Ronnie decided to wait and see. Assuming the babies did not look obviously, visibly like they had different gene pools, she would keep quiet. The truth would only hurt Lee. She tried to tell herself that she wasn’t lying, that the woman Lee had married had never cheated on him. That woman, the one who’d let Gregory shove her skirt up around her waist and fuck her against the rough brick of an alleyway, was someone else, someone Ronnie felt like she’d barely known （and, she thought, someone she wouldn’t have liked much if she had）。 And if the babies clearly did have different fathers? She decided to cross—or burn—that bridge when she came to it.
Then Sam and Sarah were born. They didn’t look like Lee. They didn’t look like Gregory. They looked like babies, pink-faced and toothless, both with tiny button noses and faint, sketched-in eyebrows. Both of them had the same fine brown hair, both had eyes the same dark-blue shade, although Sarah’s eyes had lightened to a changeable blue-gray, while Sam ended up with hazel eyes. As they grew up—Sarah, confident and assertive, with blonde hair that shaded to light brown as she got older; and Sam, quiet and shy, dreamy, with Lee’s curls, happy to let his sister push through the world on both of their behalf—Ronnie had some strong suspicions about their paternity. But she never did any testing, not even when the technology for doing so became more accessible. After that last night in New York, she never got in touch with Gregory, or googled his name, after Google became a thing. She never told Lee of her suspicions, as the years went by and the kids grew up. It was her secret to keep; her burden to bear. Lee had been their father in every way that mattered, and if biology told a different story, he never needed to hear it.
The few times Ronnie had to go back to New York, she went wearing the armor of motherhood, depending on it—plus its attendant exhaustion—to keep her chaste and untouched. Emily was also married by then. Their long, boozy lunches and the late nights out came to a natural end, replaced by breakfast meetings and coffees. She’d never set foot in her publisher’s office again and conducted her business with her agent over the phone. As time went on, Ronnie decided that the woman she’d been, the author, who’d swept through New York City in those high suede boots, hadn’t been a good woman. It was more than just what had happened with Gregory. There was also the anecdote she’d lifted, almost unchanged, from a friend’s life and used in After Dawn, and the way she’d ignored the now former friend’s hurt look when they’d run into each other at a dinner party, and how, two weeks later, when the woman sent her a letter, Ronnie had shoved it into the back of a drawer, unread. There was the way she’d listened to her sister’s dating stories, feigning interest, only because she wanted to glean details from them to use in her fiction. The time she’d used a particular detail about the way that Lee chewed and given it to the villain in her second book, and how she would encourage her friends to go on second and third dates with guys who were clearly jerks, only because their tales of depradation and heartache lit up the novelist part of her brain. The way she’d started accepting things like first-class plane tickets and pricey hotel rooms and expensive meals as her due; forgetting to be grateful, forgetting how lucky she was. The way she’d sneered at a colleague who’d asked to be introduced to her agent. “God, can you imagine what Alice would do to me if I sent her Martha’s manuscript?” she’d laughed to Lee, who’d looked startled.
“Maybe she’s talented,” he’d said mildly, and Veronica had pictured mousy Martha, in her shapeless sack-style dresses and her clogs, and, sneering, had thought, Probably not. As if she could tell, just by looking, who had talent and who didn’t; who deserved luck and good fortune and who did not.
Veronica the author was arrogant and entitled, demanding and cruel. Saying goodbye to that woman would not be a hardship. Resetting her life, making her teaching and her children and her marriage her priorities, would be a good thing.
Veronica’s last act as a published author was attending the premiere of The Summer Sisters. The movie still reappeared sometimes, late at night, on obscure cable channels. Ronnie would always flip right past it. She didn’t stop writing, but after the babies were born, she’d never tried to publish another word of fiction. When Lee asked her, gently, if she’d quit because the sales of After Dawn had been disappointing—at least compared to her debut—or if she was sad that the movie hadn’t been a bigger hit, or that nothing had come of the second book’s option, she’d shaken her head. “I don’t feel like I have anything left to say,” she told him.