The Divorce by Freida McFadden - 54
54 After a couple of months, I’ve gotten to know more about Jeremy Roth than I ever thought I would. We run together three days a week. At first, there’s a lot of walking involved, and that’s good because we have time to talk. But on the days when we walk less, we still manage to talk a lot. We get ...
54
After a couple of months, I’ve gotten to know more about Jeremy Roth than I ever thought I would.
We run together three days a week. At first, there’s a lot of walking involved, and that’s good because we have time to talk. But on the days when we walk less, we still manage to talk a lot. We get along.
I am mostly hoping for little tidbits about Teddy, and it’s not hard to get them out of him because Jeremy’s favorite topic of conversation is his son. He adores Teddy. If I let him, he would talk about Teddy for the entire hour we are running together, and sometimes he does.
His least favorite topic of conversation is his wife.
I’m very curious about Naomi Paxson Roth. She doesn’t seem to go outside much from what I can tell of my patchy surveillance of their house. Even in the morning, they have a babysitter who takes Teddy to school.
“Does Naomi work?” I ask him on one occasion as we’re doing our third lap around the park .
He shakes his head. “Honestly, I doubt she could manage it.”
“Did she work before you were married?”
“Yes. Well, sort of.”
“What did she do?”
“She calls herself a doctor .” He rolls his eyes. “But she’s not a medical doctor. She’s some sort of crystal healer, who I can only imagine was fleecing all her ‘patients.’”
“A crystal healer?”
“Right. She’s always giving me these crystals and telling me how they’re going to fix my life. Oh, here’s some sandstone—now your reflux is all better!”
“My friend Lola went to a crystal healer once when she was having trouble sleeping,” I recall. “She said it really helped.”
“Well, maybe that crystal healer didn’t get her degree through a two-hour online course.”
I wince. “No, I don’t think she did.”
He can only shake his head. “Frankly, I’m glad she stopped working, because we probably would’ve gotten sued by now.” He’s quiet for a moment, and the only sounds around us are the birds chirping in the trees and our footsteps pounding against the ground. “I shouldn’t have said that. Naomi is…whatever, it’s fine.”
“What?” I slow down my pace, and he does the same. “You can talk to me about it. I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”
“I just…” He stops running and reaches for his right knee, which is taped up today. It really does bother him sometimes—he wasn’t making that up. “I don’t like to talk about this a lot, but I would never have married her if not for Teddy. Never. We only dated a few months, and we ’d already broken up by the time I found out about him.”
“Oh.” I am desperate to find out the whole story, but I don’t want to scare him by pushing him too hard. There’s a slight buzzing in my ears. “So…she was pregnant?”
“She actually had just given birth,” he says. “I was leaving my apartment building, on my way to work, and she comes up to me holding this infant in her arms. And she tells me he’s mine.”
My heart is beating fast, and it’s not from the run. Jeremy never saw Naomi pregnant. She could have stolen my child, gotten the fake birth certificate, and then told him the baby was his.
But there’s one problem with this story. Jeremy is not clueless, and he wouldn’t have just married some woman because she said her baby was his.
“Are you sure he’s yours?” I see the look on his face, and I instantly backtrack. “Sorry. I should never have—”
“No, you’re right. I got a paternity test. It was the first thing I asked for.”
And now he is poking holes in my perfect story. “And it was positive?”
One side of his lips quirks up. “Well, obviously.”
“And it was…” I don’t know how to ask him this. “You didn’t just trust her to mail it in, did you?”
“God no!” He bends down and rubs his knee again. “She gave me the sample from Teddy, I swabbed my own sample, and then I mailed it in myself. I had the results sent directly to me.”
Well, that’s that. Unless Jeremy is lying to me, and I really don’t think he is, that means Teddy can’t be my son, because Dominic’s father was Clay. Naomi may not be mother of the year, but it turns out she’s not a kidnapper.
Yet I can’t seem to let go of the gut feeling that Teddy is mine.
And if he isn’t, I wish he could be.