My stomach tightened.
“What messages?”
Mark wouldn’t look at me.
“Anonymous. They started in the spring.”
“What did they say?” I asked.
He hesitated.
Then he pulled out his phone.
I watched him scroll. His thumb moved too fast. Finally, he handed it to me.
The first message appeared on the screen.
Ask your wife where she really was the weekend of March 12.
The second:
That baby won’t have your eyes.
The third:
Some men raise children that were never theirs. Don’t be one of them.
A fourth:
DNA doesn’t lie. Wives do.
My chest felt hollow.
I remembered March 12.
I had been in Chattanooga for my cousin’s bridal shower. Mark had known that. He had dropped me off at the rental car place himself because he needed our SUV for work.
I looked up.
“You believed this?”
“I tried not to.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t try. You collected poison and called it evidence.”
Mark swallowed.
“There were pictures.”
He took the phone back and opened an image.
It showed me walking out of a restaurant beside a man in a navy coat. The angle made us look close, almost intimate. His hand was near my back.
My cousin’s fiancé.
He had helped me down the steps because my ankles were swollen and I was seven months pregnant.
A laugh escaped me, but there was no humor in it.
“You never asked me.”
“I didn’t want you to lie.”
“No,” I said. “You wanted to catch me.”
His silence answered for him.
David rose slowly.
“Who sent these?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” Mark snapped.
But Carol was staring at the phone like she had seen a ghost.
“Show me the number.”
Mark frowned.
“Why?”
“Show me.”
He handed it to her.
Carol looked at the screen. Her face drained again.
“Oh God.”
David stepped closer.
“What?”
Carol covered her mouth.
“I know this number.”