I tell him he’s dreaming.
I tell him Denise loves him, that she checks on him because she cares, and he needs to stop making things up about the woman who might be his stepmom soon.
Four months earlier, Denise felt like a miracle.
I’m Mark, 36, divorced two years, raising Wyatt on weekends and every other holiday since Angela moved to Tucson for work. Denise came into our lives slow and careful – remembered Wyatt’s peanut allergy, learned his favorite cereal, never pushed for more than he could give. Her house had a guest room already set up for him, dinosaur sheets and everything, before we’d even said the word serious out loud. I thought I’d found someone who wanted my kid as much as she wanted me.
Then Wyatt started asking to sleep in my room when we stayed over.
I told myself seven-year-olds go through phases.
A few weeks later he stopped eating breakfast at her table, said his stomach hurt every single morning, only at her house, never at mine.
I told myself it was the transition. New house, new rules, new person watching him chew.
Then I found the notebook in his backpack, hidden under his folders. Pages of tally marks. Dates. Times. “She watched me get dressed.” “She smelled my cup.” “She weighed me on her scale and wrote it down.”
My stomach turned over.
I asked Denise about the scale, kept my voice light, told myself there’d be some normal explanation.
“I just like to track his growth,” she said. “Kids his age should be monitored closely. You’d know that if you paid attention.”
Something in her tone didn’t sit right, but I let it go.
That night Wyatt grabbed my sleeve in the hallway outside her guest room.
“She does it to me the way Grandma used to do it to Mom,” he said. “Mom told me. Before we left.”
My blood went cold.
Angela never told me why she really left Tucson’s ex-husband before me, only that it was complicated, only that her mother used to “help” in ways nobody talked about.
I look at Wyatt now, standing in Denise’s doorway at midnight, and she is right behind him, counting under her breath, a notebook of her own pressed against her chest.
“You weren’t supposed to see this one yet,” Denise says.
For more chilling tales of unexpected revelations, check out what happened when I Opened My Mouth to Defend Denise. Then They Handed Me My Own File. or read about how The Notary Said My Father Left Everything to a Woman I’d Never Heard Of.
