Second Wife

Chapter 4 — The Other Town

Cedar Hollow was forty minutes from Fairview if you took Route 48 straight through the farmland, past the wind turbines and the Amish produce stands and the billboard for a water park that had closed in 2019. Anna drove it on a Tuesday morning with the windows down and the radio off, Jenna safely at school, Craig two days into a “three-day trip to Indianapolis.”

The Grand Oak Inn sat on Maplecrest Boulevard exactly as the website promised — brick, flagstone patio, a little oak-leaf logo on the sign. Anna parked across the street and watched the entrance for twenty minutes like a woman in a bad movie. Nobody came out. The blinds in Room 214 were closed.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Some dramatic revelation, maybe — Craig’s car in the lot, the woman in the green coat waving from a window. Instead there was just a quiet inn on a quiet boulevard, and the sinking realization that she had no idea what she was doing.

Anna drove on. Cedar Hollow unfolded like a softer, sleepier version of Fairview — same chain stores, same brick ranch houses, same Friday-night football banners, but smaller, dreamier. She passed an elementary school. A library. A park with a splash pad, the water shut off for fall.

And then she saw him.

She almost drove into a mailbox. Her hands jerked the wheel, the car swerved, and she slammed the brakes at the curb, heart hammering, staring through the windshield at the park across the street.

Craig was there. Craig was right there, in Cedar Hollow, on a Tuesday morning when he was supposed to be in Indianapolis.

He was pushing a little girl on the swings.

Anna’s breath stopped. The girl was the one from Jenna’s photo — dark braids, maybe six years old, squealing with delight as Craig pushed her higher. And on the park bench, in a green coat, sat the woman. A boy of about nine played in the sandbox nearby.

Anna killed the engine. Her whole body went numb except for her hands, which were gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white.

She watched Craig push the swing. She watched him catch the little girl at the top of the slide. She watched the woman laugh at something he said, and the boy run up to show them his sandcastle, and Craig crouch down to examine it with the exaggerated seriousness of a dad who is fully, completely present.

It was a family. It was a whole, entire family, and Craig was in the middle of it, and he looked — God help her — he looked like himself. The good husband. The good father. The keeper.

Anna fumbled for her phone. Her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped it, but she got three photos — Craig and the girl on the slide, Craig crouching by the sandbox, the woman standing now, brushing sand off the boy’s knees.

Then the little girl ran to Craig, arms wide, and he scooped her up and swung her around, and she shrieked with joy, and the woman walked over and put her hand on the small of Craig’s back.

And Craig bent down and kissed her.

Not a peck. Not a friendly hello. A real kiss — slow, familiar, the kiss of two people who had kissed a thousand times before.

Anna made a sound she didn’t recognize, half gasp, half sob. She ducked below the dashboard as a car passed, then peered back up, tears blurring her vision.

The woman was laughing. The little girl was tugging Craig’s hand toward the swings again. The boy had climbed onto the bench and was showing his mother something on a tablet.

A mother. That woman was their mother. These were Craig’s children. *Other* children. A whole second life, forty minutes away, running parallel to hers like a train on a neighboring track.

Anna sat in her car until they left — Craig loading the kids into a silver SUV she’d never seen, the woman buckling the little girl into a car seat, all of them waving at someone, all of them smiling. She memorized the license plate. She watched the SUV turn the corner and disappear.

Then she sat in the silence and did the math she hadn’t wanted to do. A six-year-old. A nine-year-old.

Jenna was sixteen. Which meant that when Anna was nursing a colicky newborn at 3 a.m., Craig had already been somebody else’s husband somewhere else. When Anna had cried in the delivery room and he’d held their daughter like a miracle — he’d already had a son.

The thought hit her like a fist. Anna bent over the steering wheel and was sick on the side of the road, heaving until there was nothing left, cars slowing down to stare at the woman vomiting on Maplecrest Boulevard.

When she could breathe again, she wiped her mouth, started the car, and followed the direction the silver SUV had gone. She didn’t have a plan. She just needed to know where. She drove past the elementary school, past the library, into a neighborhood of tidy two-story houses with pumpkins on the porches — and there it was, the silver SUV in a driveway at 14 Birchwood Lane.

Anna parked three houses down. She watched the front door. The woman came out with grocery bags. The kids raced inside. Craig carried in the last bag, and the woman stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, and the door closed behind them.

14 Birchwood Lane, Cedar Hollow. A whole house. A whole address. A whole life with a front porch and pumpkins.

Anna drove home the long way, crying most of the forty minutes, pulling over twice. By the time she reached Fairview, the crying had stopped and something else had taken its place — something cold and clear and unfamiliar.

She pulled into her own driveway, looked at her own house — the colonial, the fire pit, the life she’d spent twelve years building — and felt like a tourist in her own marriage.

Inside, she opened her laptop. She typed *14 Birchwood Lane Cedar Hollow OH* into the property records search.

The house was listed under two names.

Craig M. Cole — and Beth Marlow.

Anna stared at the screen until the words blurred. Then she picked up her phone and opened the note she’d started the night before.

*FIND THE WOMAN.*

Underneath it, in shaking letters, she added a second line:

*Her name is Beth.*