“I don’t understand,” I said slowly.
“I don’t either,” Corinne said, tears still falling. “I promise you, Theo, I have never once been unfaithful to you. I need you to believe that, especially right now, before anyone else gets the chance to plant a different idea in your head.”
I looked at both boys again, working through genetics I only vaguely remembered from a high school biology class decades earlier.
“I believe you,” I said, and found, sitting there, that I genuinely meant it. “I don’t understand it. But I believe you.”
Word spread through both our families within days, the way word always does, and by the time we brought the boys home, I could feel the whispers trailing behind us at every family gathering, every pediatrician’s waiting room, every trip to the grocery store with two car seats balanced in the cart.
My own mother pulled me aside at Owen and Malcolm’s two-week checkup gathering. “Theo,” she said carefully, “I love you, and I love those boys already. But you understand people are going to talk.”
“Let them talk,” I said. “Corinne told me the truth, and I believe her.”
