At 3:17 PM, a message from her popped up: “Babe, don’t be late. The idiot should have dinner started by now.” I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry.
I just took a deep breath and started saving screenshots.
I had the voice notes. I had the bank transfers. I had the messages.
I even had photos of Marco holding a baby in a way he never held our children — a clear, proud, almost youthful smile outside a medical clinic in Wicker Park. When he and Romina walked into my kitchen that evening, I shoved the screen in his face. “Who is this?” Marco came toward me — for once, not with fury but with fear.
Romina knocked her wine glass over, staining my good white tablecloth. “Gaby, let me explain.” “No. The screenshots, the voice notes, the bank transfers, and now a baby have already explained everything.
All you want to do is manage the lie.”
Then my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: “My name is Alma. I’m not his mistress.
I was his clerk at the auto parts shop. That baby isn’t mine. He belongs to my sister, who died seven months ago.
Marco registered him as his own to get his hands on a settlement. Don’t come alone.”
The kitchen felt like it was closing in. Romina looked at Marco as if she were suddenly seeing a stranger, too.
“What settlement?” she whispered. I let out a dry, jagged laugh. “Look at that.
Even the business partner was left in the dark.” Marco tried to grab my arm, but I recoiled. “Don’t you ever touch me without permission again.” I didn’t have to scream it. The weight was enough.
Marco lowered his hand because he finally understood something: the woman he had been married to for twenty-two years was no longer in that kitchen. I grabbed my keys, my purse, and the blue folder. “We’re going to meet Alma.”
My cousin Steven was waiting in his car outside.
We found Alma at a Panera on Belmont — a woman in her early thirties with dark circles and a denim jacket, an untouched coffee in front of her, a baby sleeping in a gray stroller. “Mrs. Hayes?” “Gaby,” I said.
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