THE GIRL IN THE MEMORIAL GARDEN
Adrian didn’t move.
Neither did I.
For several seconds, the only sound was the wind moving through the trees.
Then Lena looked between us.
“You knew she was here?”
Adrian swallowed.
“No.”
Lena’s face hardened.
“You lied to me too.”
I stared at my husband.
“Who is she?”
Adrian closed his eyes.
“My daughter.”
The words hit me harder than I expected.
“How old?”
“Seventeen.”
I felt my stomach drop.
Seventeen.
Adrian had been married to me for six years.
He had never once mentioned having a child.
Lena looked at me.
“I didn’t know you existed either,” she said quietly.
I couldn’t tell whether she was angry or ashamed.
“Then why have you been meeting him here?”
She looked at Adrian.
“Because he promised he’d tell you.”
I turned toward him.
“Tell me what?”
Adrian finally stepped closer.
“Claire, Lena’s mother and I were teenagers. I was eighteen when she got pregnant. Her family moved away, and I was told the baby had been given up for adoption.”
Lena interrupted.
“That isn’t what happened.”
Adrian looked at her.
She pulled a folded document from her bag.
“My mother found this last year.”
She handed it to me.
It was an old hospital record.
Adrian’s name was listed as the father.
But beneath it was something else.
A second document.
A DNA test.
I looked at the result.
Then at Lena.
She wasn’t simply Adrian’s daughter.
She was biologically related to our twins.
My hands began to shake.
“What does this mean?”
Lena whispered:
“It means your boys aren’t the only children Adrian has been keeping from you.”
I looked at my husband.
His face had gone completely white.
“Claire,” he said, “there’s something else.”
I stepped backward.
“No more secrets.”
He nodded slowly.
Then he pointed toward the small memorial beside the oak tree.
“That’s where Lena’s mother is buried.”
I stared at the name engraved in the stone.
And suddenly I recognized it.
I had seen that name before.
On one of Adrian’s old photographs.
The woman he had always told me was simply a childhood friend.
She wasn’t.
And the reason Adrian had been turning off his location wasn’t because he was having an affair.
He had been coming here because someone had been threatening to expose a secret he had spent seventeen years hiding.
A secret that could destroy far more than our marriage.