The Woman Next Door by Barbara Delinsky

played good cop to her bad cop. Even now, as she returned to the table, wasn’t he telling Jordie that he could stay at Sean’s until ten-thirty just this once? Wasn’t the smile Jordie shot her a defiant one? Wasn’t that her own faithful little Julie, sitting on Lee’s lap with an arm around his neck?
    Setting the plate in front of him with a thunk, Karen returned to her own dinner, but she didn’t join in the talk, only listened, and with half an ear at that. Her mind was on other things. She kept seeing Gretchen’s belly and wondering when Lee might have been with her. There were dozens of opportunities, of course. Karen always marked her own meetings on the large calendar by the kitchen phone. Lee would know when she was out, where she was, and how long she would be gone. He would know when the kids would also be gone, when there would be no one to see if he ran next door. There had been times—at night, no less, in the dark, when no neighbor would see either—times when he had pleaded one work-related excuse or another and skipped an event involving Karen and all four kids. Several of those times, they had returned home to find him there.
    “Just walked in,” he always said with a big smile, tousling the twins’ hair and catching Julie when she catapulted into his arms.
    Well, he might have just walked in. But whether he had walked in from work or from Gretchen’s was anybody’s guess.
    Grinding her teeth in a way that the dentist had warned her about but that she simply couldn’t help, Karen pushed away from the table and took her plate to the sink. The plate was empty. She had eaten everything without tasting a bite. Rinsing it now, she yanked the dishwasher open and dropped it inside, swearing, swearing that if Lee was the father of Gretchen’s baby, it would be one affair too many. Seventeen years of marriage would go right down the drain. They would be done. Finished. If he was the father of that baby, Karen didn’t want to feed him again, sleep with him again, wash his socks again. If he was the father of that baby, she didn’t want to see him again.
    Yes, she was being emotional about this. Given his late nights at work, the phone calls he took but never identified, the expenses on their credit card bill that she couldn’t explain—and couldn’t ask about, because she wasn’t supposed to be seeing them, since Lee insisted that paying the bills was his job—she couldn’t be objective. She just couldn’t. At that moment, chafed raw by Lee’s history of infidelity, she couldn’t imagine that the baby’s father could possibly be anyone but him.
    The phone rang. Pushing a last piece of bread into his mouth, Jordie jumped for it. “Hey,” he said in his new deep voice to whomever was at the other end, likely a friend, to judge from his tone. He listened, frowned, and listened more.
    Drawn to his silence, Karen looked back at her son just as his color drained away.

Chapter Four
    Georgia Lange sat alone in her San Antonio hotel room, only vaguely aware of her surroundings. After spending so many nights of the last few years in hotel rooms, one blurred with another. She rarely unpacked other than to hang up wrinkled clothes; as odious as living out of a suitcase was, it felt better than making herself at home in a place that wasn’t. Likewise, she had taken to pretending that the rest of the house she loved was right outside her door. That helped ease the isolation—until she found herself waiting for Russ and the kids to come in, which was usually at the hour when their dinner was done and the evening began settling in. That was when she picked up the phone and called home.
    This evening the line was busy on her first few tries, which meant that her daughter was using call waiting to switch back and forth between calls. Sure enough, when the phone finally rang, Allison picked up in a rushed voice. “Hello?”
    “Hi, sweetie.”
    “Mom,” the girl said with the deep-voiced awe she