Shauna had our little Wren for nine days, and on the ninth day Kyle decided he was funny.

I was at my kitchen table shelling butter beans when my phone gave that sharp little chirp it makes when someone sends a video. I didn’t look right away because my hands were stained green from the pods and my arthritis was acting up from the damp weather we’d been having down here in the Ozarks.

When I finally wiped my thumbs on my apron and tapped the screen, there was my son-in-law sitting behind the steering wheel of his Ford truck with his mirrored sunglasses on, nodding along to some country song that sounded like it was recorded in a tin can.

The caption across the bottom was three words in that bold typewriter font the kids use. Single dad energy. With a pair of sunglasses emojis.

I sat there looking at it while the little loop played over and over again. Kyle nodding. Kyle looking pleased with himself. Kyle pretending he was out here carrying the world on his shoulders while my daughter was sitting on their sagging plaid sofa in a house that smelled like spit-up and dirty laundry, counting out sixty crumpled dollars from an old mayonnaise jar just to see if she had enough to buy two cans of Similac at the Walmart down on Highway 63.

She told me later she was holding a damp burp cloth in her left hand when the notification popped up on her phone. She thought it was a joke about him having to run back out to the hardware store for a pack of wood screws. He was always doing little projects around the house that took four hours and three trips to town.

Then the comment came in.

It wasn’t even a mean comment. That was the part that made my blood pressure spike when Shauna read it to me later. Some girl with a profile picture of herself holding a golden retriever wrote out a neat little question. She asked if he was still living in that red brick apartment complex over on Bethel Avenue or if he finally moved his stuff out.

Shauna didn’t know a soul over on Bethel Avenue. They lived on County Road 14, three miles outside of town past the grain elevator, where the mailboxes don’t even have numbers on them because the carrier just knows whose granddaddy owned what acreage.

She stared at that name for a minute. Then she tapped the girl’s profile picture and scrolled back three weeks, right before Wren came out of her with a cry that rattled the delivery room lights at the county hospital.

There was Kyle. Sitting at a corner booth in that little diner off the square. His arm was draped over the back of a red vinyl bench, and right beside his shoulder, half-turned away from the camera, was the girl with the golden retriever.

Shauna didn’t scream. She didn’t throw her phone against the wall the way people do in the movies. She told me she just sat there for a long time watching the little blue loading circle spin around while she tried to remember if she had enough powdered formula left in the tin to stretch until Thursday.

Then she sent her a message. Just one sentence. How do you know Kyle?

The answer came back in thirty seconds. Like the girl had been staring at her screen waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When Shauna’s phone buzzed again, she put Wren down in the wooden bassinet we bought at the church rummage sale.

She walked into the little half-bath off the kitchen so the baby wouldn’t hear her breathing, and she dialed my number.

I looked at the clock on the microwave when it started ringing. It was 12:34 in the morning.

“Mama,” she said, and that was all she got out before she made a sound like she had swallowed a stone.

I was out of my bed and into my shoes before she finished the second sentence. I drove those three miles on County Road 14 with my high beams on because the state hadn’t repaved that stretch since the nineties and the potholes could swallow a front axle if you weren’t watching for them.

When I walked through their front door, the place was dead quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the little whistling sound Wren makes when she’s sleeping on her back. Shauna was sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa, her knees pulled up to her chin in those gray sweatpants she practically lived in since the stitches from the delivery started pulling.

She didn’t look up when I clicked the latch on the front door. She just held her phone out toward me like she was offering me a dead bird she found in the yard.

I took it from her fingers. They were ice cold, even though the house was stuffy because Kyle liked to keep the thermostat cranked up to seventy-four to save money on his precious heating bills.

I had to put my reading glasses on to see the screen properly. The girl on the other end had sent three long paragraphs, and she wrote them with the sort of careful, polite punctuation people use when they are trying very hard not to look like the home-wrecker everyone in town is going to talk about at the Piggly Wiggly on Saturday morning.

She wasn’t a coworker from the lumber yard where Kyle claimed he was putting in double shifts to pay for the crib. She was a dental assistant who lived in those apartments on Bethel Avenue, and she had been living with him on the weekends for six months.

That was bad enough. But then came the part about the timeline.

The girl was twenty-two weeks along. Six months pregnant. And Kyle had been telling her that he was an unmarried man whose wife had walked out on him two years ago, leaving him with nothing but a memory and a broken heart.

I read the words twice. Then I looked down at my daughter, who was still wearing the same oversized t-shirt she had worn home from the hospital, with a faint yellow ring of spit-up dried right near the collar where Wren had leaned her head an hour before.

“He’s been there three nights a week,” Shauna whispered. She wasn’t even crying anymore. Her eyes looked dry and gray like river stones. “He told me he was doing inventory at the yard. He even brought home overtime pay stubs, Mama. I don’t even know where he got them printed.”

Before I could tell her we were going to call her brother Wade and get a truck over here to throw every last one of Kyle’s boots out into the mud by the mailbox, the screen on the phone lit up again.

Three little gray dots started bouncing in the bubble at the bottom of the chat.

The other girl was still typing. She wanted to know if Shauna was the sister. She wanted to know if Kyle was still using her car on Tuesdays.

I looked at those little bouncing dots and something in my chest just turned over, cold and hard as a cast-iron skillet left out in the snow. I didn’t let Shauna read what came next. I reached out, took the phone right out of her lap, and dropped it into my apron pocket before she could blink.

“Get your shoes on,” I told her, and my voice didn’t shake once. “We’re going to the kitchen table, and we’re going to find every single bank statement your husband thought he hid in that filing cabinet.”

She stood up slowly, her joints popping the way mine do after a long day in the garden, and she reached down to pick up her baby.

While Kyle was still asleep in some other woman’s bed thirty miles away across town, dreaming about how clever he was with his little sunglasses and his internet jokes, we spent the rest of that night opening every folder he had locked in his desk. By dawn, we had his credit card numbers, his second checking account at the credit union in Daleville, and the name of the lawyer who had handled his dead father’s estate.

When he finally pulled his truck into the gravel drive at eleven o’clock the next morning, looking refreshed and smelling faintly of men’s cologne that didn’t belong in our house, he didn’t even make it to the front porch.

I was sitting in the wooden rocking chair by the screen door with Shauna’s phone in my lap and a three-ring binder full of his own financial records spread out across my knees.

He cut the engine and sat there for a second behind those same mirrored sunglasses, looking at my car parked right behind his bumper so he couldn’t back out.

“Where’s Shauna?” he asked, stepping down into the dust and trying to put on that big, easy grin he used whenever he wanted everyone to think he was just a hardworking country boy who loved his family more than life itself.

I didn’t get up out of the rocker. I just looked at him through the rusty wire of the screen, and I asked him one question about Bethel Avenue that he didn’t have an answer for.