Mother of All Secrets(31)

I put the refrigerated bag of milk in warm water and cleaned an already-clean Comotomo bottle, which I’d felt shamed into ordering after our most recent moms’ group meeting—the meeting that Isabel hadn’t shown up to—despite the absurd price tag. So far, it seemed like any other bottle.

Clara nosed around my chest while I tried to give her the bottle. She made several scrunched, dissatisfied expressions as I put the bottle near her mouth but started drinking reluctantly nonetheless. Once she had some momentum and seemed settled, I again reached for my phone to continue my Isabel searching, finding it nearly impossible to maneuver my phone, the bottle, and Clara’s head all at once; maybe breastfeeding was easier in some ways, after all.

I entered her name into my text messages, ready to reanalyze our group messages, looking for clues that I’d missed. Instead, my search came back completely blank. Where was our group text? Had I deleted that, too, somehow?

I went to my call log instead and entered her name once more, distracted by Clara’s fidgeting. I tried burping her while holding and squinting at my phone, confused. There was one outgoing call to and one incoming call from Isabel Harris; both were from a few weeks ago. I didn’t explicitly remember ever talking to her on the phone, but these calls were placed in early September, shortly after I’d joined the moms’ group. So perhaps we’d communicated about logistics of a meeting. How many conversations and interactions could I be forgetting, though?

More perplexing, I’d just conducted this same search yesterday and hadn’t seen any calls from Isabel Harris.

Isabel Harris.

Something wasn’t right. Whenever I met another mom, I always put the baby’s name in my phone along with the mother. So that I could be polite and remember the names of their kids. And keep straight all the mom friends I planned to make, at some point in the future when I was feeling more social. More myself. Selena, Miles’s mom. Vanessa, Phoebe’s mom. And so forth.

She had been in my phone as Isabel, Naomi’s Mom. Not Isabel Harris.

And that’s when I realized that this wasn’t my phone.

It was Tim’s.

He had recently changed his wallpaper to the same picture of Clara that I had on my phone (“Copycat,” I had teased him half-heartedly). It was an adorable picture of her in her stroller, smiling broadly, on the verge of a laugh, even. The afternoon sun was reflecting on her head, making it look like she had a halo. Now that we had the same wallpaper, our phones were completely identical except that his case was dark gray and my case was light gray. It was the most subtle difference.

We even had the same passcode; I’d forgotten mine a couple of months ago in a delirious, exhausted haze and was incredibly frustrated to be locked out of my phone all day, unable to pull the four-digit code from the depths of my withered brain. When muscle memory finally kicked in and brought it back to me, he changed my passcode to match his own—Clara’s birthday—so that he could easily remind me if I forgot it again.

We had unsurprisingly mixed up each other’s phones a few times now, him grabbing my phone first and then putting it down to cross the room and retrieve his own; me about to pick up an incoming call on what I thought was my phone before realizing it was his boss. A couple of weeks ago, he’d even taken mine when he left for work, before returning ten minutes later to swap them with a sheepish grin. “I think we need a new system,” he’d said, blowing me a quick kiss before leaving again.

So this was Tim’s phone. With “Isabel Harris” in his contacts. Not only in his contacts, but in his outgoing and incoming call logs.

What kind of couple shares a phone password? The kind with nothing to conceal from each other, I’d once thought. But that was before I’d proved my own theory wrong, with the secrets I was keeping. So now, I feared that it was the kind who had become so distant that each assumed the other wouldn’t even be interested in snooping. The kind of disjointed couple for whom it was perfectly easy to hide things in plain sight.

Why was my husband calling Isabel? Why was she calling him?

Surely there was a reasonable explanation. Perhaps I had used his phone to call her—but no. I knew that I had never called Isabel. As confusing as these past few months had been, I wasn’t going to convince myself of things that weren’t true, just for a false peace of mind.

He was just in the next room, working. Nothing was stopping me from going in and asking him right now. Except for the fact that I was shaking. I wasn’t sure I could take any surprises. My life felt like it was hanging by a thread as it was.

I pushed past it. I had to confront him. This was my husband. He was safe. I knew him. And I trusted him in my bones. It was just a couple of phone calls. He’d have an explanation, I was sure.

Clara was nearly done with the bottle and had slowed down, playing with it more than drinking. I shifted her to an upright position and rubbed her back for a few minutes, waiting for her belch. I murmured over and over again, “You’re such a great girl. You’re such a sweet, smart girl.” She burped loudly in reply.

Then I walked toward our bedroom holding her and entered without knocking. Tim was finally off his Zoom call and just about to close his laptop.

“Hey. Sorry about that. Just wrapping up. What do you want to do for dinner? I’m starving.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them with his shirt. He looked tired.

“This is your phone,” I replied bluntly, awkwardly. I sounded angrier than I’d meant to.