Then the doorbell rang, and I already knew, with total certainty, exactly who it was.
Rachel must have called Tyler from her car the very moment she pulled out of my driveway, and Tyler must have walked straight out of his own office the second he got that call, because there they both stood together on my porch now, Rachel in front, Tyler a step behind her, looking like a man who had swallowed an actual stone somewhere along the drive over.
“Debra,” Tyler started, “we need to talk about this like adults.”
“Come in,” I said, calm as still water on a windless day.
Rachel walked past me first, her eyes already scanning the foyer as though she were mentally selecting curtains for it. Tyler followed behind her, head down, shoulders rounded in a way I’d never once seen on him in eighteen years of marriage.
Margaret was waiting for them at the kitchen table, arms folded.“Oh,” Rachel said, stopping short in the doorway. “I didn’t realize this was going to be a group conversation.”
“Sit,” Margaret said simply, and, to my mild surprise, they both did.
Tyler cleared his throat three separate times before any actual words came out of it. “Deb, I never wanted things to happen this particular way. But Rachel and I, we have to think about the baby now. And the house, it just makes more sense for us to.”
“To what,” I asked.
“To stay here,” Rachel cut in smoothly. “You could find something smaller easily enough. Honestly, for the baby’s sake, I think you should try to be reasonable about this.”
I watched her face carefully while she spoke. There was no shame anywhere in it, only a flicker of impatience, as though I were simply a slow moving clerk holding up her line at the grocery store.
