“Who is this man, Emmy?” I say. She doesn’t look up from the crayons. “That’s Daddy’s other family, Mommy. He said not to tell you.”
My hands are shaking so bad I can barely hold the paper. There’s a woman in the drawing standing next to my husband. A little boy too, maybe four, holding his hand. My daughter drew all three of them smiling in front of a house that isn’t ours.
Two weeks earlier, none of this was on my radar.
I’ve been married to Danny for nine years. We have Emmy, who’s six, and I thought our biggest problem was him working too many “late nights” at the dealership. I run the kitchen like a command center – homework at the table, dinner by six, Danny home by eight most nights, or so he tells me. I never had a reason to check.
Then Emmy started drawing houses. Not our house. A blue one with a red door, always the same, over and over.
I asked her about it and she shrugged. “That’s Daddy’s other house.”
I laughed it off the first time. Kids say weird stuff.
A few days later she drew the woman. Blonde hair, same as the day before. Then the little boy showed up in the picture, standing between Danny and the woman like it was normal.
That’s when I started really looking. I checked Danny’s location on Find My Friends, which he’d shared with me back when we first got married and forgotten to ever turn off.
There was an address. Forty minutes away. A place he’d been going every “late night” for months.
I didn’t say anything to him. I just started asking Emmy more questions, careful, casual, over cereal in the mornings.
“Does Daddy go there a lot, baby?”
“Every Tuesday and Thursday,” she said. “He says it’s our secret. He said if I tell you, you’ll be sad and Daddy will go away.”
My stomach dropped.
Yesterday she brought home a school assignment – draw your family – and that’s when the boy showed up holding Danny’s hand like he belonged there, like he’d always belonged there.
Today I laid it flat on the table when Danny walked in from “work,” his tie already loose, his keys still in his hand.
“Who is this man, Emmy?”
“That’s Daddy’s other family, Mommy. He said not to tell you.”
Danny’s face goes white.
“Emmy,” he says, “go to your room, buddy.”
She doesn’t move. She just looks at me and says, “Mommy, is Daddy gonna go away now?”
The Blue House
I don’t answer her. I can’t. My tongue feels like it’s glued to the roof of my mouth.
Danny takes a step toward the table and I flinch. I actually flinch. Nine years of marriage and my body just reacted to my husband like he was a stranger in a parking garage.
“Jen,” he says. His voice is low, the one he uses when he’s trying to calm me down. The same voice he used when my dad died. The same voice he used in the delivery room when the epidural wore off. “Let me explain.”
“Explain what.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s flat. Dead.
Emmy’s still sitting there, crayon in her fist, watching us. She’s six. She doesn’t understand what’s happening but she knows something is wrong. Her lower lip is doing that thing it does right before she cries.
“Emmy, baby, go to your room. Please.” I manage to make my voice gentle for her. Somehow.
She slides off the chair and walks out slow, looking back at us twice. The second time she looks at Danny and her face is scared. Not of him. For him.
That’s when I know she loves him more than she’s afraid of what he did. Kids are like that. They love you even when you don’t deserve it.
The door clicks shut down the hall and it’s just us in the kitchen. The fluorescent light buzzing overhead. The smell of the meatloaf I made for dinner still hanging in the air. His favorite. I made his fucking favorite.
“Who is she.”
“Her name is Andrea.”
Andrea. I don’t know any Andreas. I don’t know anyone with blonde hair and a blue house with a red door forty minutes from the house we bought together when I was pregnant with Emmy.
“How long.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s standing there in his suit, the one I picked out for him at Macy’s last Christmas, and his face is doing something complicated. Guilt. Fear. Something else I don’t recognize.
“Four years.”
The kitchen tilts.
Four years. Emmy was two. I was still breastfeeding. I was still waking up three times a night and walking around the living room with her pressed to my chest, singing the same lullaby over and over because it was the only thing that stopped her crying.
Four years of Tuesdays and Thursdays. Four years of “late nights at the dealership.” Four years of me believing him when he said he was tired, when he said work was killing him, when he said he needed space.
The boy in the drawing is maybe four.
I do the math without meaning to.
The Math
I was pregnant with Emmy when we bought this house. We painted the nursery yellow because we didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl. Danny painted the trim himself. He got paint in his hair and I laughed and took a picture of him with my phone.
That picture’s still on my phone. I looked at it last week.
Four years ago Emmy turned two. She had a cake shaped like a butterfly. Danny missed the party because he had to work. He showed up at nine with a stuffed elephant and a smear of something on his collar that I told myself was coffee.
The boy in the drawing is holding Danny’s hand. His hair is brown like Danny’s. His smile is Danny’s smile. I can see it in the crayon lines, the way she drew the mouth, the little gap between the front teeth.
“The boy,” I say. “What’s his name.”
Danny closes his eyes. “Leo.”
“How old.”
“Three and a half.”
Three and a half. I was right. Nine months after Emmy’s second birthday, give or take. Nine months after the butterfly cake and the stuffed elephant and the coffee stain that wasn’t coffee.
I sit down at the kitchen table. Not dramatically. I just can’t stand anymore. My legs won’t hold me.
“She knows,” I say. “Emmy knows.”
“I know.”
“You took our daughter to that house.” My voice is getting louder now. I can hear it happening but I can’t stop it. “You took her there and you told her to lie to me. You made our six-year-old keep your secret.”
“I didn’t – “
“She’s six years old, Danny. She’s been carrying this around for God knows how long. She’s been drawing pictures of your other house and your other woman and your other child and she thought if she told me you’d leave.”
He doesn’t say anything. His hands are at his sides and he’s just standing there like a man waiting for a bus.
“Say something.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry.” I laugh. It comes out wrong, too high, too sharp. “You’re sorry. Four years and a whole second family and you’re sorry.”
“It’s not a second family.”
“The hell it’s not.”
“Andrea and I – it’s not like that. It’s not what you’re thinking.”
The Story He Tells
He tells me he met her at a bar. Of course he did. A bar near the dealership where he went with the other salesmen after work. She was there with friends. They started talking. One thing led to another.
It always leads to another, doesn’t it.
He tells me it was supposed to be one time. A mistake. He was stressed, I was always tired, Emmy was a difficult baby, he felt like he was losing me.
I want to throw the meatloaf at his head.
He tells me she got pregnant. Andrea. She decided to keep it. She didn’t ask him for anything, didn’t want to break up our marriage, just wanted him to be in Leo’s life.
So he was. Every Tuesday and Thursday for three and a half years.
“And Emmy,” I say. “When did you start taking Emmy.”
He swallows. “About a year ago.”
A year. Fifty-two Tuesdays and Thursdays. A hundred and four days of my daughter living a double life.
“She wanted to meet her brother,” he says, like that’s a reasonable thing. Like any of this is reasonable.
“She has a brother.” I say it out loud to hear how it sounds. “My daughter has a brother I’ve never met.”
“Jen, I was going to tell you. I just – “
“When. When were you going to tell me. When Leo graduated high school? When Andrea got tired of being the secret and showed up at our front door?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I was scared, okay? I was scared of losing you. I was scared of losing Emmy. I was scared of everything.”
I look at him. This man I’ve loved since I was twenty-four years old. This man who held my hand through two miscarriages before Emmy. This man who cried when she was born and said she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He was lying then too, probably. Maybe not about Emmy. But about something.
“How could you do this to her,” I say. “Not to me. To her. She’s six. She’s been keeping your secret for a year. Do you know what that does to a kid?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s crying now. Actual tears running down his face into his stubble.
I don’t feel anything.
That’s the worst part. I’m looking at my husband crying in our kitchen and I don’t feel anything at all.
Andrea
I made him give me the address. The one from Find My Friends. I wrote it down on the back of Emmy’s drawing with a purple crayon because that’s what was on the table.
He said, “Please don’t go over there.”
I said, “You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore.”
I left Emmy with my mother. Told her Danny and I had something to work out. She looked at my face and didn’t ask questions. My mother’s always been good at reading a room.
The drive took thirty-eight minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the dashboard the whole way. Thirty-eight minutes from my life to whatever was waiting at the end of that address.
The blue house with the red door. Just like Emmy drew it. White shutters. A little garden in the front with yellow flowers I don’t know the name of. A tricycle in the driveway.
I sat in the car for ten minutes. Maybe longer. A woman came out of the house eventually. Blonde. Pretty in a way that made my stomach hurt. She was carrying a laundry basket.
I got out of the car.
She saw me and stopped. Just froze there on the front steps with a basket of towels pressed against her hip. She knew who I was. I could see it in her face.
“Are you Jen?” she said.
“Are you Andrea?”
She set the basket down on the step. Her hands were shaking. Good. At least someone was nervous.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “At first. When I found out he was married, I told him to leave me alone. But Leo – “
“Leo is my daughter’s brother.”
She flinched. “I know.”
“Did you know he was bringing her here? A six-year-old? Telling her to lie to me?”
The color drained from her face. “He brought her here?”
“You didn’t know.”
“No. God, no. I would never – I have a son. I would never ask someone else’s child to keep a secret like that.”
I believed her. I don’t know why. Maybe because her shock looked real. Maybe because I needed to believe at least one person in this mess wasn’t a complete monster.
“He’s been bringing Emmy here for a year,” I said. “She drew a picture. That’s how I found out. My six-year-old drew a picture of your family and called it Daddy’s other family.”
Andrea sat down on the steps. Just sat down like her legs gave out. The laundry basket tipped over and towels spilled onto the concrete but she didn’t move to pick them up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you love him?”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were red. “I thought I did. For a while. But I ended it. Six months ago. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore. He kept coming back. He said he needed to see Leo.”
“Does he still come?”
“Every Tuesday and Thursday.”
Of course he does.
The Boy
I heard him before I saw him. Little footsteps on hardwood. The screen door creaked open and there he was.
Leo.
He looks like Danny. More than Emmy does, honestly. Same brown hair, same gap between his front teeth, same way of tilting his head when he’s curious about something.
He looked at me and said, “Are you Emmy’s mommy?”
My throat closed up.
“Yes,” I managed. “I’m Emmy’s mommy.”
“Emmy’s my sister. She’s nice. She shares her crayons.”
I looked at Andrea. She had her face in her hands.
“Leo,” she said, her voice muffled, “go back inside, baby. Mommy’s talking to her friend.”
He didn’t move. He just stood there on the porch, this little boy who had no idea he was at the center of the worst day of my life.
“I drew a picture for Emmy,” he said. “Can you give it to her?”
He held out a piece of paper. A drawing. Two stick figures holding hands. One tall, one small. The tall one had brown hair and the small one had yellow hair like crayon sunshine.
“That’s you and me,” he said. “Because we’re friends now.”
I took the drawing. My hands were steady. I don’t know how.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll make sure she gets it.”
He smiled. Danny’s smile on a three-year-old’s face. Then he turned and ran back inside and the screen door banged shut behind him.
Andrea stood up. Her face was wet.
“He doesn’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t know about any of this. He just thinks Emmy is a friend who comes to play sometimes.”
I folded the drawing carefully and put it in my pocket.
“I’m not going to keep him from his father,” I said. “Whatever happens between me and Danny, Leo didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did you, really. Not the big thing.”
She looked at me like she didn’t understand.
“The big thing was Danny’s,” I said. “He’s the one who was married. He’s the one who made promises. You just fell for the same act I did.”
I got back in my car and drove home. Thirty-eight minutes. I didn’t listen to music. I didn’t cry. I just drove.
What I Told Emmy
Danny was still at the house when I got back. Sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. He looked up when I walked in.
“Did you – “
“I met Andrea. I met Leo. He gave me a drawing for Emmy.”
Danny’s face crumpled. “I’m sorry. Jen, I’m so sorry.”
“You already said that.”
“What do you want me to do. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
I sat down in the chair across from him. Not next to him. Across.
“I want you to go stay somewhere else tonight. I need to talk to Emmy alone.”
He nodded. Didn’t argue. Got up and walked to the door like a man who knew he’d lost.
“Jen?”
“What.”
“I do love you. That part wasn’t a lie.”
I didn’t answer. He left.
Emmy was in her room, sitting on her bed with her stuffed elephant. The one Danny gave her for her second birthday. She was holding it tight against her chest.
“Is Daddy gone?” she said.
“For tonight, baby. Just for tonight.”
“Is he coming back?”
I sat down on the bed next to her. She smelled like shampoo and crayons. She’s always smelled like crayons.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Mommy and Daddy have some things to work out.”
“Because I told the secret.”
“No.” I pulled her onto my lap. “No, baby. None of this is your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But Daddy said – “
“Daddy was wrong to ask you to keep a secret from me. Grown-ups shouldn’t ask kids to keep secrets from their parents. That’s not your job.”
She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Is Leo still my brother?”
The question hit me right in the chest.
“Yes,” I said. “Leo is still your brother. That doesn’t change.”
“Can I still see him?”
I thought about the blue house with the red door. Andrea’s face when she realized Danny had been bringing Emmy there. Leo’s drawing folded up in my pocket.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “I promise we’ll figure it out.”
She fell asleep against my shoulder. I sat there for a long time, holding her, listening to her breathe. The house was quiet. No Danny. No keys in the door. No “Hey, babe, I’m home” at eight o’clock.
Just me and Emmy and a drawing of a family that wasn’t mine.
I put her to bed and went back to the kitchen. The drawing was still on the table. Danny and Andrea and Leo and the blue house with the red door. Emmy’s careful six-year-old handwriting at the top: MY FAMILY.
I didn’t throw it away.
I don’t know why. I just couldn’t.
I put it in the drawer with her other drawings, the ones of our house, our family, the life I thought we had. Maybe someday she’ll want to look at it. Maybe someday I will too.
For now, it’s just there. Waiting.
Like me.
—
If this hit close to home for you, share it with someone who needs to know they’re not alone.
For more tales of shocking revelations from innocent mouths, check out My Niece Asked If It Hurt When Mommy Squeezed My Arm Like This and Aunt Denise, why does Uncle Mark say sorry to me when Mommy’s not home?. And for a different kind of parental nightmare, don’t miss “MA’AM, STEP BACK OR YOU’RE GOING WITH HIM”.
