The babysitter arrived in a panic, looking like she’d seen a ghost. “I couldn’t… I didn’t know who else to turn to,” she stammered, refusing to meet my eye. My stomach dropped.
I knew something was wrong the second she walked in. She’d been acting strange for weeks, ever since that night she came home with scratches on her arms and a story about falling off her bike. “It was just two people looking for comfort,” she’d told me then, but I knew better. I’d seen the fear in her eyes.
Now she was shaking, clutching her hands together like she was trying to stop them from trembling. “He came back at me,” she whispered. “He was ripping into me, calling me names, saying our baby died because it was an abomination. ”
The words hit me like a punch to the gut.
Our baby. The one we’d lost last year. The grief we’d never really talked about. “And then he crumpled,” she said, her voice breaking.
“And I didn’t phone an ambulance. ”
I stared at her, trying to process what she was saying. The man on the scaffolding site who’d threatened her. The one who’d been harassing her for months.
He was dead. “I wanted to tell you so many times,” she sobbed. “But how could I tell you a secret that big on top of everything? ”
I felt the world tilt beneath my feet.
This was the woman I loved, the mother of my child, and she was confessing to murder. The same woman who’d been in my bed every night, who’d held me when I cried, who’d promised me everything was going to be okay. “Swear then,” I heard myself say, my voice hollow. “Swear you’re telling me the truth.
”
She looked at me with those eyes I’d fallen in love with, and I knew whatever she said next would change everything.
