PART 2
The room went completely silent.
“My obituary?” I said.
Hailey pulled out her phone with shaking hands. She scrolled, then turned it toward me.
There was my face. My college graduation photo. Under it: “Natalie Brooks, 1991–2021. Beloved wife. Taken too soon by a car accident.”
A memorial page on a funeral home website. One I’d never heard of.
“He said you died two years before we met,” Hailey whispered. “He said he couldn’t talk about it. He cried.”
Jared tried to speak. Mr. Odom put a hand on his shoulder.
“Sir, you’re going to come with me.”
Then my contractions came so close together that Bettina said, “Okay, everybody out. This baby is coming now.”
My son was born at 6:14 p.m. Four pounds, one ounce. He went straight to the NICU.
Two hours later, two floors up, Hailey had a daughter.
The next morning, a nurse wheeled Hailey into the NICU. She stopped next to my son’s incubator.
She brought me coffee. Decaf. She’d asked the nurse what I was allowed to have.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”
“I believe you,” I said.
And I did.
Over the next week, we sat side by side in that NICU and put the pieces together.
The “business trips” were weeks at Hailey’s house in Greensboro. The hotel gifts came from a gas station near her neighborhood. The fake obituary was made on a free website. He’d paid twelve dollars for it.
And the money.
Jared had been moving money out of my firm’s operating account for four years. “Client entertainment.” “Equipment.” He’d used it to pay Hailey’s mortgage. Their wedding. Their honeymoon in Aruba.
Almost $90,000.
I gave everything to a detective and a lawyer.
Jared was charged with bigamy, embezzlement, and identity fraud for the fake death notice.
His lawyer tried to argue it was “a misunderstanding about paperwork.”
The judge was not amused.
He pleaded guilty in April. Three years in prison and full restitution.
Hailey’s marriage was declared void. She went back to her maiden name, Rourke. So did her daughter.
I went back to my maiden name, Ashby. So did my son, Elliot. I didn’t want either of us carrying Jared’s name.
Elliot came home from the NICU after five weeks. Hailey’s daughter, Maya, came home the same week.
We started meeting on Saturdays at a park halfway between Raleigh and Greensboro.
Two moms. Two babies. One terrible man, and no reason left to be strangers.
Elliot and Maya are brother and sister. They’ll grow up knowing that.
Last month, at Maya’s first birthday party, Hailey raised a glass of lemonade.
“To Natalie,” she said. “The dead wife who saved my life.”
Everybody laughed. Then we both cried.
THE END.
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Some men build two lives because they think women will never talk to each other. They’re wrong.
Would you have become friends with Hailey? Tell us in the replies.