My Neighbor's Husband

This is the ugly part of the story.

“Margot, listen to me. I think Amelia has lost her mind, not to mention her grasp of reality. You know that when we divorced, I suspected that she was having an affair with someone in her department, right?”

Margot nods.

“Yes, but that must have stopped when she found out she was pregnant. Or that she wasn’t pregnant,” she says with some confusion.

I shake my head again.

“Amelia was never pregnant, either by me or this other professor. Professor Gerry is his name. Evidently, Gerry is a philanderer who has the attention span of a gnat. He loves luring women from their marraiges, and then turning on them. Once he gets them out, he loses all interest and drops them like a hot potato.”

Margot gasps.

“But why?”

I shrug.

“Who knows? Clearly, these are all people who have their wires crossed. Evidently, Professor Gerry is sixty-five and has done it to at least three women in the past.”

Margot scrunches her brow in confusion.

“Why don’t they fire him? The university must know.”

I shrug.

“He’s a tenured professor, and has been for thirty years. They can’t fire him over something like this because he’s done nothing criminal. It’s unethical, but it also has nothing to do with his field of study, which is Comparative Literature.”

Margot shakes her head.

“Oh my god,” she says in a small voice. “It’s totally crazy.”

I take a deep breath.

“I know because it is totally crazy. Anyways, after Professor Gerry dropped Amelia, all her insecurities came rushing back. She felt like no one wanted her, and that she was getting to be an old maid. She felt that she’d lost her source of stability and support, and went seeking for the last stable thing she had: me.”

“But you’re divorced,” Margot says, like she can’t believe it. “The papers are signed and all.”

I nod.

“They sure are, but you can’t reason with a crazy woman. Anyhow, Amelia wanted to get back with me and she devised this crazy scheme. She told me that she was pregnant with my child so that I would take her back. Her plan was to make me fall in love with her and then to fake a miscarriage, when in fact, the pregnancy never happened.”

Margot gasps.

“That’s completely bonkers, and really diabolical, come to think of it. How did you figure out her plan?”

I shake my head with exhaustion.

“Well, pregnant women need to see the ob-gyn often. They need to see the doctor all the time, actually, and Amelia was often disappearing for these so-called doctor’s visits. I was never invited to go, and I started to get suspicious. I looked at her phone one day, and realized that there were no doctor’s appointments scheduled. She was just driving to the next town over and getting a coffee while enjoying herself. You can’t drink much coffee when you’re pregnant either, and I guess she was trying to do it where I couldn’t see.”

Amelia stares at me.

“So she made up the whole thing.”

I nod.

“She did, and when I confronted her about it, she tried to deny it at first. But she had no proof of the baby. There were no ultrasounds, no blood tests, and honestly, there was no bump either. She’s always been a thin woman, but you can’t be that thin and six months pregnant.”

Margot shakes her head with disbelief, unable to form words in her shock. So I continue.

“When she finally admitted it, Amelia was crying, screaming, and creating a commotion. Not only that, but she still couldn’t see the evil that lay behind her plan. She kept saying that there was no baby, but that we could conceive one going forward.”

Margot gasps, her face pale.

“And you said?”

“I said absolutely not,” I bark. “And I threw her out of my house. Her stuff too. I called the movers and had them ship her things to a storage unit.”

“Oh my god,” gasps Margot. “Where is she now?”

I sigh, feeling weary.

“That, I don’t know. It’s the beauty of being divorced, baby girl. Amelia is not my responsibility, she’s not my significant other, and she’s not someone I care about anymore. She’s gone, and I haven’t seen her ever since she left my property.”

Margot puts both hands to her cheeks. Her eyes are as round as saucers.

“Oh my goodness,” she mumbles. “This is incredible.”

I nod grimly before taking her hands in my own.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” I say in a soft voice. “I had to tell you all this, and ask you to forgive me because without you, Margot, my life has been pure hell. I haven’t gotten a single wink of sleep because I think of you all the time. I’ve been living in misery, and the moment I could, I came to find you.”

Tears swell in her eyes.

“I still can’t believe it was all a hoax, Dane,” she says in a soft voice. “We were parted for what I thought was forever because of what your ex did.”