Chapter 9 - The CorrectionIt took exactly thirty-six hours for the machinery of correction to grind into motion.
On Monday morning, Sarah from my kindergarten co-teaching team walked into my classroom before the morning bell rang, her eyes wide as saucers, holding her phone out like it was radioactive.
"Molly," she gasped. "You are not going to believe what just happened."
"Try me," I said, grading a stack of color-matching worksheets.
"Your dad just called me. Personally. At eight o'clock in the morning." Sarah shook her head in sheer disbelief. "He told me—word for word—that he lied at your birthday dinner. He admitted that Tessa’s baby is his, that Dan had nothing to do with it, and that he was deeply ashamed of his behavior."
She stared at me, waiting for my reaction.
"I know," I said calmly.
"You knew he was going to call?"
"I gave him a script," I replied, sliding a red grading pen back into my desk organizer.
By Tuesday afternoon, the revised version of reality had rippled through West Knoxville with the speed of a brushfire.
Tessa posted a brief, humiliating public retraction on her social media pages—deactivating her accounts forty-eight hours later after being inundated with comments from outraged mutual friends who realized she had tried to frame an innocent man to cover up a geriatric affair with her best friend's father.
My mother called me Tuesday night, her voice hollow and defeated.
"She moved out of the Fox Lake townhome today," Mom whispered. "Your father went down there and helped her pack her boxes. He says he has to figure out how to provide for the baby when it arrives, but... he doesn't know how we're going to pay the mortgage on this house with the agency audits starting."
"That sounds like an insurance claim you guys are going to have to file yourselves," I told her, and gently hung up the phone.
Dan and I spent Tuesday night eating pizza on our living room floor, watching a mindless action movie on television. The apartment felt lighter. The air felt cleaner. The invisible, suffocating weight that had settled over our marriage since my birthday dinner had finally been lifted off our shoulders.
"Are you okay?" Dan asked softly during a commercial break, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
May you like
I leaned my head against his chest, listening to his steady, rhythmic heartbeat.
"I'm better than okay," I said honestly. "It took twenty-two days to figure out every single lie they built around us. But the math finally balanced out."
