I forbade Brian Simmons from bringing the housekeeper's daughter home to live with us. He agreed to my face, then kept her tucked away in a private place behind my back.

Everyone said how lucky I was. Married into money, and carrying twins on top of it.

But the day I gave birth, I hemorrhaged, and Brian was off celebrating that woman's birthday.

My mother sat collapsed in the hospital corridor, crying as she called him over and over. His phone stayed switched off the whole time.

It was only later that I learned the housekeeper's daughter had been his since she was eighteen.

I took the twins back to my mother's place. When Brian came after me, I was in the middle of changing a diaper.

He stood in the doorway in a tailored suit, a baby toy dangling from one hand.

"Fee, come home with me."

He held the toy out. "I know I was wrong."

I looked up at him and gave a small smile. "Wrong about what?"

He froze, as if he hadn't expected me to ask.

I took the toy and dropped it into the trash right in front of him.

"Wrong about…"

I dusted off my hands, my voice very quiet. "You should have married her in the first place, instead of tricking me into having your children."

…

Brian bent down to fish the toy back out.

The trash can tipped over. Baby wipes and a used diaper rolled out and stuck to his handmade Italian leather shoes.

He didn't move.

"Fee," he said, dropping his voice low, "I know you're angry…"

"I'm angry?"

I scooped up the younger one. The little thing had just finished his bottle and let out a milky burp. "Angry about what?"

He straightened and glanced around the living room.

The changing table, the formula tins, baby rattles scattered across the floor.

His mother had come by last week, said the place was too cramped, told me to move back.

"The thing with Sloane, I handled it badly."

"Sloane."

I repeated the name. "What's her name?"

Brian's face changed.

"You don't even know her full name, and you rented her a place at the Sandalwood Residences?"

I patted the baby's back. "Thirty-eight hundred a month. More than the rent on this whole building of my mother's."

"The place is in her name," he said.

My hand stopped.

The baby started fussing, so I shifted him to my other shoulder and kept patting.

"In her name," I said. "Brian, you bought her a house?"

He was silent for two seconds.

Those two seconds were enough.

The older one suddenly started crying in the crib, his voice cracking, arms and legs kicking everywhere.

My hands were full. Brian stepped over on instinct, leaned down to pick him up, then pulled his hands back halfway.

He didn't know how to hold a baby.

We'd always had a nanny at home. He'd never changed a single diaper.

"You should go," I said.

He stayed standing by the crib.

The older one was crying himself red in the face, and Brian just looked on, helpless, his suit cuff brushing against the dried milk on the crib rail.

"Fee, the doctor said your recovery's been rough. Two children can't go without their mother."

I set the younger one in the rocker, walked over, and lifted the older one out.

The moment he was in my arms he went quiet, his little face burrowing into my chest.

"They never had a father to begin with," I said.

Brian's head snapped up.

"How many times did you sign?"

I soothed the baby, my voice low. "The checkup when I fainted, the nurse called you. You were in a meeting. The time he ran a fever and was admitted, Sloane answered your phone. And the day I was hemorrhaging, where were you?"

The older one started chewing on his hand. I gently eased it out.

"My mother knelt on the floor and called you forty-three times."

Brian's throat moved.

"That day was Sloane's birthday."

"You went to Miami with her," I said. "A helicopter there and back, just to have dinner."

He spoke. "I'd booked it before any of this. There was no getting out of it—"

"No getting out of it?"

I laughed. "She's been with you since she was eighteen. Eight years. And you couldn't get out of one birthday?"

The living room went quiet, just the baby babbling in the rocker.

In the kitchen my mother had been chopping pork ribs. The knife stopped.

Brian looked me in the eye. "Fee, I've ended it with her."

I said nothing.

"I gave her a house. Call it a settlement."

He took a step closer. "I promise, from now on—"

"You promise."

I gave a small laugh. "Last time you promised you wouldn't move her in. Then you turned around and rented her an apartment. The time before that you promised you'd be done with her before the babies came. Three days after I gave birth, she sent me a photo of the two of you."

Brian froze.

"You want to guess what she sent?"

I set the older one down and turned to face him. "She sent the one of you tying a scarf around her neck. That scarf was mine. The Van Cleef one I bought."

The color drained out of his face completely.

"Brian." I leaned against the side of the crib. "When you were chasing me, you said you were single. When you proposed, you said there was no one in your heart but me. When I was pregnant with twins, throwing up until it was bile, you put your hand on my belly and said the four of us would have a good life together."

The younger one fussed in the rocker. I went over and picked him up.

His little mouth crumpled, ready to cry again, so I turned aside, lifted my shirt, and fed him.

All that was left in the living room was the older one sucking on his fingers.

Brian still stood where he was. There was garbage stuck to his leather shoes. He didn't even glance down at it.

"That scarf." He spoke. "I didn't know she took that picture on the sly."

"Of course you didn't."

I pressed my hand to the back of the younger one's head. "You didn't know she sent me the photo. You didn't know she used your phone at two in the morning to send me voice messages. You didn't know she photographed my prenatal reports and showed them to her mother."

Brian took a step forward.

The younger one was still nursing when he suddenly hiccupped, white froth spilling at the corner of his mouth.

I took a cloth and wiped him, then set the cloth down on the coffee table, next to the divorce papers weighted there.

My mother had drawn them up for me yesterday. An old friend of hers is a divorce lawyer.

Brian saw them.

He slid them out and flipped through a couple of pages.

"You want to divorce me?"

"It's all written out in the agreement."

"The children go to you?"

"They go to me."

He pinched the edge of the paper, pressing his thumb over the crease again.

"Fee, the babies are still so small. You, on your own—"

"On my own?"

I laughed. "The day I hemorrhaged, the nurse held the babies up for me to see. She said, look, Mommy, they're both fine. I was lying on the operating table, the anesthesia worn off, shaking all over from the pain. The doctor asked where the family was. The nurse said she couldn't reach anyone."

The younger one had finished. I sat him up to burp him.

His little head slumped soft against my shoulder, drool soaking into my collar.

"That day, my mother signed."

I said, "Her hand shook so hard she couldn't write. The doctor said without a signature both the mother and the babies were in danger. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand and traced each stroke for half a minute."

Brian stayed silent.

And into that silence my mother came out of the kitchen.

She'd taken off her apron. She still had the kitchen knife in her hand, bits of meat clinging to the blade.

"Brian," my mother said. "Are you leaving or not?"

He glanced at her.

My mother is five foot two, barely up to his shoulder, and she had that knife raised, grease spattered on her cuff.

"Mom!"

"Who's your mother."

She slapped the knife down on the shoe cabinet. "Three years. You've set foot in this house fewer than five times. When Fee was so dehydrated from morning sickness with her first pregnancy and called you to come get her, you said you were with a client. When she started cramping and bleeding in the middle of the night, she called 911 herself, and when the ambulance got downstairs she couldn't climb onto the stretcher—the security guard had to carry her up."

Brian's lips moved, but nothing came out.

My mother dragged in a breath. "You try to take An away today, I'll cut you down first, then cut myself down after."

Theodore started coughing, a wet rattle in his throat, his little face going red.

I set Job down in the rocker and lifted Theodore, patting his back.

A bit of phlegm came up, and then he started crying again.

Brian came over and reached out to take him.

I didn't give him over.

"Stay where you are."

His hand stopped in midair.

"You've got her perfume on you," I said. "Gucci Bloom. The one she's always spraying."

He lowered his hand.

"You saw her before you came?"

He said nothing.

"What did she say?"

"She said—" Brian's voice was very low. "She's pregnant."

The living room went so quiet there was nothing but Theodore's hiccupping.

My mother's knife hit the floor. A single clang.

I patted Theodore's back.

"How far along?"

"A little over two months."

"Two and a half months younger than these two," I said, and I smiled. "Brian, you work fast."

His head snapped up. "An, I never touched her—"

"Then whose baby is she carrying?"

His lips trembled.

"She said it was that night, the night you gave birth, in Miami—"

"That night?" I cut him off. "I was hemorrhaging, and the two of you were getting a room in Miami?"

He didn't deny it.

Theodore started crying again, so I walked him back and forth in my arms.

I walked to the window. Down below, a young couple pushed a stroller past, the husband bending to tie his wife's shoe.

"You should go," I said.

"An—"

"Go home and cook for Sloane." I kept my back to him. "She's pregnant. Don't let her go hungry."

No sound behind me.

A long time passed before I heard his dress shoe turn on the floor, then come down on a dropped diaper with a wet, sticky squelch.

He left.

My mother crouched to pick up the knife. It had chipped against the floor, and she turned the chipped edge toward herself.

"An," she said, "I stewed pork ribs for you."

I carried Theodore back over.

Job had fallen asleep in the rocker, his little mouth opening and closing.

I laid Theodore down beside him, two identical little heads tucked side by side.

"Mom," I said, "tomorrow find my household register for me."

My mother had her back to me, chopping scallions, the knife rising and falling.

"All right."

I went to the coffee table and picked the divorce agreement up off the floor.

Brian had taken it when he left, then dropped it again by the door.

Job rolled over, his little fist landing on Theodore's face.

Theodore grunted but didn't wake, just turned his face away.

I sat on the arm of the couch and watched them.

My phone rang.

Sloane had sent a voice message. Twenty seconds.

I tapped it open.

Her voice was soft and sweet. "Sis, is Brian over at your place? I made soup and I'm waiting for him to come home and have some."

I set the phone face-down on the coffee table.

The screen was still lit. She'd changed her profile picture to the photo of Brian tying that scarf around her neck.

On the windowsill, the pothos my mother kept trailed down, water beading at the tips of the leaves.

I tapped the message and listened to it again.

"Sis, is Brian over at your place? I made soup and I'm waiting for him to come home and have some."

My mother poked her head out of the kitchen. "Who is it?"

"No one." I turned the phone off.

First thing the next morning I went to the law firm. That old friend of my mother's, James, had done divorce cases for twenty years, her office walls covered in client thank-you plaques. She read through the agreement three times, then tapped her finger on the line that said "division of assets."