After their anniversary dinner, she found a cheap flip phone hidden in her husband's truck. One text: will you be at Mia's birthday Saturday? She keeps asking for Daddy. They'd spent nine years trying for a baby. And the woman who sent that text was someone she knew very well.
Sixteen years.
Tamika Curtis drove her husband's truck out of the restaurant parking garage at ten thirty at night because he'd had two glasses of wine and she'd had none. She never drank anymore. Not since the doctors. Old habit.
The anniversary dinner had been nice. Steak for him, salmon for her, a candle on the table. He'd given her diamond earrings and a card that said Still my favorite person. She'd almost cried. They'd been through so much, the two of them.
Nine years of trying for a baby. Four rounds of IVF. Every one of them failed. A whole shelf of pregnancy tests in the bathroom cabinet she couldn't make herself throw away. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she'd stopped saying "when we have kids" and started saying "if."
Darnell had held her through every single one.
That's what she was thinking about when she stopped at the exit gate of the garage and the truck went quiet, and she heard it.
A buzz. Small. From the pocket of the driver's door. Right by her knee.
She reached down without thinking. Her fingers closed on something small and plastic.
She pulled it out and held it up under the yellow garage light.
A phone. A cheap black flip phone. The kind you buy at a gas station. The kind nobody uses anymore unless they have a reason.
Darnell was sitting in the passenger seat in his black jacket, scrolling his real phone. He looked up. He saw what was in her hand.
She watched his face. Bald head, short beard, the wedding ring on his left hand resting on his knee. His face didn't change. That was the scariest part. It just went completely, carefully still.
"Why do you have a second phone?"
Darnell looked at the phone. Then at her.
"It's for work."
She turned the phone over in her hand. No company logo. No case. No name.
"Whoever's on this phone," she said, "you love them more than the truth."
Darnell reached across the console for it. Not fast. Just steady, his hand open.
"Tamika," he said. "Put it back."
She didn't put it back.
She flipped it open.
One new message. No name. Just a number with a North Carolina area code. She read it in the little blue glow of the screen.
Will you be at Mia's birthday Saturday? She keeps asking for Daddy.
Tamika read it again. And again. The words didn't change.
"She keeps asking for Daddy," she said out loud. Her voice didn't sound like her voice.
She looked up from the screen. Her eyes were already wet. Her husband sat in the dark next to her with his hand still half out, and he didn't say a word.
"Who is Mia?" she said. Then, slower, because she'd heard it in her own head before she said it. "Mia Curtis?"
Curtis. His last name. Her last name.
Darnell looked at her across the dark truck for a long time. Then he put his hand back on his knee.
Behind them, somebody honked. The gate arm was up. They'd been sitting there for almost a minute.
Tamika didn't move.
"Darnell. Who is Mia?"
"Not here," he said quietly. "Please. Let's go home, and I'll tell you everything."
"You'll tell me now."
The car behind them honked again, longer. Darnell closed his eyes.
"She's six," he said. "She turns six on Saturday."
Tamika felt the steering wheel under her hands, but she couldn't feel her hands.
Six years old.
Six years ago, she was in a hospital bed after the third round of IVF. The one that almost worked. The one where she got a positive test and they cried in the bathroom together, and then two weeks later she lost it, and she bled so much they kept her for three days.
Darnell had been away a lot that year. Work trips. Charlotte. He said the company was opening a new territory.
"Is she yours?"
He didn't answer.
"Is she yours, Darnell?"
"Yes."
Tamika pulled the truck forward through the gate, out onto the street, and over to the curb, and put it in park. Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely work the gearshift.
She held the flip phone up between them.
"Who sent this?"
"Tamika, please. Let me explain first. It's not what..."
She didn't wait for him to finish. She pressed the green button and called the number back.
It rang twice.
Then a woman's voice answered. Soft. A little nervous. A voice Tamika had known her whole entire life. A voice that used to sing in the bunk bed below hers when they were girls.
"Darnell? Hey. Did you get my message? Mia made you a card..."
Tamika's sister.
Nikki.
This is a fictional story. Names, characters and events are invented. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
