Then her eyes sharpened.
She saw my scrubs. She saw my face. She saw that I knew.
She did not gasp. She did not cover herself in shame. She smiled.
Not fully. Not wide. Just enough.
A small, lazy lift of one corner of her mouth.
“Lauren,” she said, her voice rough with sleep. “You’re home early.”
The casualness of it was so cruel that I almost laughed.
“My son was sleeping on the kitchen floor,” I said.
Diane’s smile faded, but not from guilt. From inconvenience.
Marcus groaned into the pillow. “What’s going on?”
I looked at him. My husband. Marcus Caldwell. The man who once cried when Noah took his first steps across our living room carpet. The man who used to leave the porch light on because he said his wife should never come home to darkness. The man who had promised, with his hand on my pregnant belly, that our child would never know what it felt like to be unwanted.
“Get up,” I said.
Marcus rolled onto his side, blinking. His eyes were red. His hair was flattened on one side. For a second, he looked like a stranger wearing my husband’s face.
Then he saw me.
Then he saw Diane.
Then he saw the wedding ring on the nightstand.
His entire body went still.
“Lauren,” he said, sitting up too quickly. “Wait.”
That word did something to me.
Wait.
As if I had been too fast. Too unreasonable. As if this was a misunderstanding I had rudely interrupted before it had time to arrange itself into an acceptable lie.
I pointed toward the hallway.
“Noah was under the kitchen table,” I said again, slower this time. “Cold. No blanket. No heat. Still wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
Marcus rubbed both hands over his face. “He was fine when I checked on him.”
“When?”
He looked at Diane.
That glance told me more than any confession could have.
Diane pulled the sheet higher and sat up against the pillows. “Don’t do this dramatic hospital voice with us, Lauren. He probably climbed out of bed. Kids do that.”