PART 2 — THE NEWBORN
My husband left me for my best friend while I was recovering from surgery. They moved into the house we bought together and changed the locks before I could even collect my clothes. I thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen between us.
A year later she stood at my apartment door, shaking, holding their newborn son. Please take him, she begged. Your husband can never know what I found out about his first wife, because he is planning to do the same thing to me.
I never knew he had a first wife. But my friend had found the papers. Years ago he had married another woman, drained her accounts, forged her name onto loans and a policy, and left her ruined and alone before he ever met me. And now, with a baby and a house in my friends name, he was quietly setting up to do it all again.
The man we both loved had a pattern older than either of us, and my friend had become the next name on a list that started long before mine.
I did not turn her away, and I did not take her baby from her. I did something better. I sat her down, and we laid every document she had found on my kitchen table, and we stopped being rivals and started being witnesses.
We took it all to a lawyer and then to the authorities. The first wife was found, alive and willing to tell her story at last. Three women, one pattern, one paper trail. He had counted on each of us being too ashamed to compare notes.
He answered for the forgeries and the fraud, all of it, in a courtroom, with the three of us in the gallery.
My friend and I are not what we were, and maybe we never will be. But her little boy has two women who will make sure he grows up nothing like his father. The man who thought he could use us one at a time learned what happens when we finally stand in the same room.