didn’t have blue or green eyes, since those are recessive traits.” High school bio to the rescue again. I was looking for someone with brown hair and brown eyes.

“What else? Allison cheated on me at least once, roughly nine months before Travis’s birth. Things weren’t great between us back then, so maybe that was the only time? No. No. Focus on what you know for now, not supposition.”

I cast my mind back; that had been a hectic time in our lives. Allison had struggled with postpartum depression for a while after Julie was born. That plus her travel and my stress and Julie being a light sleeper and a colicky little thing meant we were not at our best during that period.

Our sex lives certainly suffered. There were months during that first year after Julie was born where nothing happened in the bedroom, and others where we just got off as fast as we could. Biological needs were barely getting met, and emotional ones weren’t doing much better.

All of that got worse when her brother got ill and Alli had to split time between her work, taking care of Jake, and our home. In fact, I had been certain, until that “B,” that Travis had been conceived on a blessed weekend when the stars aligned and my parents were able to take care of Julie while Alli was in town for three days straight, when we were finally able to reconnect as a husband and wife should.

“Okay, so something in the week or two before or after that weekend. What? Anything you can think of that might help explain… oh, shit.”

Evan left town.

It was a couple months after Travis was conceived. My brother never made it to the NFL, only ever making a semi-pro team. Then he got injured, and even that last piece of his dream was taken from him. His dead end job and the way he’d fucked up his love life made him an even more miserable SOB than he’d been before. It only got worse when he looked at his nerdy younger brother and saw him with a happy life, a job he enjoyed, and a loving family.

A sudden memory of his last visit to our house before he left chilled me. Alli had been there alone, and I came home just as he was leaving. The way he acted, which felt strange even at the time, now seemed sinister with the knowledge of my wife’s infidelity: the awkward body language; the way he lit out almost as soon as I got home, like he didn’t want to be around me, even as he was supposedly dropping by to say goodbye; and most of all, the strange look on his face when he thought I wasn’t looking, a mixture of pity, smugness, and disdain.

Oh God. Had he gotten what he wanted all along? Had he finally humiliated me by taking her away? And not just her, but my son, too? Is that why he doted on Travis during family get-togethers while he all but ignored my daughters? I felt sick, and the room started to spin.

“No. Stop. Think it through. Fight the anger, and don’t jump to conclusions. What do you know, not suspect? What other options are there?”

Trying to get back into the programmer’s mindset, I looked at other possibilities. “Alli traveled all the time for work; a random stranger maybe?” I chewed on that for a bit. “Mmm, that doesn’t sound like her, but she was so impulsive when we were younger. When did that really stop?” Fifteen years was a long time, but it was such a marked change in her behavior that it almost immediately came to me. “Travis’s birth. She changed then. Or… no. Not after his birth. During her pregnancy with him.

So a fling while traveling, regretted afterwards? That would explain the explosive sex; but no, it wouldn’t, because we were always good together before the kids. A coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

“Would Alli bang a random stranger?”

Said a second time, it made even less sense. It just didn’t sound like her. She wasn’t a virgin, but she also hadn’t been promiscuous; Jake used to laugh about how hard it was for a guy to get a date with her. So probably not a random hookup.

“A co-worker?” I could think of at least two that would fit the bill, guys that looked enough like me that I could squint at Travis and see it. Couldn’t remember their names, though. “Bob…? Robert! And… and Trent.” I rolled that second name around in my mouth contemplatively. “Trent. Trent. Travis? She wouldn’t, would she? Use the first couple of letters of her lover’s name to form his son’s name as a tribute? Or a joke on her stupid clueless cuck hubby?” Another deep breath to stop myself from going on a tangent. “Stop. Stop. Who else?”

I snapped my fingers. “Jake’s doctor! What was his name? Dr… Bates? I think. Yeah. Yeah, Eric Bates. That’s… fuck, that would make a lot of sense.” The guy was irritatingly handsome, and I knew they got pretty friendly when she was taking care of Jake; the few times I was around him I was annoyed by their closeness. I didn’t like the way he looked at her, and I liked even less the way she looked at him. Before, I wouldn’t have thought of it as anything more than me being unaccountably jealous; now, I suspected more.

Shaking my head, I continued. “Don’t get stuck on one possibility. Friends?” There were a few possibilities there: Jimmy Wiliams and Alan Taylor immediately sprung to mind, a pair of pussyhounds that had always shown too much interest in Alli. Our social life suffered during that first rough year with Julie, and we didn’t hang out often then. Or mine did, at least; was Alli actually traveling all those times she told me she was? Was she going away for work? Was she actually going out of town to meet someone else? Was she–

“STOP!”

I was still drifting from what I knew to what I could guess. I had at least a half-dozen strong possibilities and at the rate I was going, I’d get to double digits quickly. This wasn’t helping.

I needed more data. And I needed… yeah. I needed someone to talk to. Talking to myself was a useful stopgap, but I needed someone to actually bounce ideas around with. However, I didn’t have anyone I could, at least not until I had ruled out some possibilities. With no idea who had done this– besides my cheating bitch of a wife– I didn’t know who I could safely talk to without alerting her.

Asking Alli would be pointless; in the years since Travis’s birth, she had been anything but impulsive. As a mediator, she’d leaned into her empathy for others and had combined it with a new self-control that meant that if she had any time to prepare at all– and possibly even if she didn’t, because she’d had more than a decade to think about how to deal with all this coming out– anything she told me would be suspect.

At the same time, if I gave her too much room to work in, and if she chose to lie to me, I was pretty sure Allison could come up with something on the spot. She was always quick-witted. I needed to narrow down the possibilities as much as I could. The fewer avenues she had to dissemble or mislead, the better my chances of getting an honest answer out of her.

There was a part of me that wondered why I even cared. She had cheated on me at least once, and without a very good reason– say, if it had been nonconsensual and she was too ashamed to tell me– there was no hope of reconciliation. But I needed to know, at the very least, whether any of the kids were mine. I couldn’t abandon them; they were innocent in all of this. I’d pay child support unless the father– or, for fuck’s sake, fathers– could be identified. They weren’t going to starve. But I wasn’t going to raise them either, pretending to be their father if I wasn’t.

That gave me the first good idea I’d had during all of this, the first real path to go down. If neither of the girls was mine, all of this was a moot point. And if they were all children of the same father, this affair had gone on for so long that I had to believe it was still ongoing. That would indicate… what? An ex-boyfriend, maybe, or something even stranger. Crueler. My brother’s face popped back into my mind, but I pushed it aside.

I had the direction I needed to start with, and I knew exactly who could help me. An old friend of mine from college had gone into biotech instead of business dev, and he’d made a pretty penny offering his services to various companies.

Tate also was never really friends with Alli. There was no animosity there, but they just never clicked. And arguably even more useful, Tate was about as gay as the day is long. There was no way that he’d ever have fucked Alli, not with a dance club’s worth of Molly and an IV of Viagra. I couldn’t see him covering for anyone, either; his own husband had cheated on him, and he had absolutely no patience for adultery. Tate was the closest thing I had to a safe bet, and a quick phone call to him confirmed he could get me tests for all of the kids with a turnaround of less than a day.

I was too frustrated to work. There are people for whom burying themselves in their jobs can help them keep their mind off of problems elsewhere, but I’ve never been one of them. There was space for a single problem at a time in my head, and while I could sometimes switch to another one if the needs were pressing enough, it was difficult. And this problem? There was nothing that was going to get my mind off of it.

The good news was that I was only in the planning stages for my most recent contract. I could afford a little slack time for now, planning to make up for it later with long hours. Or maybe not. Slippage in software development isn’t just factored in: it’s almost expected. I knew more than one guy who came through some personal crisis and made up for it on the back of caffeine, rage, and deadline anxiety. Hell, I’d been one a few times. I guessed I would be again.

The bad news was that, even with the knowledge that this was the path forward, I still could find only limited comfort in that fact. It was all so awful, and my future so murky, that I couldn’t even decide what the worst case scenario would be.

If none of them were my kids, I could walk away with little regret. I’d still try to keep in touch with them, and part of me would always love them, but I’d have no real allegiance. That might sound cold, but it was true. They would all be my stepchildren then, and how many stepdads stay in their stepkids’ lives after finding out their mom has cheated on them for over a decade?

But if one or both of the girls was mine, what then? What if Travis was my brother’s son? What if Alli had been raped and was too embarassed to tell me? Would I believe that? How could I trust anything she told me? How could I trust almost anything at all?

I sat there at my kitchen table, skipping breakfast and lunch, until it was time to pick the younger kids up from school. All I could do was obsess. I had come to no conclusions, unintentionally added about a dozen possible names to my list, and only made myself unhappier. Fuck! I wanted to strangle her.

Once the kids were home, it got easier. There was someone else that needed me to keep it together then. Three of them, actually. I wasn’t the best actor, but I relied on my affection for the kids. My love for them. Depending on how things ended up, they might be about to have the worst time of their young lives, and if I could soften the blow for them, I would

I made spaghetti. My cooking repertoire is fairly limited, but I liked cooking Italian. The kids always loved my spaghetti. After dinner, I made sure to spend extra time with them, even Travis. Especially Travis.

I felt so bad for him, maybe even worse than I felt for me. It wasn’t his fault, but he was right at the center of a storm that might destroy his family, and I knew how sensitive he could be. He’d blame himself for it, no matter what happened. He was just that kind of kid.

It was one of the things I was proudest of about him, that sense of personal responsibility, even if he did take it too far at times. He might be impulsive, but he always faced the consequences, even sometimes when they weren’t really his fault. God, what was coming would crush him.

As we spent time together, I looked at my son… stepson, really looked at him, in ways I hadn’t for a while. When someone’s close to you for so long, your brain starts to skip over little details about them: their personality quirks, their tics, the little physical aspects that start to blend into the background.

It’s easy to keep assumptions and impressions, to not question them because they’ve been with you for so long. But as I looked at Travis then, I saw more and more the ways we differed. I always thought that he had my chin and nose; maybe a little rounder, maybe not quite as defined, but that could have been down to his youth or his mother’s influence.

But now, I knew that I had no influence there at all. I could see how my belief that he was my son had made me miss the subtle differences in our features. The girls shared my chin and nose, and they were very clearly mine. But his? No. I realized for the first time that even a blending of his mother’s features and mine wouldn’t account for the differences.

There were tics I didn’t recognize, too, ones not from me or from Alli: the way one corner of his mouth quirked up more than the other when he smiled; an almost OCD-like need to do things evenly, in twos or fours or eights; his laugh, so different from ours. How much was nature? How much was nurture?

And why did some of it seem so familiar? Who did I know from the past that acted like this, that smiled like this, that laughed like this? Anyone? Or was I just driving myself mad trying to find clues that didn’t exist to solve a mystery I had no chance of figuring out?

The next morning, we went to the lab. I made up a bullshit excuse– a specialist doctor’s visit– but none of them really bought it. Julie and Megan just rolled with it, because, hey: morning off from school. But Travis definitely suspected something was up. He knew that I’d been acting differently since his accident, and while he dropped it when I told him it was just to do some followup testing– something to make sure that all of us were safe from an anomaly found during his blood test– I could tell he didn’t really buy it.

After dropping them at school, I used the rest of the day to do chores and yardwork. I didn’t need to think too hard about the work, but I could also use the exertion and the minimally necessary attention to detail to distract myself. It was certainly better than nothing. Then it was time to pick the kids up again. Time to perform my pantomime. Time to toss and turn in my bed, wondering how many more days I’d be sleeping in it.

The test answered several questions. The first, and most important one, was that Julie and Megan were mine. That was a mixed blessing; almost entirely a positive, of course, but it meant that one of the easier routes was closed off to me, the one where I washed my hands entirely of their mother and our family. That simple scenario, dark though it may have been, appealed to me in the late hours where I wanted for this to all just go away. But I’ll admit that I wept openly knowing that something in my life and marriage had been real.

The next was, honestly, a real surprise. My brother had been the frontrunner as Travis’s father in my mind; the way he’d acted before he left, how he used to steal girls from me, his anger when Allison picked me over him, and just that he was generally an asshole all pointed to him. But he wasn’t Travis’s father, nor was one of my cousins or any other member of my family. Another source of easy relief taken from me; if it had been him, I would have had so many questions answered. But instead, I was almost back at square one.

Tate was able to help me a little bit more, though. He had access to various genealogy and consumer-grade DNA databases; I didn’t ask how, and he didn’t say. We were able to strike a few people who were already in these: Robert Jenkins, Allison’s co-worker from that time; Alan Taylor, one of our creepy “friends” from our younger days; and Dr. Eric Bates, her brother’s oncologist.

That still left a lot of people, and finding out the girls were mine didn’t actually rule a longer-term affair out, either. Travis could have been an oops that she learned from, or she could simply have not cared who fathered each child, as long as I didn’t find out. Or maybe she didn’t even really worry about that. Maybe she just believed that I was trusting enough to never catch her. To be fair, she would have almost been right.

That was the most maddening thing, even more than the infidelity itself: I simply had no basis for what was real and true anymore. I believed that Allison loved me– she certainly acted like it– but I had thought that before my fateful discovery as well. Clearly, for at least a little while there, she hadn’t loved me enough to stay faithful. It had been a hard time for both of us, I know; but did that even begin to excuse it? I sure as hell didn’t feel like it did.

And she hadn’t been loving enough to fess up, either. She had to have known; once I started looking, it became obvious that Travis wasn’t mine. Did Alli lie because she didn’t love me, and she wanted to keep her happy life while she continued to cheat? Or did she lie because she did love me, wanting me to keep my happy life, to not lose it because of a one-time indiscretion that produced lifelong consequences? I just didn’t know.

There was nothing that could be taken for granted anymore; she had lied to me for at least sixteen years, since the day that Travis was conceived. That meant that any “knowledge” that I had of who my wife was simply wasn’t knowledge at all. It never had been. It had only ever been belief that Alli was who she told me she was.

Maybe that’s true for everyone, but I wanted to believe that I really knew who she was, that she was open and honest with me about everything that really mattered. I had been with her, and now that I knew that honesty hadn’t been reciprocated, the possibility that she might have lied to me about any and everything was slowly driving me mad.

My behavior became even more obsessive as the week wore on and as answers stubbornly refused to present themselves. I looked in her email accounts; we’d shared our passwords with each other for years. Nothing. My job made me far more knowledgeable about computers than Alli, so I scoured our shared home computer for any sign of hidden files, apps, folders, or strange activity. Nothing.

Our bank accounts fell under my scrutiny next as I looked for any strange transactions or cash withdrawals. Nothing. I checked her cell phone records. Nothing. The house was searched from top to bottom during the week that I awaited my wife’s return, looking for even the most circumstantial evidence of a separate life hidden from me. Nothing.

When she called during the week, I did my best to quickly hand off the phone to one of the kids. I don’t think Allison suspected anything; she didn’t know that I knew, so why would she? There was always something to do at home, and she’d praised me in the past for how hard I worked at keeping all of the balls in the air when she wasn’t there. Alli always bragged about what a great dad I was. When I thought about that after the revelation about my son… stepson, I wanted to throw everything she owned in a wood chipper. ‘What a useful little cuck he is.’ Is that what she was really saying?

Even our past was in question, all the way back to the first time we met. Why did she pick me? “Because you’re you.” It had always seemed so sweet and sincere when I’d thought about it before. Now, it carried sinister undertones. ‘Because you’re such a sucker.’ Everything she had ever done, every little glance and gesture, every phrase that could even slightly be open to interpretation, every time we’d shared anything, it was all suspect.

I was getting paranoid; no, I was paranoid. I knew that, but I couldn’t see any way out. My job– my life!– had been based around my ability to examine a problem and come to useful solutions quickly and accurately. Puzzles, mysteries, games, I loved all of them. I was great at them. And it didn’t matter a goddamned bit. This was a problem that couldn’t be solved. A puzzle missing too many pieces. A mystery with too many suspects and not enough clues.

A game that could have no real winners, but which could see me lose almost everything.

“A game.” I was talking to myself again; I had been, off and on, all week. With no one other than Tate to confide in, and not wanting to monopolize his time, rubberducking was all I had.

“I’m trying to ‘beat’ Alli, so why not think about it like a game?” She’d be home in a couple of days, and I was only the tiniest bit closer to the truth. I had eliminated a few names from the possible list of Travis’s father, but that wasn’t enough. The information was going to have to come from my wife, but any she gave me was going to be suspect; Allison had been lying for the better part of two decades, so clearly she could hide the truth from me.

“How do you beat an opponent that’s more skilled than you?” I ruminated on that one for a bit. “You make it so that they’re at a handicap. Take away any advantages. Get in their head. Blindside them. Get them on the back foot and keep them there.” Possibilities began to reveal themselves in my mind. “Thanks, me. You’ve been a great help.”

Two days later, I greeted Allison at the door, a broad grin on my face. “Hey, beautiful. How was your trip?”

She kissed me lovingly; thankfully, I’d had forty-eight hours to steel myself for it. “Oh, it was a bear. The clients were…” She shook her head, then sniffed the air and smiled. “Did you make dinner?”

“Lasagna.”

“Ooooh my god, you’re the best.” Alli looked around as if something was wrong, then realized what was off: it was too quiet. “Where are the kids?”

Taking her arm in mine, I led my wife to the dinner table, where I had laid out everything necessary for an intimate candlelit dinner. “Off at Mom and Dad’s.” As she sat, I pushed in her chair. “I thought we could use a weekend to reconnect. We’ve both been so busy lately, you know?”

Alli’s expression was the very definition of ‘gratitude.’ “Oh, Luke, really? That’s… God, I love you.”

I raised my glass in toast. “To the most wonderful, loving, loyal wife in the world. I’m so lucky to have you.”

“Mmm, I plan to show you how lucky you are later, mister.” I didn’t shudder. Barely.

Dinner was pleasant, and I did what I could to draw it out. I gave her a little too much wine, more than she would have normally drunk. Only a single glass for me, which I sipped slowly throughout the meal, alternating with water. The meal was one of her favorites, as was dessert. There was light, surface-level conversation: a little about our jobs, a little about the kids, just the everyday topics most couples discuss.

We talked about what she’d like to do with the rest of the weekend. That spurred more innuendo from her, but I simply smiled and deflected. Deep down, that hurt; I loved her, she was still so desirable, and I knew that the wonderful physical intimacy we’d had was likely in the past. But those thoughts inevitably led to the knowledge she’d been intimate with someone else, which kept me from melancholy and focused on my rage. Focused on the game.

When we finished, she started to help me clear the dishes, but I tutted, “Now, now, go have another glass of wine and relax on the couch. I’ll join you there in just a moment.”

Alli chuckled, more than a little tipsy, and said, “You know, we’re married. You don’t have to get me drunk if you want to have your way with me.”

“Ah, but what if I want you completely at my mercy?” There was just the tiniest bit of acid in my voice, but she missed it. With a kiss on the cheek, my duplicitous spouse turned and wandered off to the couch.

Once the dishes were cleared, I stood at the kitchen sink, white knuckling the edge of the countertop. The next few minutes would determine the course of the rest of my life. I wouldn’t get a second shot at this; Alli was too good at what she did, too good a salesperson before and too good a mediator now to give me a second shot at getting information she didn’t want to give up. I had to get this right.

After taking a few deep breaths, I put a charming smile on my face and moved to the living room to join her on the couch. She lounged there, well fed and comfortably inebriated but not completely drunk, waiting for me. Allison was clearly fatigued from her trip, but also in a playful mood. “Hey, handsome. Wanna make out? I don’t think anyone’s gonna be home for a while.”

“That is quite the tempting offer, sweetheart. Maybe later? I wanted to ask you something first.”

“Oh?” Her eyebrows arched gently, a friendly, inquisitive expression on her face.

“Who is Travis’s father?”

That friendly expression fractured, then froze. “What?”

I maintained the same gentle manner but put just the hint of an edge in my voice. “Travis’s father. You know, the man you cheated on me with? The man whose child I’ve raised for fifteen years?”

Alli went as pale as a sheet. “Oh no. No, oh no, oh god, oh no!” She looked sick as she pushed her way off the couch and ran to the guest bathroom. I followed, only a few steps behind, and found her on her knees, throwing up in the toilet.

Standing in the doorway, I waited for her retching to stop. When it did, I said, “I’m still waiting for an answer.”

She gasped, “Just give a minute to–”

“No! You’ve had sixteen fucking years to lie to me, and I’m not giving you a chance to think up yet another one now!”

Alli nodded, nausea barely held in check. “Okay. Okay.” She stood up and turned towards me. “I’m sorry, Luke. I’m so sorry. I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

Any pretense at friendliness was gone now, leaving only ice in my voice. “Your promises don’t mean a damned thing to me now, Allison.”

She was very visibly hurt. Too fucking bad. “Can I change? I’ve got vomit on my–”

“Then take your shirt off and rinse your mouth out! That’s all the time you get. If you’re in here for more than another minute, I’m walking out the door and telling Travis I’m not his father.”

“No! Please, no!” She was terrified. There was a part of me that felt bad for that, the one had always comforted her when she needed it. Another felt some guilt at what I knew was an empty threat; how strange that I should be ashamed at this bit of trickery when she’d deceived me for so long. But the bulk of my feelings on the matter were a certain sadistic satisfaction: I’d suffered for a week, and now she could feel a fraction of the pain and fear I had.

“Hurry the fuck up. I’ll be on the couch.” I made a show of starting the timer on my phone before stalking off.

With seconds to spare, Alli was back in the living room, shamefaced and shirtless. The sight of my wife in only a bra and skirt made me feel an unexpected pang; she was such a beautiful woman, and a week before I would have already started stripping the rest of her clothes to reach the splendor concealed beneath. There was still an attraction, and I couldn’t deny it; but the loathing and anger I felt prevented any biological reaction that gave away my still-felt lust for the woman I’d shared so much of my life with.

I sneered without meaning to at that thought; yes, I’d shared my life with her, but it hadn’t been reciprocal, had it? Alli halted in mid-stride when she saw my expression, but I got myself under control. My wife– my opponent– took up a position on the far end of the couch from me. Then she sat silently before I snarled, “Well?”

After taking a deep breath, she began to speak. “Please, Luke. It was one time, it was a horrible choice at one of the worst times in my life– our lives– and I’m so ashamed of what I did. It’s in the past, and–”

“No it isn’t, goddamn you!” I exploded, the rage that had been bottled up during the week– hidden from my children, hidden from our friends, hidden from her– finally coming unstoppered and soaking her in venom. “It’s something that’s still happening, something that I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my fucking life!”

“I realize–”

“NO, YOU FUCKING DON’T! Stop using your goddamned mediator voice on me! Stop trying to ‘be reasonable’ and ‘find middle ground’ and ‘get me to see it from the other guy’s point of view’ and tell me who. You. FUCKED!”

Alli flinched away, afraid of me for the first time in our lives together. She should have been; it shames me to say this, but I was so enraged that even I was afraid I might hurt her. I took a long, shaky breath and hissed, “Who.”

She looked at her hands for a moment, then back up at me; there were tears in her eyes. Her mouth opened, but no sound came at first, the lips opening and closing in mute pain. My wife closed her eyes and swallowed, then opened them again as glittering rivulets cascaded down her cheeks. “Jake.”

Jake? Not– no. “Jake who?”

Alli turned her face away, unable to meet my gaze. “Jake.”

“Your brother?” … Stepbrother.

When someone’s close to you for so long, your brain starts to skip over little details about them.

I knew the story, of course. I learned it before I’d even met Alli, when Evan was gushing about his new best buddy on the football team during the Thanksgiving break of his freshman year. More details were filled in when I met Jake and then, later, when I met Alli: how Jake’s mom had abandoned his dad when he was a child; how Alli’s dad had died unexpectedly; how their parents fell in love with each other; how, only a year into their marriage, they were killed in a car accident; how, even though Jake barely knew Alli, he still took her in as his ward, using his modest inheritance to make sure she would be taken care of and able to attend college.

Jake treated Alli better than her own blood relatives. He wasn’t her stepbrother; he was her brother. That’s how she always referred to him. That’s how I always thought of him. But he wasn’t, anymore than Travis was my son. That little “step” that I’d forgotten, the detail my brain had skipped over as unimportant background noise, had been the most important detail of all.

Neither of us spoke, until I could finally ask, in a raspy voice filled with unimaginable pain at the magnitude of her betrayal, “Why?”

Her gaze remained steadfastly away from mine. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Luke. I… He was dying. And I was so… the depression, it was crushing me. I couldn’t be home with Julie. I couldn’t be home with you. And every time I was there, I felt… disconnected. I felt guilty for not being home, and then when I was home, I felt guilty for not feeling– not feeling the connection that you and I had before she was born. And then, and then not feeling the connection with Julie.

“And Jake… I loved him. I’d always loved him. He was my first love, I–”

“What?!”

She glanced at me for just a moment, the fear back in her eyes, then looked away again. “Jake was handsome and kind. He saved me when mom died. And I was a teenaged girl when we first met; I was fourteen and he was seventeen, a quarterback headed for what everyone was sure would be a college and then pro career. And he was so sweet to me; not in a romantic way, but just as a good person. I was… well, I was just a girl, and I developed a crush on him, and then when our parents died, he was all I had left. I fell in love with him.”

I was going to be sick. “And you and he…?”

“No!” Alli’s gaze snapped instantly back to me, alarm on her face. “No, not at all. I told him, and he responded like… well, like a grownup would. He was flattered, but he encouraged me to find someone else. Someone more appropriate. It hurt, but I knew, later on, that he was right. There was never… he and I were just brother and sister. Nothing more than that. Not until… until later.”

She sighed. “He gave up so much for me, Luke. He always supported me, financially and emotionally.” Her hand started to reach out for me, but then stopped and withdrew; my disgusted expression made it clear that her touch was the last thing I wanted. Quietly, Alli said, “He introduced me to you. That… More than anything, that was the best thing he ever did for me. He was my first love, but you are the love of my life.”

There was nothing but rancor in my voice. “Funny fucking way to show it.”

Tears dripped onto her skirt as she looked down. “I know. I’m so sorry. I can’t… There are no words that can tell you how sorry I am for hurting you.”

I scoffed, “Whatever. So you fucking loved him, but you married me, the–” My voice turned mocking and sing-song. “–‘love of your life,’ and then what? Decided, what, you’d get one fuck in with the first guy that got your panties moist before he shuffled off this mortal coil? Had to find out what you missed out on by marrying your stupid loving nerd husband?”

Her shoulders were drawn in as she sobbed, “No! It wasn’t like… That wasn’t what happened. He…” She looked up at me, experimentally, as if gauging my anger. “You remember how disappointed he was when he didn’t make the NFL. Jake didn’t take it as badly as Evan did, but it still hurt. But he picked himself up and went on. Started his business, got engaged to Jennifer, and… well, you remember.”

Alli swallowed. “Then the cancer came, and his business failed, because he wasn’t able to take care of it. And then that fucking bitch left him because she couldn’t deal; that was what really killed him, I think.

“He was so… just destroyed by that. Evan had moved away, we had moved away, he had no other close relatives, and then she just walked out the door. He was so alone. And– and you remember how Jake was. How he had wanted so badly to leave some kind of a legacy, even at that age. And he was going to have nothing to show except…”

She looked away. “I was in an especially bad place that visit. You and I had been fighting, and Julie acted like I was some stranger whenever I came home, and I was deep in my depression, and work was…” Alli shook her head. “When Jake started to cry one night, after he’d had something to drink– too much to drink– and talked about how he’d never have kids of his own, how he’d never leave anything behind… Well, I’d been drinking a lot, too. And I just…”

Her voice was tight, like she was only barely able to speak, like she had to force herself to. “It made perfect sense to my drunken, depressed mind. I couldn’t save him, like he had done for me. He had given me everything: a home, an education…”

Alli completely faltered for a moment, before quietly, mournfully saying, “… My husband.” Then she pushed on again, as if she needed to finally be free of her secret. “And I’d been able to do almost nothing for him but sit and watch as he died. But I could give him just a legacy, a child of his own.”

I shouted, “You did this on purpose!?”

Alli flinched away, but looked straight at me. “That’s how it started, yes. I’m so sorry, Luke; it made sense at the time, if only for that night. But then I woke up the next morning, sober and hungover, and by the light of day I realized how insane the idea was. And Jake was ashamed, too, that he’d betrayed you like that. You two were never as close as him and Evan, but I know he loved you, and–”

“Oh, fucking clearly! He fucked my wife, and he never said anything about it, and– ”

In almost a whisper, Allison said, “I told him you were okay with it.”

“WHAT?!”

She closed her eyes, whether because she couldn’t stand the pain she was inflicting by saying that or she couldn’t bear the shame of looking at me, I’ve never been certain. “I told him that, after he slept, I called you and confessed. Told him that you were so, so angry, but that you ultimately understood it was just a drunken mistake, and that if I got pregnant, you’d still take care of his child.”

“You. Fucking. BITCH!”

Eyes screwed tighter than ever, Alli responded, “Yes. I am. I know I am. I’m so sorry.” She swallowed again and continued. “I told him that you only requested that he never mention it to anyone, including you. And then I told him that I was going to go home and make it up to you; he understood what I meant by that, that if I did get pregnant, it could be either his or yours. He understood why I needed to do that.”

“I sure as shit don’t.”

Allison picked her words carefully, eying me as she did so. “It was, for him, a respect thing. He respected that you’d given him one more chance at his legacy. For me, it was a panicked, desperate hope that I wasn’t already pregnant and that I could give you another child instead.

“I was so completely despondent, out of my mind with PPD and guilt over what I’d done and panic at what could happen if you found out. The idea of taking Plan B didn’t even occur to me until after you and I had our three day weekend. And then… and then I hoped that you had gotten me pregnant. But if you had– and I hoped so much that you had!– I couldn’t take Plan B. There was no way I could take a chance that I’d get rid of your child. I was stuck.”

My head was killing me, and I began to rub my temples. Alli continued softly, “When I went back to see Jake again, I had a nervous breakdown in the hallway of his treatment center. His doctor– do you remember Dr. Bates?”

I let out a short, sharp laugh. “Yeah. He was one of my suspects.”

There was the ghost of a smile on her face after I said that, the kind that one has when they know they shouldn’t smile because of the gravity of a situation, but can’t help anyways. “Eric was gay.”

So much for the great detective. “Anyways. Breakdown?”

She nodded, smile gone again. “I… honestly, I was so despondent over what I’d done that I considered killing myself. I was a terrible wife and mother and sister and…” Alli sighed, “Eric saw me crying and took me into his office.

“Dr. Bates was… he was always very kind. Great bedside manner. And I told him about… well, about everything except what I’d done that night, and he referred me to a specialist in postpartum depression. She referred me to one in our city, and that’s how I started meeting with Dr. Brandt.”

I vaguely remembered her therapist. We’d met a couple of times to talk about how I could support Alli through her PPD. “Support her.” What a joke. What support did I get? I’d supported her as best I could, and this is how she… Wait.

I felt a sudden shiver. “Did she know what you did?”

Alli turned her face away once more and nodded. “She did. We talked about how to handle it, about how you’d respond, how it would affect my recovery, about… about a lot of things. She advised me to tell you, but I knew…” A quick glance at me, then away. “I knew you’d never forgive me. If I told you, it would have destroyed you and our marriage and our family. And… and at that point, I didn’t know that Travis was Jake’s biological son. I still wanted to believe he was yours.”

My eyes narrowed. “Wanted to believe, or did believe?”

Her shoulders rose and fell in a tired shrug. “I don’t know. Believed for… for a while. Until after I stopped seeing Anne– Dr. Brandt. The odds were in my favor, you know? That weekend we got back together, you came in me like a dozen times, remember?”

I did. It had been a great weekend. But now I knew that it was driven by her guilt, and that it hadn’t been the occasion of Travis’s conception. Instead, those three days were a desperate and failed attempt to paper over her infidelity. That fact made me look back at our time together during that “great” weekend in a new and entirely unfavorable light.

“When did you know that he wasn’t my son?”

Alli’s brows knit together, and that fucking oh-so-reasonable, we-can-find-a-solution mediator voice returned. “He is your son, Luke. He’s– ”

“Stop! Stop trying to make this better, Alli! You can’t. He’s not my son. I raised him, but he’s your son, not mine.”

“Of course he is!”

“Bullshit. He’s my stepson.”

She gasped, “You can’t mean that!”

My lip curled. “Yes, I do! Biologically, he’s my wife’s son but not mine. That, by definition, makes him my stepson. I didn’t adopt him; you just tricked me into believing I was his father. Travis. Is. Not. My. Son. I’ve treated him that way because I believed he was, but that doesn’t make it true. And, yeah, maybe my name is on the birth certificate, but I can have that changed.”

Alli started to cry again. “Please, Luke. Please don’t do that. Please, I’m begging you.”

I just rolled my eyes. “He’s going to find out eventually.”

“Why?” It came out as a strangled cry.

“For fuck’s sake, Alli! Why do you think? I’m not just going to… God, did you think I’d find out and go, ‘Welp, guess I’m just a cuck, gonna keep on cuckin’ on. Herp derp, guess I’ll just keep raising someone else’s son! Yup, I should just keep the bitch’s secret and hope she appreciates it! Maybe she won’t fuck anyone else if I’m nice about it!'”

She shouted, “I’ve never fucked anyone else! I messed up! I know that! But don’t take it out on him just because I hurt you!”

I shouted right back. “And when we get divorced, Alli, what are you going to tell him?! What about the rest of the kids?! Am I going to be the bad guy? Are we getting divorced because we ‘drifted apart’ and I wouldn’t try to keep us together? Will that be your story?”

“Luke, please! I don’t want to get divorced! I want to be with you for the rest of my life!”

“And I wanted to have a faithful wife and a son, and now I have neither.”

“But you do! I’m sorry, Luke, I made a mistake, but I’ve never–!”

“I don’t know that! I CAN’T know that!” I was on my feet, roaring at her as she cowered. “You fucked another man! Even if you’ve been faithful since then, so what? If I had gone out and fucked another woman when you were so depressed that you barely let me touch you for a year, would you consider me faithful? Huh?! We both know you wouldn’t!

“And I don’t know that you haven’t cheated since! You’ve been lying to me about one thing for sixteen years, how do I know you haven’t had a string of lovers since then? How do I know you haven’t picked a guy up in a hotel bar every time you’ve traveled and fucked him while laughing about your poor, stupid, loyal cuck husband back at home? I don’t!”

She sobbed, “I would never do that to you!”

“But I. Can’t. Know. THAT!” My body shook with fury and sorrow. “I can’t even believe that you wouldn’t! Belief requires trust, and I don’t trust you anymore! So, no, I don’t have a faithful wife. And I don’t have a son, either! Just a stepson. Just this…”

I balled up my fists and hissed through gritted teeth, “Just this goddamned living, breathing monument to your infidelity! Every time I look at him there’s this… this thing that used to be my son, but now he isn’t, and he can’t ever be. And it’s not his fucking fault, or mine, so that only leaves you! You fucking took him from me, and I hate you!

“You stole my son, even my chance at having a son from me, Alli! YOU did that! I wanted a son and a daughter, and you’ve given me a stepson and two daugh–”

A puzzle piece slammed into place with a sickening thud, and I suddenly felt cold and sick as I whispered, “Megan was supposed to be my son.”

My darling wife, the woman who’d invited another man to cuckold me, was once more unable to meet my gaze. I continued, voice sounding as dead as I felt inside. “Travis was three. You realized then, didn’t you? That he wasn’t mine. You didn’t just want one more child like you’d said; you realized you’d stolen my chance at having a son, and you couldn’t stand the guilt.”

Another unhappy nod from her– such a worthless gesture of remorse– made me seethe, “And so you thought, what, you’d give me one more shot? Maybe the cuck would win the coin flip this time? Did you give me even that much of a chance, or did you go find some other poor doomed loser to fuck first? Maybe Evan?”

“How dare you!” She was on her feet now, too, shouting as I had been. “I love you! Fucking Jake is the biggest regret of my life. I never cheated on you before that, and I have never, ever cheated on you since then! I will never cheat on you again! And even if you were dead and gone, I’d never have a damned thing to do with your brother!”

Another puzzle piece clicked, and a new, painful fragment of knowledge revealed itself to me. “… Except share a secret with him. Right?”

Her face fell, and her body soon followed, slumping back down onto the edge of the couch. “I didn’t tell him. I promise.” She saw me start to speak and glumly headed me off. “Jake told him, I think. I don’t know for sure; he’s never come right out and said it, but he’s given… hints, I guess, that he knew. ‘Do you think he’ll be as athletic as his dad?’ ‘I wonder where he got that throwing arm from?’ Never… never an outright accusation. Just a little bit of cruelty. I don’t know why, just…” She chuckled humorlessly. “Evan’s always been a dick. I don’t know why Jake thought I’d like him.”

“Maybe he thought you deserved each other.” Alli didn’t rise to the insult; I think she’d lost any will to defend herself. Perhaps she even agreed, now that it was all in the open.

My adrenaline ran out. Not my rage; there was still plenty to be angry about, and plenty to be decided, but I suddenly couldn’t sustain the necessary energy. The magnitude of what had been done to me finally hit, and it was just too much. I flopped down on the couch even as my mind kept reeling at everything I’d learned. What Alli had done, of course, and Jake, and that whole fucking mess. But my brother… yeah, he was an asshole, but to know and not say anything? Why?

And… God, I’d planned for so many eventualities, but not this one. Travis was going to have to know eventually, but how was I supposed to tell him? “Oh, your dad is actually your uncle, but don’t worry. He’s really your step-uncle, so you’re only morally the product of incest, not legally. Lucky you, champ!”

If I divorced Allison, it was all going to come out eventually, and probably in the worst way possible. We could try to hide it, but “we just grew apart” is something parents with kids in college can get away with, not ones that have a kid just barely out of grade school. Especially not ones that until a week previous had been so happy with each other that their kids pointed at their marriage as better than any of their friends’ parents’.

The inevitable “why” reaction to a sudden divorce would be followed by either another blatant lie to cover up for Alli or the awful truth. And that would have killed Travis. Maybe literally; he was so sensitive. God, I couldn’t stand it if he hurt himself– or worse– because of this.

There was no way that we could tell him, “We’re splitting up because your mom cheated on me, and you’re not my biological son, and I can’t trust her anymore,” without him hearing it as, “We’re getting divorced because of you,” no matter how good a headshrinker we got him. Not at fifteen years old. And that was without “oh, and you’re the product of pseudo-incest with your dead step-uncle.” Maybe, maybe he’d be able to handle learning this when he was old enough for college. Maybe.

Megan was just old enough to kind of understand divorce, but she’d want to know who was to blame. At that age, that’s just how they think. Tweens have no real capacity for nuance, and she’d want to pick a side. It would almost certainly be mine, but when she found out the truth about Travis? She definitely wouldn’t be on his side, at all. Eventually, she’d “forgive” him, but the fact that she’d see it as something she needed to forgive him for… yeah, that was going to turn nasty. Maybe enough to irrevocably damage their relationship.

Julie, well, she was old enough that she’d be in college soon, and old enough to get pretty much everything. Probably wouldn’t even be mad at Travis, just try to comfort him and assure him that none of it was his fault. That was about the only bright spot out of all of it; I was sure she’d be able to handle it. Her age and maturity meant that… meant that…

Damn it.

Damn it damn it damn it–

“DAMN IT!” Alli jumped at my sudden shout. I stood, furious again, realizing that I’d stumbled onto what I was going to have to do for my family and hating it. I guess there was a little adrenaline left after all, because I was shaking with rage once more.

As I stalked to the door and grabbed my keys and wallet from the tray next to it, Alli trailed behind, asking all sorts of stupid questions. I finally wheeled around and growled, “I’m going out. We’ll talk tomorrow. Don’t be in my fucking bed when I get home.” And then I was gone.

She texted me, of course. Ping after ping after goddamned ping chimed on my phone. She tried to call, and I let it go to voicemail over and over. I almost threw the damn thing out the window, but instead simply silenced it and drove. Thank God I’d only had the one glass of wine, and that it had burned off by then; my driving was already impaired enough by the tears blurring my vision.

I didn’t drive anywhere specific, just making circuits around town and out into the surrounding countryside. I was reminded of Travis when he was a baby, how he couldn’t sleep and how I’d drive him around for hours while singing lullabies. That way Alli could get some rest in between the nightly cluster feedings when he was… God, when he was so tiny. I had loved him so much. Still loved him. Loved all of my kids.

That was when I couldn’t drive anymore, when I had to pull into a parking lot to break down and cry. It wasn’t fucking fair. I’d been a good husband and father. I’d done everything I was supposed to, I’d seen her through her fucking depression and her brother’s death and I raised our kids while she traveled and it just wasn’t fair it wasn’t fair it wasn’t goddamned fair!

Of course it wasn’t. Life’s not fair. For a while, though, it had been good, and now all of that was tainted by what she’d done and how she’d hidden it from me.

But I loved my kids, and I was going to do what was best for them.

I let myself cry for a good, long time. I mourned my marriage and the notion of my son. I mourned the happy times that had been built on lies and the future that I wouldn’t have. I mourned a family that would split– that had split– but which, for now, I’d pretend was still as happy and healthy as ever for the sake of my children. For Megan and for Julie. And, yes, for Travis.

And when the tears were gone, at least for the moment, I pulled back onto the road and headed home.

The house was dark when I got there, but only superficially quiet. From the outside, I heard nothing, but as I opened the door and headed for my bedroom, there were soft sobs coming from Julie’s room. At least Alli had fucking listened to me enough to let me sleep by myself.

And sleep I did. For the first time in a week, I was out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. Part of it was exhaustion from the expended adrenaline and shed tears, some of it was finally getting to vent at someone, but mostly it was that I now had a real path forward, even if it wasn’t one I was happy about.

The next morning, Alli was up before me. By the look of her, the puffy red eyes and disheveled hair, I’m not sure she actually slept. I told myself that I didn’t give a fuck one way or another, but secretly I was happy. ‘Shoe’s on the other foot now, bitch. How does it feel having someone else decide your fate?’ Petty thoughts, but I felt entitled to them.

There was coffee and breakfast. I didn’t trust Alli as far as I could throw her, but I trusted her enough to not poison me, so I pulled up a chair to drink and eat in silence. She picked at her food; it was clear that this was for me more than her. Or maybe it was for her, in that it was an olive branch to me, which… ‘No. Stop,’ I told myself. ‘It doesn’t matter why she did it anymore. Her motives don’t matter, just her actions.’

After I’d eaten and drunk enough, I said, matter-of-factly, “Here’s what’s going to happen.” Allison looked startled; our marriage had always been a partnership, one where we had a dialogue and decided on important matters together. That was over, and she was going to have to get used to it. This was the fucking “Luke Takes Care Of His Family Show” now.

“We’re not getting divorced–” Her shoulders sagged with relief. ” –yet.” The tension returned, and Alli opened her mouth to speak, but I stepped on the words. “We are going to get divorced eventually, but I’m not going to have your infidelity and your lies hurt the kids. When they’re old enough, when Megan is in college, we’re going to split up.”

“But I don’t want that!”

I banged the table with my fist. “I don’t give a FUCK what you want! I didn’t want any of this, but I’ve got to deal with it, and now you do, too. Actually deal with it! Not just fucking lie to everyone and hope you get away with it!”

Alli frowned but stayed silent, so I continued. “We’re going to pretend that we’re still the happy couple. You’ve pulled it off for long enough–”

“I wasn’t pretending! I love you!”

“– long enough that you should be able to handle it. I’m going to have to work at it, though, because lying to my family hasn’t been an every-fucking-day thing for me. So you get to cover for me, too. Get used to phrases like, ‘Dad’s just stressed from work.’ You’re going to need them.”

After another sip of coffee, I said, “We’re going to share the same bedroom until Julie goes to school, and then we’ll reevaluate. If I can’t stand being around you, you’ll move to her bedroom because… whatever fucking reason. Come up with something that makes neither of us look bad. You snore or you’ve got restless legs now or something. Not ‘Dad wants to throw up everytime he looks at mom.’ You know, a lie. You’re the expert there.”

Alli flinched at that, but so what? She deserved it. “There are going to be some other changes, too. You don’t need to know what, exactly, or why, but I expect you to roll with them. I’m going to be spending more time out of the house; that’s all you need to know for now. And I’m opening my own bank account. My paychecks will go there, and I’ll deposit the appropriate amounts to our joint one.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “See point fucking one: ‘You don’t need to know.’ I want to separate our finances, and this is the first step. I want to do it because I want to fucking do it, and that’s all you get until I decide otherwise. You’ve kept your fucking secrets for long enough; mine are at least out in the open. You know they exist.”

Alli looked at her hands. “It doesn’t need to be like this. I love you. I’ll do anything to make this up to you, Luke.”

I snorted, “There is no ‘making this up to me,’ Alli. You lied to me for sixteen years, you fucked your brother, you had his kid, and…” The anger was building again, but I needed to get through this. It was good practice for when the kids were back.

With a deep sigh, I continued. “…and, Jesus, Alli. I got a vasectomy after Megan. You encouraged me to after I brought it up! Even though you knew I didn’t have a son of my own. You made sure I couldn’t ever have one, whether that was your intent or not. How fucking evil is that?

“There’s part of me that says I should divorce you right now and sue you for fraud. But what would be the point? I ruin the kids’ lives like you ruined mine? They don’t deserve that anymore than I did.

“No, there’s no making it up, Alli. I mean, even if we divorced right now, and you gave me 100% of what we own and full custody of the kids, I’d still have to hold Travis together when he learned what you did, and –”

“Why?! Why do we need to tell him? He could go his whole life and never learn that…” She sighed. “He loves you so much. You say that he’s not your son, but you are absolutely his father. Why would you take that away from him?”

My fists clenched and unclenched. “I didn’t take a goddamned thing away from him, Alli. You did, just like you took him from me.”

Alli looked at me imploringly. “I know that, and I’m so sorry that I hurt you like that. But why hurt him?”

“Are you serious? You think that’s why I’d tell him? To hurt him, or even to hurt you?” I shook my head in disgust. “God, if you do… just, honestly, I don’t know what to say.”

“Then why?”

“Because he needs to know, Alli. Not because of my pride or ego or whatever, but because…” God, I’d only known he wasn’t my son for a week, and who his father was for two days. How could she possibly have not thought this through? But maybe that’s how she did manage to lie to me, by thinking about the consequences of what she’d done as little as possible.

Closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead with one hand, I said, “Think, Alli. Think. His father died of cancer in his twenties. Who knows what else is in his family tree, in terms of his medical history? Parkinsons? MS? What else? At the very least, he needs to get genetic testing to find out what he’s at risk for, and what he might put his kids at risk for.”

She started to raise an objection, but I ignored her. “Yes, we could do that anyways, without need for a paternity check. Did do it, actually; I had all three of the kids tested to see if they were mine. Oh, spare me the hurt look.”

“But even with that, every time I look it turns out something new has a genetic component. He needs to be able to give a family history, which he can’t right now. Or, rather, he can, but it’s going to be wrong. So for health reasons alone, he needs to know eventually.

“And then beyond that, there’s Jake’s mom. She abandoned him, right? When he was pretty young?”

“Yeah. Five.”

“So, she was pretty young, too. What do you think the odds are that she remarried? That she has kids out there? Grandkids? Ever heard of ‘genetic sexual attraction,’ how family members can be intensely attracted to each other if they don’t know that they’re related, like, say, if they’re the bastard child of an abandoned son? What happens when he runs into a girl at college that–”

Alli scoffed, “Oh come on! How likely is that?”

With a shrug, I admitted, “Not very. But possible. And I’ll tell you what is likely: a few years down the road, he gets curious, or his wife does, or one of our other kids does, and he decides to get one of those genetic ancestry kits. Hey, maybe he gets one for Julie and Megan, too. What then? Do you want him to be surprised like I was? To feel betrayed and lied to by both of us?

“Or what if it doesn’t happen in a couple of years? What if it’s in forty years, after you and I are dead and he wants to learn more about his family? Maybe find out about his dead grandpa and grandma that he never got to meet, and he learns that I’m not his father then? So he’s left wondering–”

“I get it! I get it!” She sighed, “I just didn’t… I hoped it would never come up. I don’t know. It’s not… I did my best to not think about this. To me… to me, he was your son, even if… regardless of what I had done.”

I sighed again, already exhausted at nine in the morning. I didn’t want to explain all of this to her. I shouldn’t have to clean up a mess she’d made. Because of her irresponsibility, I had to not just get through my pain but prevent her son’s, too.

“But he’s not my son. And that’s got repercussions beyond what happens to you and me when the kids are in college. Even beyond the heartbreak the kids are going to have at us splitting up.”

Alli sat quietly for a while, head bowed. When she looked back up, her eyes were wet. Quietly, she said, “I know you think there’s no hope for us, Luke. But I’m going to do everything I can to show you that I love you and that you can trust me. I will do anything to find a way back to us. I made a horrible mistake, and I lied about it because I didn’t see another way out. But you know everything now, and I’m going to–”

“Save it.” I stood up. “I know exactly three things right now: I have two daughters that are mine, I love my kids, and there’s not a chance in hell things will ever be the same between us. I have to assume anything else I thought I knew is a lie.” And with that, I left for the rest of the day.

I drove again for a while, but eventually my thoughts were too much of a distraction. For lunch, I stopped at a diner and ended up staying there for hours; the waitress got a very, very nice tip. Plans for my future twisted in amongst recollections of the past, now newly illuminated in the sickly light of Alli’s confession.

My brother’s actions and attitudes towards me over the last decade and a half suddenly made a lot more sense. Evan wasn’t just being a dick: he was laughing at me behind my back. I needed to have an in-person chat with that asshole, but it would have to wait. He was three states away, I had to work, and he was still such a testosterone-addled manchild that the chance of us, two grown-ass men, coming to blows was pretty damn near one hundred percent. Either he’d take a swing at me, or he’d needle me until I took one at him, and I needed to be ready for that. But there would be a reckoning, one way or another.

My last meeting with Jake pushed its way to the fore next. To be more specific, something he said finally made sense. I remembered him affectionately patting my hand and saying, “Thank you for taking care of her. Of them.” At the time, I thought it was merely odd phrasing, possibly due to the pain meds, but knowing what I knew now– or at least what Alli had told me, assuming it was true– he didn’t mean “Alli and your family,” or at least not primarily. He meant “Alli and my unborn child.”

But there was no malice in his eyes, no air of either superiority or of guilt. He really thought that we were okay. On one level that pissed me off; we most definitely were not. On another, he was a dying man who thought I’d let him have a chance at his last wish. Part of me hated him, but not as much as I thought, and it was relatively easy for me to push that anger aside. He was dead and gone, beyond any judgment I could mete out.

No, my rancor was reserved for my loving wife. “Loving.” That’s what hurt worst of all: I still loved her, or at least the person I had believed she was. I wanted to believe that she loved me, that she had made a horrible mistake that she kept compounding with lies until it finally blew up in her face. But I didn’t know if that was true, and I could never know. No matter what happened in our future, for however long we were together before Megan left home, I would never know. And that made me doubt everything she had ever told me, up to and including her confession.

“Trust but verify” goes the adage. But I didn’t trust. I couldn’t verify. Jake was dead, and he had no living relatives that I could contact for a DNA sample. Maybe the story about Jake was bullshit, and Alli had fucked some stranger; what she told me made a perverse sort of sense, and all of the pieces fit, but she’d had sixteen years to come up with a convincing lie. Even if she was telling the truth, I couldn’t really know. I’d never know.

I could talk to Alli’s psychologist, but I had no idea what the ethics were on lying for a former patient, or even if Dr. Brandt would stick to those ethics; they were just guidelines, after all. I knew that her first loyalty would be, or at least should be, to the health and safety of her patient. Evan probably knew at least part of the truth, but he was enough of a dick to lie just because he thought it would be fun to tie me up in knots.

No, there was no way to verify, and given that my wife lied to me with a straight face for so long, no reason to trust. I had to plan for a future by and for myself. For my kids, too, of course, but I had no idea how all of that was going to shake out; yeah, the girls were closer to me and Travis was closer to his mom, but who knew how that would shift over the seven years before Megan turned eighteen?

As adolescence hit, would Megan suddenly turn to Alli for discussions that only a mother and daughter could have, and would that destroy my bond with my youngest? Would Julie find someone to love and marry, then decide that what Alli had done was wrong but acceptable in the interests of keeping a family together? Hell, would Travis suddenly hate me when he learned the reason we’d always been so different? Or would he hate his mom for lying to all of us? Or would it be both, and he’d turn his back on his family?

No, I couldn’t plan that far out. I would show all of my kids I loved them, and I would be there for them in every way that I could. But I needed to start separating my life from Alli’s. The bank account would be the first step, but it would be far from the last. With cup after cup of cheap coffee, I added to my to-do list, action items that would bring me closer to a life independent of the one person I’d once promised to devote the rest of my life to. The one who had failed to hold herself to that promise long ago.

When I finally arrived home, Alli had cleaned up. My wife looked less haggard, but no less unhappy. When she tried to talk, I just shut her down; I’d need to practice civility and even false warmth with her, but we had another day before we were supposed to pick the kids up. I wanted to wallow a little longer. Let her twist in the wind just a bit more.

When I headed for bed that night, she followed along but then waited in the doorway, like a vampire waiting for an invitation. After regarding her like a particularly bothersome insect for a time, I nodded, then turned to get ready for bed. Her smile was hopeful, but I dashed that hope pretty quickly, turning away from her in bed without a word, much less a kiss. I drifted off to the sounds of my wife quietly crying.

Breakfast the next day was pleasant enough; she had cooked again, and I ate in silence. There was tension, but I was able to get through it without glaring and she without cringing. Baby steps. When it was done, I thanked her, and she acted as though I’d given her the highest praise possible. That was when I put my hand up. “Stop.”

“What?”

I sighed. “I’m going to help you keep your secret for a while longer. We’ll live in this… charade of a marriage for as long as necessary to keep our kids safe and happy.” She frowned but stayed silent. “But that’s not going to work if you can’t keep bullshitting at least as well as you did before I found out your dirty little secret. None of this over-the-top fawning nonsense. Do you understand?”

Alli bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I just… I already miss us. Miss what we were like before you knew, and I just…” She looked up at me, sadness etched on her face. “I just… I meant what I said. I’ll do anything to get us back. Anything.”

With a shrug, I said, “I don’t see how you could. But this? The ‘I’m not worthy’ crap? I don’t believe it, and it pisses me off. And what’s more, the kids are going to realize something is wrong. The only reason I’m willing to even try to stay together is for them, but this bullshit? They’re going to twig to the fact that something is off, and that it’s something that you did, real damned quick. So knock it off.”

Nodding, she said, “Okay. Okay.” Then, quietly, “Thank you.”

“Whatever. I’m not doing it for you.” Then I smiled, as if nothing had ever been wrong at all and said, “What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”

We playacted for a while. Not in a rehearsed or planned sort of way, but merely me pretending that she hadn’t stabbed me in the heart and her pretending that she didn’t feel deep shame for her actions. Well, I was pretending. Maybe her guilty expressions and crying were the pretense; how the fuck would I know?

By the time we picked the kids up, we didn’t seem normal, but we also didn’t seem wholly abnormal, either. Travis seemed to sense something was up. He was already on edge from how I’d acted during the week previous, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. But when we got home and I gave Alli a toe-curling kiss to the sounds of gagging by our youngest, I was confident that we could keep up the illusion as much as was necessary.

Practice makes perfect, as they say. By the end of that first month, only the keenest-eyed observer would notice the occasional hateful glare or despondent gaze passing between us. The kids were off in their own worlds, as kids are. A little reinforcement of the “love” the kids’ mother and I felt for each other in the form of cringe-inducing PDA headed off any doubts with them.

In the bedroom, things were beyond chilly. Alli tried to initiate a few days after the kids came home, and I told her to fuck off, using those exact words. It may have seemed petty and silly, like I was cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I was in the mindset that I didn’t trust her at all. I wasn’t rejecting her because of her one drunken, depressed moment of madness; I was rejecting her for all of the other moments that might have followed, up to and including ones that could have happened that very day while we were separated during working hours. Rational? Maybe not. But not wholly irrational, either.

Finally, though, I couldn’t hold out any more. I had needs, ones which had been unattended to for almost a month by the time I broke. But, as with many things in the following months and years, my plans and hers for how to deal with my needs diverged.

One night, Allison tried to spoon against my back and reach around to touch me. I had rebuffed her numerous times, even as her advances had more and more effect on me. But that night, I didn’t stop her. Alli quietly moaned in my ear, “God, you’re so hard,” as she stroked my cock through my shorts. “Please let me take care of you. I just want to make you feel good.”

There was a brief thought of swatting her hand away with the usual acid reply. Instead, I surprised her by wordlessly pushing my shorts down. Allison was thrilled at this, kissing the back of my neck while firmly gripping my dick and sliding her hand up and down the shaft in long strokes. I reached behind me and slid my fingers inside her panties to find her wet and ready, certainly ready enough for what I had planned.

When I moved away, she made a little querulous noise, and then an irked one when she saw why. “A condom? Really?”

As I rolled the latex sheath down, I said, “Take it or leave it. I have no idea where you’ve been.”

Alli tried a seductive little smile and said, “I can suck your dick first, if you’d like. I know how you–”

“Nah. STDs can travel through saliva, too. I won’t be going down on you anymore, either.”

She started to object, then thought better of it, instead inviting me into her embrace with a strained smile. I didn’t take her roughly; there was no punishment involved, no spanking her ass or hammering her cunt or anything of the kind. On the contrary: it was simply intercourse. It lacked any passion on my part beyond what was necessary to get off.

Allison was vocal, as usual; I was not. She tried to kiss me several times, and while I was receptive, I never initiated. Her eyes and her voice became desperate as our coupling went on, begging me to engage with her on some level besides the purely physical; I did not.

Normally, even if I hadn’t gone down on her, I still would have taken the time to make sure she enjoyed herself; Alli was multiorgasmic, something she and I had both enjoyed a number of times. On any previous occasion, if we had the time, I would have gladly expended the effort to make sure she got off at least three or four times before I did. This time, though, she came once, about halfway through, and was close again when I finished filling the condom with useless spend.

When I was done, I was done. As I rolled off of her and stood up, Alli whined, “I was so close!”

My hands busied themselves with the task of removing the condom. It had been over twenty years since I had worn one, and it wasn’t like riding a bike. I ended up spilling just a little. “So use your fingers.”

Alli tried one more time to engage me with a coquettish smile and a playful tone. “I’d love it if you used your fingers, instead.” When I held up a single digit to show her the cum on it, she giggled, “So?”

“You don’t know where I’ve been either.” Her jaw dropped as I walked into the bathroom to dispose of the rubber. When I finally climbed into bed a few minutes later, her back was to me, and I once again fell asleep to the sound of my wife’s weeping. It didn’t take long; I’d gotten off, after all.

The next day was a Saturday, and the kids were already out of the house when we woke up, Julie having been tasked with weekend taxi duties as partial payment for the used car we’d given her. I woke after Alli with a spring in my step; getting laid had put me in a better mood than I’d been in a while.

My wife was sitting at the kitchen table, looking miserable. Breakfast hadn’t been prepared this time, nor was coffee ready, so I grabbed a poptart and started a cup brewing. Alli stared at me, angry and unhappy, but silent. When I raised an eyebrow, she complained, “I didn’t like that.”

“That?”

“You know!” Alli hugged herself and looked away. “Last night.”

“Seemed like you got off. Unless, of course, you’ve been lying about that for years, too.”

Fury flashed in her eyes as they returned to me. “No, I haven’t! I’ve always enjoyed how you make love to me! But that wasn’t making love!”

The coffee was done brewing, so I pulled out my cup and blew on it, then took a sip. I stared at her the entire time, making her wait for a response until I was ready. “No, it wasn’t.” She watched me expectantly, but a further response wasn’t forthcoming.

Alli’s gaze slipped away again as her discomfort grew, before she quietly said, “I didn’t like it. It made me feel… dirty. Cheap.”

I helpfully offered, “Used?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t feel great, I agree.” She looked straight at me then, eyes narrowed, and opened her mouth to speak, but I beat her to the punch. “You’ve used me for sixteen years. Used me for free childcare for another man’s kid, to put food in his belly and a roof over his head.

“Why did we move into this house, Alli? So we’d have more room for three kids; our old house would have been fine if we had two. I’ve driven him around, gone to PTA meetings, coached him through classes and sports, poured my heart and soul into making him everything he could be.

“So, yeah. I used you like a whore, Alli. Just like you did with me. Only difference is that I didn’t pretend to love you while I was fucking you.”

My wife burst into tears, but I had no use for them, no interest in the performative grief she displayed for a marriage that she’d killed. There was part of me that still loved her and felt terrible for the things I’d said. But that part was growing smaller by the day.

That wasn’t the last time that we had sex; far from it. If she felt the need, she would initiate, and I usually responded positively. If I felt the need, she never turned me down, no matter how tired she was. I was never cruel with her, always making sure that her body was ready with my fingers before we began, and she usually came at least once.

But I used a condom every time, and we rarely fucked facing each other anymore; doggy and prone and reverse cowgirl became our go-to positions. That way she wouldn’t have to see the love that wasn’t there. Like I said, I was never cruel.

Outside of the bedroom, things changed as well, but not in a way that would betray the rot eating at the heart of our marriage. The kids didn’t have a clue– I don’t think– even when we were at our worst. Julie was off doing her own things, and Travis usually was as well. Megan was a little nerd like her daddy, so she’d be in her room playing games and doing puzzles most of the time. Dinnertime was generally without tension, and the weekends were busy with all sorts of activities.

What changed most obviously was how I spent my time. One of the things that I realized early on was that there was no way I’d be able to have a social life after divorcing Alli if I didn’t go out and make some friends of my own. I had friends, but they were almost all “our” friends, which meant, for the most part, that they were Alli’s friends. She had always been the social one. So I decided to fix that.

The problem was that I had no idea how to do that at first. Anyone who’s tried to make new friends as an adult, especially a middle-aged adult, will tell you it’s hard. Even moreso if you aren’t very good at being social.

But Tate, again, came to my rescue, and even let me kill two birds with one stone. He was part of a cycle club; not a motorcycle club, but a bicycling one. I had gotten a bit pudgy as age and a sedentary lifestyle took their toll, but that guy was about as fit as they come. So, one day, I showed up at home with a bicycle rack and a brand new, way too expensive bike attached to it. Alli let it go uncommented upon, but Travis was very excited. Before the weekend was out, there was another bicycle on the rack, and Tate’s group had another member.

More importantly, though, I made a lot of friends there. Isabella was the first; she was a stunningly fit woman, a dozen years younger than me, with a slim, athletic build, beautiful green eyes, and long auburn hair that she kept in a braid when she was cycling.

Yes, she caught me checking her out.

But then she just laughed it off. “Hey, I know how I look. As long as you’re not a perv about it, I don’t mind; your eyes have to go somewhere.” I felt like a perv, but she didn’t seem to think so. Neither did Janine, her wife, who was almost as attractive. Ah, well. I was still technically married anyways.

And, oddly, they ended up being some of the best friends I ever had. They both encouraged me and taunted me as I tried to get back in shape, and although I was never going to get near the level of health they were at, they did their best to get me as close as they could. In turn, I offered them some of the insights that age could bring; twelve years might not sound like a lot, but there’s so much of a difference in perspectives and experience between someone who’s just past thirty and someone edging close to their mid-forties.

More than that, though, they were both fun. They were nerds, too, of the puzzles and games variety. I joined them regularly for game nights, sometimes bringing Travis or the girls along. Janine and Isabella loved kids, and that was one of the things I regularly talked with them about. Isabella was planning to go through IVF, and they wanted advice on bringing up their son or daughter when the time came.

Alli wasn’t thrilled about me hanging out with two younger and very beautiful women, especially after my comment about her not knowing where I’d been, but she was somewhat mollified by the fact that they were married to each other. And if she hadn’t been? Fuck her. The whole point of getting out and being social was to make friends I’d still have after we divorced. Isabella and Janine were much like Tate in how they treated Alli: there was no animosity there, but neither was there a real friendship.

They weren’t the only friends I made there, either, nor was cycling my only new hobby. I also got back into martial arts. I had studied shotokan in my senior year of high school, after my run-in with Evan, but had to drop it when I moved to college. I remembered enjoying it, and I happened to pass by a place teaching kenpo. It wasn’t the same art, but beggars can’t be choosers. Since I was just looking for new ways to both be social and out of the house, switching arts was fine. It’s not like I was trying to become a black belt.

The guy that ran it was kind of a blowhard, but in a fun sort of way, unlike my brother. He was a big, brash guy, goofy and friendly, named Jack. Of course he was named Jack. He was like the Platonic ideal of a “Jack.” I enjoyed my classes with him a lot, and since I was one of the older students, he and I would sometimes joke around after class, which led to us going out to a bar together from time to time.

I made other friends there, too: Tom and Mike– twenty-five year old twin brothers that were kind of Jack-lite– and Lila. Lila was closed off at first, but she warmed up to me pretty quickly. Her boyfriend, Trey, was a really nice guy, and another nerd; Lila was so grateful when I roped him in for game nights with Janine, Isabella, and the kids. It meant that she no longer had to pretend to understand the byzantine rules of whatever Trey’s new obsession was. That alone made sure that we were fast friends, but she and I also bonded over our relative ineptitude when it came to our chosen art. I got in better shape cycling, but I had more fun at the dojo.

Travis glommed onto kenpo, as well. He had gone through a tae kwon do phase as a grade schooler like a lot of kids did but dropped it after a few months. I was in an adult class, and he was in a teen one, but he rode with me to and from the dojo, and we talked about school, girls, music, and all of the other things that teenage boys obsess about when it was just the two of us in the car.

It was strange that Travis and I became closer after I found out he wasn’t my son. That’s one of the things that always strikes me about my story: I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with either of these sports if I hadn’t seen that “B” on his charts. If I hadn’t, I doubt we would have become as close as we did. My life had been upended, but it was nice that I was able to find at least one bright bit of treasure amongst the wreckage.

I made sure to make time for my girls, too. Julie was pulling away, as I expected her to do at that age, but I made sure that we still spent time together. It was an experience that I’m sorry to say she didn’t get enough of when she was younger; her brother came along not long after she did, and Megan had taken her slot as Daddy’s girl not much longer after that.

She was tough and independent, but I wanted to make sure that she knew that her dad was always there for her, no matter what. We had always had a strong bond, but this intentional renewal only strengthened it. I had no doubt, by the time she left for college, that she knew she could always come to me for anything.

Megan, well, Megan just stayed Daddy’s girl. Daddy’s girl that could kick ass, that is. She got irritated that Travis and I were getting to have all the fun at kenpo, and she joined in after six months or so. That, plus the game nights, plus her instinct naturally being to come to me when she needed help, meant that there was no doubt who her favorite parent was.

I know that sounds Machiavellian, but it wasn’t my intention when I started this. I just wanted to spend time with my family while I still had one. You’ll notice that nowhere in there do I mention the times we all spent together as a family with Alli, although those did happen. We went to the movies sometimes, or on occasion we’d all veg out around the TV, or even lasso their mom into a game or two. But Alli and I spent almost no time alone together outside of the bedroom. On top of that, she was still traveling regularly for work, while I was almost always there for them.

She did have some time just with the kids, though. In addition to cycling, kenpo, and game nights with my new friends, I started to take short weekend trips. Sometimes I’d bring one or more of the kids along, to go camping or on a long bicycle trip, or to go compete at a tournament with Travis or Megan. But, on occasion, I’d just go by myself.

I didn’t tell Alli more than the bare minimum about where I was going or what I was doing. What I did was none of her business, as far as I was concerned. It took her a while to accept that, but eventually the news that I’d be taking off for a weekend was met with a slightly brittle “stay safe.” It was rare that I went very far– usually no more than an hour or two drive away– and I only traveled if it wouldn’t interfere with the kids’ activities. I was never irresponsible.

Well, except for that one time, about nine months after I learned what Alli had done.

On that occasion, early on a Saturday afternoon, I found myself in front of a grubby door in a grubby building in a grubby part of a town several hundred miles from home. After knocking, I heard a loud voice bellow, “Yeah, just a minute!” The peephole turned dark. I heard the sound of locks being opened and a chain being removed. And then, standing before me in all his toxic glory was my older brother, Evan. “Fuck are you doing here?”

He smelled like beer and sweat, but that wasn’t particularly new. Ever since his wife had left him, he’d been like a parody of a post-divorce trainwreck. That might be understandable if it had been only a few months, but it had been years. Even at Thanksgiving, he was barely cleaned up and sober. But on a Saturday afternoon? He looked every bit the walking dumpster fire on the outside that he’d always been on the inside.

“Wanted to talk.” My affect was neutral; I knew the way this was likely to go, but I wasn’t going to shove it in that direction. However, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to be nice, either. I’d long since moved past “sibling rivalry” with Evan, even before my run-in with the letter “B” and Alli’s revelations. I openly loathed him when social circumstances allowed for it.

“About what?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion, or possibly just with the effects of daylight on them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d woken him.

“Travis.”

A quick flicker of his usual dickhead self showed through for one moment, a smugness that he quickly tried to hide. “What about him?”

“I think you know.”

And there it was in its full magnificence, the shit-eating grin I’d come to hate over the years. “Dunno what you mean.”

“Yes you fucking do. Cut the act.”

He shrugged. “Okay. So, you finally figured out you weren’t his daddy?”

“Yeah.” I shook my head. “You knew all this time, and you didn’t tell me. Why?”

“Why the fuck would I?”

My shout resounded down the hallway. “Because I’m your brother, goddammit!”

“Only ’cause Mom fucked Dad. Jake was more of a brother to me than you ever were.” I stood there, dumbfounded, as he continued, “And, yeah, you’re a little beta bitch, but he figured Alli loved you, and you were a good husband to his sister– no idea what she ever saw in you– and that you’d be a good dad to his kid, so I told him I’d keep it quiet.”

“But you couldn’t help taunting Alli.”

Evan snorted, “Bitch had a chance at me instead of you. Can’t blame me for getting a few shots in here and there. Never would have happened if she’d married a real man in the first place.”

I just kept staring at him for a minute before finally asking, “What the hell did I ever do to make you hate me so much?”

That big shit-eating grin was back, and it made me want to throttle him. “You were a pussy. I wanted to have a brother I could be proud of, someone that was into football and cars and shit, like me and dad were.” He chuckled. “I usedta wonder if you even were actually my brother, or if mom got around behind Dad’s back. But, nah, I can’t believe that. Dad wouldn’t put up with being a cuck like you.”

I tensed for just a moment, and he laughed. Then I forced myself to loosen up, preparing for what was about to happen. “Say that again, asshole.”

“What? Cu–” He didn’t finish that word. Didn’t say a whole lot for about the next minute, either, outside of “Oof” and “Ow” and “Aaaugh!!!”

Something I learned pretty early on, even when I was younger, was that guys that are big and strong often don’t know how to fight. If you didn’t know how to fight either, yeah, they’d maul you. But if you were even marginally skilled– like, say, six months of shotokan as a kid and eight months of kenpo as an adult– along with the conditioning that came with bicycling and martial arts as a way to avoid your wife for nearly a year, then, yeah: it’s pretty easy to kick the shit out of a big guy that never actually learned how to fight.

My first shot caught him in the nose, a quick jab that gave a satisfying crunch; I didn’t know if it broke then, so I hit him again with a followup before he could even respond. That finally woke the bear, and my asshole brother roared as his hamhock of a fist soared through the air towards me.

But Evan was slow, his muscle covered over with a layer of fat. On top of that, he had either just woken up, was nursing a hangover, or had gotten an early start on his daydrinking. Or maybe he just sucked. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just knew that I had over-prepared for this confrontation, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

His flailing swing was easy to evade, and I barely even felt the air off of it. The big lug was overextended, so it was trivial to duck to the side and jab a fist into his kidney a couple of times. Evan howled with pain as he reached down to grab me; that didn’t work out so well for him either.

Kicks in a fight are usually a bad idea, but they do have their place, especially if you’re good at landing them precisely. I wasn’t, but my brother had two bad knees, and they were pretty close to each other; he hadn’t been expecting a fight, so his stance was little changed from when he’d smugly greeted me at his apartment door.

Did I mention that Evan’s football career, lackluster though it was, ultimately ended due to knee injuries? That’s how the fight ended, too. My shot wasn’t precise, and I didn’t do as much damage as I’d wanted, but a quick snap kick to one leg was followed up by another one into his crotch.

Evan was bleeding from the nose, clutching his side in pain, staggering, and now he had a pair of scrambled eggs below the waist. An elbow to his face knocked him on his ass and ended the fight– such as it had been– with a pathetic thud.

I was breathing hard, more from the adrenaline than the exertion, while he sat, dazed, in his doorway, leaned up against the frame. When he finally spoke, his teeth pink with blood from a split lip, he said, “Huh. Maybe you are my brother after all.”

After eying him for a moment, I stood upright and said, “No. Not anymore.” Turning to leave, I tossed over my shoulder, “If I ever see you again, I’ll finish what I started. Stay the hell away from my family.”

It wasn’t until I got in the car that I shook my hands and yelled, “Ow!” There’s a reason boxers wear gloves, and it’s not to protect their opponents’ faces. At least he hadn’t landed a hit on me; that wouldn’t have been fun to explain. Bruised knuckles were easy enough to ascribe to an accident while camping.

Confronting Evan was pointless. Fighting him was childish. It didn’t give me much new insight, other than that Jake and Evan both thought that Alli loved me. It didn’t fix my marriage. It didn’t heal any hurts.

But goddamn, it felt good.

I had a full life in that first year, maybe a fuller life than I would have otherwise. There were new friends and hobbies, and I was closer to my kids than ever. In private, Alli and I were distant, but we looked like a happily married couple to the outside world. And that distance when alone together didn’t extend to our bedroom; while we were still just fucking– decidedly not making love– it was only slightly less frequent than when I had still been in love with her.

She was still in love with me. I knew that, or at least I believed it. I was very angry for a very long time, and when I allowed myself to think of her lies, I could still stoke that ember of resentment into a bonfire. But she never stopped trying to win me back, even as I pushed her away.

One of her attempts at earning back my trust involved a wide array of devices, apps, and protocols. Alli put keyloggers on all of her devices, a tracking app on her phone, instituted open email and text policies, and pledged to always immediately answer texts and calls.

When my wife presented all of these efforts to me, I simply said, “I have better things to do than waste my day being your jailer, especially since I know you’re smart enough to get around all of these if you really wanted to.” She spent the next few weeks under a cloud but never took the apps off her devices. I checked them every once in a while; I’m only human.

For my part, I stopped being quite as paranoid. Having a few more trusted advisors in my circle allowed me to lessen, somewhat, the hurt that I had. Their diverse viewpoints also gave me some new perspective.

For example, Tate pointed out, “Yeah, she was a bitch for what she did, but do you really think you’re so dense that you wouldn’t have found anything at all when you actually looked for it?” I thought about that for a good long while. I still didn’t trust my wife entirely, but I chose to trust myself. Tate was right. I couldn’t have been that blind, and even if I had been, there was no way she was so clever that she could have hidden every single speck of evidence once I started to look.

Jack’s wisdom was even more blunt: “Dude, she wants to blow you. If she’s been cheating on you for that long and didn’t even bring home the clap, you should clearly be getting all the BJs that you can while you can.” It was a fair point. Oral went back on the menu, which made Alli a little happier. The condoms stayed, though; I did my research on STD transmissibility, and while I was willing to take the chance with oral, going raw in her was a bridge too far.

As we moved from the first year into the second, things changed even more. I won’t say I forgave her, and I certainly didn’t forget, but my rage was blunted. When I first found out what she’d done, and for months afterwards, I was furious. But it’s hard to maintain that level of anger for a long time, especially when I was trying to seem like a happy and loving husband most of the time. “Fake it til you make it” goes both ways: I faked affection for her around others, and I found it coming out sometimes even when we were alone.

And while Alli was clearly unhappy with how I treated her, she also took it almost entirely without complaint. There was no way we could ever balance the scales, but she had told me over and over that she’d do anything she could to make it up for me. Even as I eased up a bit, she didn’t relent. The full court press to win me back never ended. That could be exhausting sometimes, but it also felt good to know our marriage mattered to her that much.

As we rolled through the second year post-revelation, the love for her that I thought dead turned out to be merely dormant. I was afraid to be hurt, and I hid my love behind the usual gruff and blunt façade that I’d taken to in the first year. But, eventually, that edifice started to crack.

The first chinks appeared when Isabella made me the godfather to her daughter, Cynthia. She had found a sperm donor, and I was honored when she asked me to help guide her child into adulthood and take Cynthia in if anything ever happened to her and Janine.

When I held that little bundle for the first time, I was reminded of Julie and Megan, and of what Alli had given to me. My wife watched me with tears in her eyes as I held the baby, and we connected then in a way we hadn’t in a long time. I gave her a genuine and heartfelt smile; it wasn’t much, but her face glowed as if I’d gotten on one knee and proposed all over again.

The next crack came when we took Julie to college. We bundled up all of the possessions she could fit in her car and ours and took the four hour trek to the state university she’d be attending. On the way, just the two of us, we reminisced about her as a child, doing our best to not cry as our first little bird left the nest. We weren’t entirely successful, but we held hands and chatted as if none of this had ever happened. It felt good to not be angry at her, even if I also felt oddly guilty about letting go of the anger.

After we’d dropped our daughter off– with the requisite amount of tears, and after we stopped finding reasons to not leave her dorm room– we made our way to a hotel room to spend the night before returning home. I held Allison as she cried. It was such a big milestone, and we both knew that it had even more import than it did for most parents: we were now a third of the way to the end of our marriage.

Alli didn’t beg. She didn’t plead for me to reconsider; the dissolution of our marriage wasn’t directly mentioned at all. But her deep sorrow was visibly not just about our eldest leaving home. She sobbed for a time, face pressed into my shoulder. Then she looked up at me, desperate for any sign of love. Of hope.

I don’t know what my wife saw there. Perhaps she just saw what she wanted to see, or perhaps the fissures in my disguise had widened enough to make her think there really was a chance for us. But she kissed me, softly at first, and then with more insistent urgency. I responded in kind, and within a few minutes, our clothes were discarded and I was on my knees between her legs, sucking at licking at her pussy as she writhed on the bed.

Alli wasn’t usually vocal during sex; she could be loud, but the sounds that she made were moans and sighs and gasps, nonsense syllables drawn from a primal past before language. I knew what they meant, though: the way her body moved and her breath caught as I sucked at her clit telling me she was close; the mewling whine of pained pleasure when my fingers found her nipples and pinched them; the sudden silence followed by loud sobs of joy as her body was wracked by orgasm. I loved them. Loved her. Hated that I did, but couldn’t help it.

We made love for the first time in almost two years that night. I still wore a condom; love wasn’t the same thing as trust, and I needed her to know that. But this wasn’t a quick fuck or even the occasional rough taking I’d subjected her to, and which she took with an unexpected eagerness. Instead, it was the two of us spending time pleasing each other in every way we could.

There were only two condoms in my luggage, and those were there only by happenstance. I hadn’t planned to have sex at all that weekend. After they were expended, Alli didn’t pressure me to continue our coupling. Instead, she slid down my body and eagerly brought me back to life with lips and tongue. When I was fully erect again, she looked up at me sweetly, eyes wide as she took the full length of my cock into her mouth and throat.

I groaned with unexpected pleasure. Alli had been able to do this for as long as we’d been together, but she had never particularly enjoyed it, so I rarely pressed the issue. But now, she took my hands and put them on the back of her head, pressing them into place. My fingers wove into her hair, establishing a firm grip, and I began to fuck my wife’s face, to fuck her throat, forcing her to gag and choke on my dick, to gasp loudly when I gave her a moment– and only a moment– for air.

Allison took it all without complaint, just as she had the venom I’d heaped on her for the last two years. Her throat distended around my shaft, bulging as she took me as deeply as she could. Mascara ran down her face, and saliva dripped from her chin. Yet when I gave her brief relief here and there, allowing her a moment to breathe before my cock invaded her throat once more, Alli’s smile was broad and sinful and heartfelt.

She was overjoyed to show the depths of her devotion to me, to give as much of herself as I would allow. It wasn’t a bribe or an attempt to win me back, at least not primarily. It was more akin to tribute, a gift given to the man who would determine her fate, and one given without expectation of recompense. Hope for it, yes. But no expectation.

I was tempted to finish in her throat, but instead pulled out, jacking my cock in front of her gasping, upturned face. Alli’s voice, sore from the abuse she had begged for, rasped, “Mark me, lover. I’m yours. Always yours,” as she stared into my eyes. That was all it took to push me over the edge. Ropes of jism coated her face, splattered in her hair, landed in her opened mouth.

My delightfully wicked wife licked her lips, then dragged her fingers across her cheeks and brought more of my cum into her mouth, sucking greedily at her coated digits. And, finally, she returned to the source, taking the head of my cock in her mouth and stroking the shaft with her hands, draining the last few dribbles from me as if she could never get enough.

We showered together later, kissing and cuddling under the spray. I brought her off once more with my fingers as her voice raised in animalistic exaltation, but there just wasn’t another one in the tank for me. Three times in an afternoon was my limit. That’s not to say she didn’t valiantly attempt to resuscitate me once more, which I certainly enjoyed; but while the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak.

Afterwards, we ordered room service and lounged in our robes, feeding each other as we had on our honeymoon. There was no discussion of our future, nor even much of our past. We just enjoyed the present together. The world would be out there waiting for us when we left, and there would be time enough for fear and melancholy, guilt and anger. But just then, we were Luke and Allison, two people who had been in love and still remembered what that felt like. That maybe, just maybe, wanted it enough to fight for it.

My wife did tease one more orgasm from me, taking my seed into her mouth and swallowing it with a need that, while not as desperate as before, still felt completely honest and loving. As we laid in bed afterwards, I spooned up against Alli for the first time in a long time and held her close to me, protectively, like a dragon guarding its treasure. She whispered, “I love you.” I couldn’t respond in kind; I still had a ways to go before I’d be able to do that. But I did squeeze her and kiss her hair. She nestled back into me, and we dropped off to sleep.

It would take more than one weekend to get us back to anything approaching where we had been before, but that was the first real step, the first time I even slightly gave in the direction of reconciliation. I pulled away in the following weeks, afraid of being hurt by her again. But she had been patient for almost two years, so what was a few more weeks? Her dedication to winning me over never faltered. But there was always that fear there for me, and I couldn’t see any way back from it. It wasn’t a matter of love; it was still, as always, a question of trust.

I had enjoyed driving with her to drop Julie off, so I decided to take her with me on my next trip. This initially seemed to be a bad choice. I had planned a long hike but forgot that Alli was no longer anywhere near as in shape as I was. She was blistered and bruised and exhausted by the time we got back to the trailhead at the end of the first day. My wife had pushed through the pain without complaint to prove, yet again, her devotion to me, and she suffered for it.

Instead of spending the night under the stars in a tent as I had planned, I booked us into a nearby hotel. That night and the next morning were spent massaging her aching muscles and napping together, interspersed with very, very gentle lovemaking. We spent the latter half of the second day soaking in a tub together, drinking wine and reminiscing. I still didn’t say “I love you” by the time we were back home, but the balance was beginning to shift; where previously it was hard to say it, it was starting to become hard not to.

There was a setback in our healing a few months later; or possibly a breakthrough. It’s strange how often they look like each other. It’s only with distance that we can see which one is which and how sometimes one becomes another.

Janine, Isabella’s wife, had sworn up and down that she wanted nothing to do with childbirth while Isabella was trying to get pregnant. That lasted all the way up through the third trimester. But then she rubbed Isabella’s tummy and felt the baby kick, and she was in the room when Cynthia was born, and she watched Isabella nurse their daughter and bond with her in a way that Janine simply never could. Her opinion on bearing a child herself did a complete 180 over those last few weeks of Isabella’s pregnancy.

And so it was that three months after our hiking trip, Alli and I were once again with Janine and Isabella in a hospital room, and I was once again given the honor of being the godfather to their child. This time, however, my friends had been blessed with a son: Alexander.

As I held their second child there were tears again, but this time bittersweet ones. I remembered holding Travis in my arms, the son that was not my son. I remembered loving him and being proud, so proud, to have a boy to carry on my family name. I know it’s old-fashioned; the protocol surrounding who takes whose name in marriage seems to change just about every decade. But while Travis would bear my name, he wouldn’t carry on my bloodline.

Once again, I held a son that was not my son, and a sense of melancholy washed over me. I had pledged to my friends to help bring their boy up and to keep him safe should anything happen to them. I was honored to do so. But once again, I would be guiding a boy that was not and would never be fully mine. I looked at Alli with a sad smile. She couldn’t meet my gaze.

The moment passed, and I kissed my friends’ son gently on the forehead before handing little Alexander back to his mother. Then Alli and I said our goodbyes and headed for home. We didn’t talk about what had passed between us in the hospital; there was no need. Alli felt as low then as she probably could have. Well, at least until later. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Travis graduated high school shortly after he turned eighteen. Ostensibly to celebrate, I took him mountain biking for a few days in a national forest a few hours from our home. In actuality, it was a way to isolate him from the rest of the family and give him time to process when I told him the truth about his true parentage.

Alli and I had discussed– argued, actually– about who should break the news and how he should be informed. I finally won, a dubious victory if ever there was one. My argument that the first thing he’d do if Allison told him was to come to me and verify everything finally won the day. We considered telling him together; that notion was discarded once it became clear how close to the surface the emotions still were. For Travis’s sake, we couldn’t afford to speak at cross purposes in his presence.

Travis and I had a great first day together, riding down rough trails that only barely qualified as such. We were bruised and battered, and we had both taken more than one tumble, but by the end of the day, we were in the same tired-but-euphoric state that we’d both shared before in our cycle outings and martial arts practice.

After dinner, we sat outside our rented cabin, taking in the beauty of the night sky. Glancing over at him, I was proud of the young man that he had become. He was handsome and strong; I felt more than a little twinge of jealousy knowing that I had contributed little to his physical attributes, outside of steering him towards the sports that he and I practiced together and away from football. Sorry, Jake. Fuck your legacy.

But I also knew that I had influenced him mentally and emotionally. As we had spent time together, he became more himself; not like me, per se, but blending in some of the attributes of mine that he had eschewed when he was younger. He was never going to be as into puzzles or games as I was, but his analytical skills and thoughtfulness had sharpened as we became closer. He was mentally tougher than he used to be, too. That was part of why we were there: Alli and I both finally believed he could handle the truth.

With a deep sigh, I said, “Travis?”

“Yeah, Dad?” His eyes were still pointed skyward.

The cheap plastic legs of my chair scraped against the wooden deck as I turned towards him. “I need to talk to you about something important.”

“Dad?” He looked at me, apprehensive. “Is everything okay?”

I tried to give as reassuring a smile as I could, but one thing he’d retained all through his adolescence was his insightful nature. I was sure he saw through it, especially when his eyebrows raised with concern. Still, I tried. “Yeah, buddy. It is. But…” I sighed. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this. I love you, Travis. I always have, and I always will. Your mom does, too. But–”

How eyes went wide. “Oh my god, am I adopted?”

I laughed; God, if only it were that easy. “No! No. But…” Another deep sigh. “But you’re on the right track. Travis, you’re not biologically my son.”

The look on his face almost killed me. It was the face of my little boy when his best friend moved away; of my tween when we had to put down the family dog; of my high schooler going through his first breakup. Each of the smaller pains that prepare us for the greater ones we feel as adults. And yet we’re never truly prepared, are we? We never reach the point where there’s not a larger and newer pain lurking on the horizon.

I saw my son’s heart break in a new and awful way, but I also saw all the ways it had broken before.

My son.

He was my son.

Travis was my son, and he always was and always would be, lineage and genetics and legacy be damned. In that moment, the idea that I’d ever even thought of him as my stepson made me furious with myself.

“Wh– who. Who is my real…” No, we’re never really prepared for the greater pains; there’s always a worse one waiting. Travis shook his head, tears starting to spill down his face as his voice broke. “My biological dad?”

“That’s… a long story.” And so, I related to him the tale of a young wife and mother, so lost in her depression that she made a terrible choice. I told him of a girl who owed so much to a boy that, when he was a dying man and she a frightened, confused woman, offered something that had not been hers to give, something she had promised to another. To my surprise, he guessed the next part of the story before I got to it.