Martha had started questioning my baby before the baby even had fingernails.
At twelve weeks, she studied an ultrasound picture and said, “Interesting nose.”
I thought she was joking.
At sixteen weeks, she told Ethan that pregnancy could make couples “discover difficult truths.”
At twenty weeks, after our anatomy scan, she stood in our living room holding a printed sonogram and said the baby’s profile didn’t look like a Wells.
“She has Olivia’s face,” Ethan told her.
Martha smiled.
“That’s certainly one explanation.”
I should have thrown her out then.
Instead, I tried to keep the peace.
That had always been my mistake with Martha.
She rarely accused me directly.
She preferred questions.
Had Ethan ever wondered why I worked late during the first month we were trying to conceive?
Had he noticed how private I was with my phone?
Wasn’t it unusual that the baby seemed small when every Wells baby had supposedly been large?
None of it meant anything.
But suspicion does not need evidence when someone repeats it often enough.
One night I woke at two in the morning and found Ethan sitting on the edge of our bed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring at the wall.”
He hesitated.
That hesitation changed something between us.
“Just say it.”
He rubbed his hands over his face.
“My mom thinks—”
I sat upright.
“No.”
“Olivia—”
“No. If you finish that sentence, understand that I will remember it for the rest of my life.”
His eyes filled with shame.
But he finished it anyway.
“She thinks we should do a paternity test.”
I stared at my husband.
The man who had cried when the pregnancy test turned positive.
The man who had assembled the crib before I was even out of my first trimester.
The man who rested his hand on my belly every night waiting for his daughter to kick.
“Do you?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Do you?”
Silence.
And there was my answer.
Not certainty that I had cheated.
Perhaps not even genuine suspicion.
But enough weakness to let another person put the question inside our marriage.
