Chapter 2 - The Party Was for Brad
I took Lily upstairs.
Rachel tried to follow.
I shut the bedroom door in her face.
“Daniel.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“You can’t just—”
“Ten minutes.”
Something in my voice stopped her.
Lily’s bedroom looked wrong.
Half her toys were gone.
The framed photograph of us at Virginia Beach had disappeared from the dresser.
So had the stuffed bear I mailed her from Germany.
“Where’s Captain Bear?”
“Mommy put Daddy things away.”
“Why?”
Lily shrugged.
I found warm pajamas and helped her change.
There were small scratches on her knees.
Mud beneath her fingernails.
A bruise on one upper arm.
I noticed it.
I didn’t question her about it yet.
I needed to calm her, not turn the room into an interrogation.
Buster lay across the doorway.
Guarding it.
Rachel knocked again.
“Daniel, people are leaving.”
“Good.”
The party downstairs had supposedly been for Rachel’s promotion at the real estate firm.
That was what she’d told me in an email two weeks earlier.
Lily corrected that too.
“It was Brad’s party.”
“What kind?”
“He’s moving in.”
I stopped.
“Moving where?”
“Our house.”
The words were so simple.
Five-year-old simple.
That made them worse.
Rachel and I had been married eleven years.
My deployment had lasted fourteen months, including extensions I hated but couldn’t control.
We had problems before I left.
Arguments about money.
Distance.
Her resentment of military life.
My tendency to shut down instead of fight.
But divorce?
Brad?
Telling Lily I was dead?
Nothing prepared me for that.
Lily suddenly climbed off the bed.
She opened the bottom drawer.
Beneath some pajamas was a grocery bag.
Inside were envelopes.
My handwriting.
APO return addresses.
Birthday cards.
Little notes.
Photographs.
Dozens of them.
Most unopened.
I stared.
“I sent these to you.”
Lily nodded.
“Mommy said I couldn’t read them.”
“Why?”
“She said dead people don’t send letters.”
My stomach turned.
Then I found something else.
A printed email.
Sent from my military account.
Subject: ABOUT THE DIVORCE.
I had never written it.
The message claimed I wanted out of the marriage and planned to surrender most contact with Lily.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
May you like
Someone had fabricated an email in my name.
And suddenly Rachel’s lie about my death looked like one piece of something much larger.
