Second Wife

Chapter 8 — Two Families

The wallet fell out of Beth’s purse on a Tuesday, at the playground.

It was one of those bright, brittle autumn afternoons when the light comes sideways and everything looks sharper than it is. Maya was on the swings, pumping her legs with furious concentration, and Eli was attempting to impress a group of older boys on the climbing wall. Beth had brought a thermos of cider. Anna had brought a bag of popcorn she’d bought at the gas station, because that was what their friendship had become — thermoses and popcorn and Tuesdays, regular as church.

Beth’s phone rang. She fished it out of her purse, stood up to take the call — “It’s the school,” she mouthed — and the wallet slid out of the open bag and hit the mulch with a soft thump.

Anna picked it up before she thought about it. That was all. She picked it up.

It was open.

That was the thing she told herself later, in the laundry room, with the pen shaking in her hand. It was *open*. The little plastic window on the inside flap was facing up, and the photograph in it was facing up, and Anna’s eyes were only doing what eyes do.

It was a wedding photo.

The bride was Beth. Younger — early thirties, maybe — her hair in a loose knot instead of the ponytail Anna knew, her smile radiant in a way Anna had never seen on her friend’s face. And the groom —

The groom was Craig.

Anna’s first thought was so absurd that she almost laughed out loud: *She’s wearing ivory.* Her second thought was: *His hair was darker then.* Her third thought was nothing at all, because her whole body had gone somewhere else — somewhere cold and far away, where a woman named Anna Cole stood at a playground holding proof that her husband had married another woman and was still standing.

“Beth—” she said.

Beth was still on the phone, her back turned, laughing at something the school secretary said. The wallet was in Anna’s hands. The photo was in Anna’s eyes. Anna’s thumb was on the edge of the plastic, and she had about four seconds.

She put the wallet back in the purse. She tucked it down deep, under the sunglasses case and the pack of tissues, so it would look like it had never left.

Her heart was doing something violent against her ribs.

“A school thing,” Beth said, sitting back down, pocketing her phone. “Maya’s teacher wants to talk about her reading level. Which is code for: your daughter is reading three grades ahead and it’s making the other kids look bad.” She grinned. “I’m choosing to take it as a compliment.”

Anna smiled. She had no idea what her face was doing. She hoped it was smiling.

“Everything okay?” Beth asked, tilting her head. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just — cold,” Anna said. “This cider is saving my life.”

“Right?” Beth wrapped her hands around her own cup. “Fall in Ohio. Blink and you miss it.”

They watched the children. Maya had graduated to jumping off the swing at the highest point, and Beth winced every time but didn’t call out, and Anna thought: *She’s a good mother.* That thought felt like a betrayal of itself. She thought: *She married my husband.* That thought felt like falling.

The date, Anna kept thinking. What was the date? She’d seen it — hadn’t she? Printed in white letters along the bottom of the photo, the way wedding photos do. She’d seen numbers. But her brain had refused to record them, the way a camera refuses to focus on something too close.

She needed the date. If the wedding was before Craig married Anna — no, that didn’t make sense, Craig had married Anna twelve years ago, and Beth was thirty-six, and Eli was nine —

Nine. Eli was nine. The math moved through her like a cold front. If Beth’s marriage photo was real, if the photo was *real*—

“Mom!” Maya shouted, breathless, cheeks pink, hair flying. “Did you see how high I went?”

“Higher than the moon,” Beth said, and Maya beamed, and Eli rolled his eyes, and Anna sat on the bench with popcorn on her lap and a bomb in her chest and smiled and smiled and smiled.

On the drive home, she had to pull over twice. Not to cry — she didn’t cry. She just sat, hands at ten and two, staring at the cornfields, and let the fact of it settle over her like snow.

A wedding photo. A *wedding* photo. Not an affair. Not a girlfriend. A marriage. A second marriage, with a photographer and a cake and witnesses who had clapped. Craig hadn’t just strayed. He had built a second family the way a man builds a second house — deliberately, with permits and foundations, while the first house stood forty minutes away, unsuspecting.

And Beth — Beth kept the photo in her wallet. In the front. Where you put the thing you look at when you’re in line at the pharmacy. Where you put the thing you love.

Anna thought about Beth’s river-water eyes. About the shadow that had crossed Beth’s face when Anna mentioned the traveling husband. About the door, left open.

She wrote it all down that night, in the notebook, behind the detergent. Her hand was steady now. The shaking had stopped somewhere around the second rest stop.

*She has a wedding photo. Craig is the groom. She doesn’t know I saw it. Don’t let her know.*

And then, under that, because it was the truest thing she knew:

*I’m not the only wife anymore. I’m the wife who came second — or maybe first. I need to know which.*

She closed the notebook. She closed the laundry room door. She went upstairs and got into bed beside her husband — her husband, the groom in two wedding photos — and lay awake until dawn, listening to him breathe, and wondering which of his two wives he dreamed about.

In the morning, her phone buzzed. A text from Beth: *Coffee Thursday? I need to tell you something.*

Anna stared at the message for a long time. Her thumb hovered over the screen.

*Of course,* she typed back. *I always need coffee.*

She set the phone down and thought about the wallet, and the photo, and the date she hadn’t quite seen — and she wondered, with a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn air, whether Beth had dropped that wallet on purpose.