No matter how strongly I expressed my desire to go back to his hometown with him, he always found a hundred reasons to refuse.
"The family graves are all up in the hills. It rains every Memorial Day, so you'd have to slog through mud the whole way. The only bathrooms are pit latrines. Could you really handle that?"
I thought about it, swallowed my disgust, and said yes.
Then he tried again.
"There's nothing out there. Mom's too sentimental to tear down the old house. At night, rats run across the ceiling. You're terrified of rats. You'd never make it."
I would have had to be a fool not to see he was making excuses.
At the time, I told myself he was just embarrassed for me to see how poor he'd grown up.
But the villagers said he'd done well for himself. He'd renovated the family home into a three-story mansion.
There were no pit latrines. Every bathroom had a smart toilet.
He'd even hired two housekeepers, one to cook and one to clean. Rats running around? Not a chance.
And Spencer had known what the house really looked like all along. He'd been lying to me right alongside his father.
I stepped back, pulling free of my mother-in-law's grasp.
The rage I'd been holding down broke loose.
"What is this about you two being husband and wife?"
I pointed at the villager, my voice shaking with fury.
"Why do the people here say you two are the married couple?"
"The person who married you—wasn't that me?"
"Calvin, how much have you been hiding from me?"
Seeing that the situation was spiraling out of control, Lola dropped to her knees in front of me with a heavy thud.
Her eyes brimmed with fragile, wounded innocence.
"This is all my fault."
"Corinne, you're from the city. You don't understand how hard it is for women like us in the countryside."
"After I became a widow, my own family wouldn't even take me back. They wouldn't so much as save me a burial plot. Calvin only held that wedding reception in the village to keep people from bullying me."
Still lying. Every last one of them.
I looked at this family, and for the first time, the sheer absurdity of my marriage hit me full force.
Spencer suddenly lunged at me, fists swinging.
"You're a bad person!"
I caught his wrist, but he bared his teeth and sank them into my arm.
Blood ran down my wrist in a thin red line.
Lola dabbed at her tears, but behind her hand, the corner of her mouth curled upward.
Calvin yanked Spencer away and snapped at him, brow furrowed.
"You can't just bite people!"
Lola pulled the boy into her arms and turned to me with an apologetic look.
"Corinne, please don't be angry. Spencer just cares about me too much."
At a glance, they looked like the real family of three.
I stared at Spencer's defiant little face, and the pain in my chest was sharp as a needle.
The clothes on his body—I had compared every fabric, every material, one by one, before buying them.
The knitted bag hanging from his shoulder—I had followed the tutorial, unraveled it, and started over several times before I got it right.
But those familiar features, the ones I'd memorized by heart, now looked exactly like Lola's no matter how I tried to see them differently.
I steadied my breathing and turned to Calvin.
"Spencer isn't my child. Is he."
"Give me back my real child. And give me a divorce."
Calvin's brow knotted tight.
"Have you lost your mind? Someone throws out a piece of gossip and you just believe it?"
"Mom already told you—it's local custom here to call your uncle and aunt 'Dad' and 'Mom.' Spencer's just closer to his aunt than most kids, so he calls her that. That's all."
"She's a widow with no one to depend on. Spencer learned to look out for her from the time he was small. What exactly did he do wrong?"
Isabella chimed in from the side.
"Corinne, you've always been generous. Can't you just make a little room in your heart for your poor sister-in-law?"
"It's only here in the village that Lola counts as the second son's wife."
"Plenty of families around here have one man carry on two family lines. I never once entertained that idea. When all's said and done, you're the one I think of as my second son's wife."
I couldn't help but laugh. Cold and hollow.
