Part 2 of 4
She found me sitting at the table in Nate’s old sweatshirt, the paper in front of me and a cold cup of tea untouched beside my hand.
Rachel read the results twice. She set them down carefully, as if sudden movement might make them more real. Then she pulled out the chair across from me and sat with both feet planted on the floor.
“Walk me through the timing,” she said.
I stared at her. “The timing doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“It says Nate isn’t the father. What else is there?”
Rachel did not flinch. She had always been the steadier one between us, the sister who remembered where the insurance cards were, who asked follow-up questions, who could sit in a crisis without filling the room with panic. Her steadiness irritated me in that moment. I wanted her to be frantic because I was frantic.
“You’re about eleven weeks pregnant,” she said. “That means conception was probably around nine weeks ago, give or take.”
I rubbed both hands over my face. “Nate and I were trying constantly. You know that.”
“I know.”
“We had a schedule. It was embarrassing, honestly. We took all the romance out of it because we wanted this so badly.”
“Was there any night that stands out?”
I almost snapped at her. Then I saw her face and stopped.
Rachel was not accusing me. She was searching for a door neither of us wanted to open.
I closed my eyes and tried to move backward through the weeks. Most of the nights blurred together: the app notifications, the forced optimism, Nate turning away afterward, both of us pretending it did not feel like a chore. But one night rose out of the haze because it had been different.
“There was a night,” I said slowly. “I woke up because he was touching my shoulder.”
Rachel said nothing.
“It was late. Maybe three, maybe four. I remember being annoyed at first because I had work in the morning, but then I thought…” I stopped, embarrassed by the tenderness of it now. “I thought he wanted me. Not because an app told us to. Because he wanted me.”
Rachel’s hands folded tighter.
“Our room was completely dark. You know those blackout curtains Nate insisted on? I couldn’t see anything. I asked if he was awake, and he kind of hummed. I thought it was him. I mean, of course I thought it was him.”
My mouth had gone dry.
“He didn’t talk after that,” I said. “Not once. Nate usually talks to me. Little things. Are you okay, I love you, that kind of thing. That night he didn’t.”
Rachel’s face had lost color.
I stood up because sitting still suddenly felt impossible. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Claire.”
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You don’t have to.”
She rose more carefully. “I need you to think about it without protecting anyone. You were asleep. The room was dark. He didn’t speak.”
“It was my bedroom.”
“I know.”
“It was my house.”
“I know.”
“So who else would it be?” I demanded.
Rachel did not answer, and the silence did what her words had not.
A memory shifted. Not the event itself, but the details around it. The hand on my shoulder had felt heavier than Nate’s. The kiss against my neck had been rougher, less familiar. I had explained all of it away because I was half-asleep and desperate to be loved, desperate to make a baby, desperate for that month to be the month.
I backed into the counter. “No.”
Rachel crossed the kitchen and took my hands. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“No,” I said again, but my voice was breaking apart. “No, no, no.”
“Breathe.”
“I would have known.”
“Maybe you couldn’t.”
The room seemed too bright, every object suddenly sharp. The mug in the sink. The torn envelope. The baby bottle balloon dragging its ribbon in the dining room. I had thought my body had betrayed Nate. Then I thought the lab had betrayed me. Now my own memory was turning into a place I was afraid to enter.
“Who has a key?” Rachel asked.
The question landed quietly.
That was what made it worse. Not a dramatic accusation. Not a shouted theory. Just one practical question in my sister’s steady voice.
I thought of our spare keys. My parents had one, but they lived forty minutes away and never came without calling. Rachel had one, but she had been at home that night with her kids. Nate had his. I had mine.
Caleb had the last one.
Nate had given it to him two summers earlier before we left for the beach. Caleb watered the plants, brought in the mail, and fed the neighbor’s cat when it wandered onto our porch. We never asked for the key back. There had never been a reason to.
I sat down hard.
Rachel’s eyes closed for half a second. “Claire.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“I’m not saying—”
“He’s Nate’s brother.”
“I know.”
“He helped me.”
Rachel came around the table and crouched beside my chair. “Sometimes people help because they’re good. Sometimes they help because they want to stay close to the damage.”
I thought of Caleb sitting at my kitchen table, unpacking food while I cried. Caleb texting every day. Caleb telling me Nate did not deserve me. Caleb holding my hand when I opened the results.
Whatever happens, you’re not alone.
My stomach turned.
I reached for my phone with shaking hands and called Nate.
It went straight to voicemail.
I called again. Then again. By the fifth attempt, I understood he had either blocked me or was looking at my name on the screen and choosing not to answer.
“He’s staying with Miles,” I said.
Rachel stood. “Then we go together.”
“You told me to wait.”
“I changed my mind.”
We drove to Miles’s apartment in Rachel’s minivan because she did not trust my hands on a steering wheel. The sky was turning pale over the east side of Columbus, washing the strip malls and gas stations in a colorless light. I sat in the passenger seat with the lab report folded in my lap and tried not to be sick.
Miles lived on the third floor of a brick apartment building near a coffee shop and a dry cleaner. Rachel parked crookedly, and we took the stairs because neither of us wanted to wait for the elevator. By the time we reached his door, my breath was coming too fast.
I knocked. Then I pounded.
“Nate,” I called. “Open the door. Please. I know you don’t want to see me, but you need to hear this.”
The door opened a few inches. Nate stood there in wrinkled jeans, his hair flattened on one side. Behind him, Miles sat on the couch with a cereal bowl in his hand, looking like a man who wished he had left for work early.
Nate’s eyes moved from me to Rachel. “No.”
I put my palm against the door before he could close it. “Someone came into our room.”
His expression hardened. “Don’t.”
“I need you to listen.”
“I listened for a week.”
“No,” Rachel said. Her voice was low and sharp. “You accused. That’s different.”
Nate looked at her, then back at me. “I’m not doing this.”
I stepped inside anyway. It was rude and desperate, and I did not care. Miles stood up, bowl forgotten in his hand.
I told Nate everything in pieces because that was all I had. The night. The darkness. The silence. The hum. The way I had thought it was him because why would I think anything else? I watched him resist the story at first. His jaw locked. His eyes narrowed. He was bracing for another lie.
Then I asked, “Who still has a key to our house?”
The anger shifted.
It did not disappear. It moved, like a storm changing direction.
Nate stared at me. “What?”
“Who has a key?”
He looked at Rachel, then back at me. “Caleb.”
My knees weakened. Rachel’s hand found my elbow.
Nate stepped away from the door. “No.”
“I know,” I said.
“No.”
“I know.”
“He’s my brother.”
“I know.”
For the first time since the party, Nate looked afraid in a way that had nothing to do with pride. The anger that had made him cruel was still there, but now it had nowhere safe to land. He turned once in the small apartment as if searching for something to throw.
“Get in the car,” he said.
Rachel moved between us. “Absolutely not. Not like this.”
Nate looked at her. “Move.”
“No. You don’t get to drag her into another violent scene because you’re finally mad at the right man.”
He flinched. The words hit because they were true.
“I’m going,” I said.
Rachel turned on me. “Claire.”
“I need to know.”
“You know enough to call the police.”
“No, I know enough to be terrified. I don’t know enough to make him stop lying.” My voice shook, but I held her gaze. “If he did this, I need to hear him say it. I need Nate to hear it too.”
Rachel did not like it. I could see every objection moving across her face. But she also knew the look in my eyes. She had seen it when our mother was sick, when I had sat in hospital chairs and demanded doctors explain every number on every chart. I could fall apart later. First, I needed the truth.
So the three of us went.
Rachel drove because she refused to let Nate behind the wheel in that state. Nate sat in the front passenger seat, one hand clamped around his phone, the other curled into a fist against his thigh. I sat in the back with my arms wrapped around myself, watching the city slide past in fragments.
Caleb lived in a newer apartment complex with fake stone columns and landscaping that always looked freshly watered. His building had a keypad entry, but someone came out with a gym bag, and Nate caught the door before it latched. We rode the elevator in silence.
At Caleb’s door, Nate knocked once.
No answer.
He knocked again, harder. “Open up.”
The lock turned almost immediately.
Caleb opened the door wearing sweatpants and a clean white T-shirt. He did not look surprised. That was the first thing I noticed, and it told me something my body understood before my mind could bear it.
His eyes went to Nate, then Rachel, then me.
“Claire,” he said softly.
My name in his voice made my skin crawl.
Nate grabbed the front of Caleb’s shirt and shoved him backward into the apartment. Rachel caught the door before it swung shut, and I followed because I could not stay in the hallway. Caleb hit the wall near the kitchen and did not fight back.
“Tell me,” Nate said.
Caleb looked at his brother with an almost patient sadness. “You figured it out.”
Rachel made a small sound beside me.
I gripped the edge of the nearest chair. The apartment was tidy, almost painfully ordinary. Running shoes by the door. A bowl of keys on the counter. A framed photograph of Nate and Caleb as boys at some lake, both sunburned and smiling.
“You did it?” I asked.
Caleb looked at me then, and his face changed. The softness returned, but it was no longer comforting. It was intimate in a way he had no right to be.
“I loved you,” he said.
Nate slammed him back against the wall. “Don’t say that to her.”
“I still do,” Caleb said, eyes never leaving mine. “That’s the part none of you understand.”