“Megan…”
The girl looked about seventeen.
She had Daniel’s gray eyes.
I stared at him.
“Who is she?”
Daniel swallowed.
“Her name is Isla.”
Then the girl answered for him.
“I’m his daughter.”
Everything suddenly made sense and absolutely no sense at all.
Daniel and I had been together eight years and married for six.
Until recently, I would have described our marriage as solid.
We rarely argued.
He brought me coffee in bed.
When our twins, Kai and Theo, finally arrived after years of hoping for children, Daniel was attentive and loving.
He knew which baby preferred being rocked and which one settled faster with white noise.
That was why his first lie seemed so strange.
One afternoon, I checked our shared location because we were almost out of formula.
His location was unavailable.
When he returned, I asked if he had switched it off.
“No. Probably a glitch.”
But it happened again.
And again.
Every time Daniel left home, his location disappeared within minutes.
When I asked him to test the app, he became defensive.
“You’re exhausted, Megan. Maybe you’re overthinking things.”
Then he started taking his phone into the shower.
He changed the passcode.
Twice, I woke after midnight and found him gone from bed.
One night, I discovered him standing between the twins’ cribs looking at a photograph on his phone.
A dark-haired teenage girl stood beside an unfamiliar woman.
“Who is that?”
Daniel immediately locked the screen.
“Something from work.”
“Work sends family photographs after midnight?”
He refused to answer.
A few days later, his phone lit up while we were waiting at the pediatrician’s office.
I saw part of a message.
**I can’t keep being your secret. Mom died believing that…**
Daniel grabbed the phone.
