Twenty-nine years of knowing me had disappeared behind one accusation from another woman.
“I thought…” My mother swallowed. “I thought your husband’s mother was telling the truth.”
“About what?” I asked.
She looked toward the bassinet.
“That the baby wasn’t…”
She couldn’t finish.
My husband’s jaw tightened.
“Wasn’t what?”
My mother started crying harder.
“She said the baby didn’t look like your husband. She said something was wrong. She said your wife had deceived everyone.”
I stared at her.
“You believed that because she said it?”
“I was shocked.”
“You hit me because you were shocked?”
My mother covered her face.
“I was wrong.”
The words should have comforted me.
They didn’t.
Because the slap wasn’t the only thing hurting.
I had spent the first minutes of my son’s life surrounded by people who had already decided what I had done before anyone had bothered to ask me.
