Under that, in heavier ink: “I’ll let it go. But I won’t forget what she’s capable of.”
I sat there on the bed, journal open, hands shaking.
Two kids. Her kids. Not his.
What if there were no secret children?
What if she’d walked into my grief and decided it wasn’t enough?
I picked up my phone and called Peter.
Peter was Greg’s closest friend from work. He’d been at the house three times already, fixing things that weren’t broken because he didn’t know what else to do.
He answered fast. “Ev?”
I told him everything. The note. The cameras. What Susan had said. What I’d read in the journal. He went quiet.
“Peter?” I whispered.
“I believe you,” he said finally. “I knew Ray. If he’d had kids with someone else, he wouldn’t have been able to hide it. He was a terrible liar.”
A weak laugh escaped me.
“I’ll help you find out what’s real,” he said. “You deserve that.”
***
The following afternoon, he sent his son, Ben.
“I’ll lose my temper if I go,” Peter told me. “Ben’s calmer.”
Ben was 17. Tall, polite, a little awkward. He stopped by my house first.
“I can back out if you want,” he said. “You don’t owe anyone proof.”
Peter had already dug up Susan’s address from old vendor paperwork. Ben drove over.
When he came back an hour later, we sat at my kitchen table. My hands were wrapped around a mug of tea I wasn’t drinking.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
“So,” he said, “I knocked. This girl opened the door. Teenager. Pajama pants, messy bun. I asked for her dad.”
I pictured it as he talked.
“She yelled for him,” Ben went on. “Guy in his 50s comes to the door. I told him, ‘I’m here because of something your wife said at a funeral yesterday.'”
Ben swallowed. “I told him she said she’d had an affair with Greg. That her kids were Greg’s.”
I winced.
“He just… froze,” Ben said. “Then he yelled for Susan. She came out with a dish towel in her hand. Saw me. Saw him. She knew something was wrong right away.”
“She denied it,” he said. “Said I was lying. I told her I’d heard her with my own ears.”
“And then?”
“Her husband asked again,” Ben said. “He looked… broken. He said, ‘Did you tell people our kids aren’t mine?'”
Ben stared at the table.
“She snapped,” he said. “She yelled, ‘Fine, I said it, okay?'”