My husband had twins with my best friend and told me he finally had the family I could never give him. I signed the divorce papers without arguing — and then his mother answered my message with one sentence that told me the divorce wasn’t the end of anything.

Emory is bringing the twins to the house next weekend. I thought you’d want to know.

Her reply came in under a minute.

You have no idea what you just confirmed.

I read that four times.

Because eight days earlier, Winifred Kessler had called me — me, the daughter-in-law she had spent eleven years correcting — and kept me on the phone for an hour and fifty minutes, circling and circling, asking whether I knew anything about a fertility center in Alder Mesa.

And whether I had ever known of Bree going there.