The Man Who Knew

Foster Lang answered the door in a cardigan, looking older than Naomi remembered from the funeral, like grief had aged him overnight too. He and Gregory had run the hardware business together for almost twenty years before Gregory sold his half.

"Naomi," he said, surprised. "I would've called if I'd known you were coming."

"Did you know," Naomi said, no greeting, no softening, "that Gregory had a daughter?"

Foster's face didn't do the thing she was braced for — the shock, the denial. Instead it did something worse. It fell, slow and tired, like a man setting down something heavy he'd carried a long time.

"Come in," he said. "Sit down first."

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to answer the question."

"Yes," Foster said. "I knew."

The word landed like a slap. Naomi had half-hoped, walking up the driveway, that Foster would be as blindsided as she was — that there'd be someone else in the world who could stand next to her in the wreckage. Instead she was standing alone in it, and everyone else, apparently, had known the layout for years.

"How long," she asked.

"Since before you two married." Foster rubbed his face with both hands. "He came to me the week he found out. Lorraine — the mother — was someone he'd dated briefly, years before you. It ended badly. When she told him she was pregnant, he panicked. You two were already engaged."

"So he married me and kept paying her off in secret for twenty-four years."

"It wasn't like that," Foster said, and something in his voice sharpened, defensive in a way that surprised her. "He wasn't protecting himself from an affair coming out, Naomi. Not really. Not after the first few years."

"Then what was he protecting?"

Foster looked at her for a long moment, like he was deciding whether the next sentence could be taken back once he said it.

"He was protecting Sable," he said. "From her mother."