The woman looked at me with a straight face. My jaw hit the floor when she said,
“But he told me he wasn’t married anymore.”
Everything around us went silent. Even the women at the next table stopped shaping their clay. I felt my stomach twist, not just from the pregnancy, but from the realization that this stranger knew details only my husband could have shared.
She slowly pulled out her phone and showed me pictures.
There he was. My husband. Smiling beside her at a beach I’d never been to. Holding her waist at a concert he told me was a “work trip.” One photo was dated just three weeks earlier.
I couldn’t breathe.
The woman looked horrified when she realized the truth. “I swear, I didn’t know,” she whispered. “He said his ex-wife was difficult and jealous.”
My best friend grabbed my hand under the table because she could see I was shaking.
Then the woman said something that made everything worse.
“He asked me to move in with him next month.”
I left the pottery party in tears and drove home numb. When I walked through the front door, my husband smiled and asked how my evening was.
I placed the printed ultrasound of our second baby on the counter beside her photos and quietly said,
“You forgot to tell your girlfriend about this one.”
