I Married the Man Who Rear-Ended Me in a Kroger Parking Lot, Six Months Later His Wife Called

Part 3: Saturday

I did not sleep on Wednesday. I did not sleep on Thursday. On Friday I drove to work, sat in the parking lot for forty minutes, and drove home.

Daniel called twice from “Kansas City.” I let it ring.

The third time I answered.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay? You sound tired.”

“I’m okay.”

“Missing you. This training’s a slog.”

“When are you back.”

“Sunday night. Late.”

“Okay.”

“Love you, Bec.”

“Love you too.”

I hung up and threw up in the sink.

Saturday morning I got in my Corolla, the one with the small scar on the back bumper that I had never bothered to fix because Daniel said it was our meet-cute, and I drove to Rogersville.

Lauren’s house was a beige two-story with a basketball hoop in the driveway. Two cars in the driveway already. A Honda CR-V I assumed was Lauren’s, and a red Kia Soul that I later learned belonged to Ashley.

I sat in my car for ten minutes before I could make my hand open the door.

Ashley was younger than me. Twenty-nine, maybe thirty. Blond, small, wearing a Missouri S&T sweatshirt that was starting to strain a little across the middle. She was sitting at Lauren’s kitchen island with a mug of decaf and eyes that had clearly been crying for eighteen hours straight.

Lauren introduced us like we were at a work function.

“Ashley, this is Rebecca. Rebecca, Ashley.”

Ashley stood up and walked over and hugged me.

I don’t know why that broke me. But it did.

We sat at the kitchen island, the three of us, and Lauren made a pot of coffee, and we talked for four hours.

Ashley had met him at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Rolla in 2019. He’d been on a work trip. She’d been on a first date with someone else that was going badly, and Daniel had, apparently, extracted her from it with a joke about the buffalo sauce and a story about a divorce that wasn’t finalized yet.

She’d married him in 2020 at a park in Rolla. His daughter, he’d said, couldn’t come because she was in nursing school in Kansas City.

There is no daughter in nursing school in Kansas City. Emma is a junior studying accounting at Missouri State and she lives twenty minutes away in her mother’s basement suite.

Ashley found out she was pregnant in August. Daniel had cried when she told him. He’d said it was the happiest day of his life.

Lauren went very still when Ashley said that.

“He said that when Caleb was born too,” she said, quiet. “Word for word.”

There was a long silence in the kitchen.

I looked around. Family photos on the wall. A refrigerator covered in a fourteen-year-old boy’s schedule, basketball, band, orthodontist. A framed cross-stitch that said BLESS THIS HOME. A dog bed in the corner with no dog in it.

“Where’s your dog,” I asked.

“He died in July,” Lauren said. “Daniel wasn’t home. He was in Tulsa for a training.”

He was with me in July. In Branson. At a bed and breakfast.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She waved her hand. “You didn’t kill my dog, Rebecca.”

Ashley laughed. It came out wet.

We had a plan by 2 p.m.

Daniel was due back at Lauren’s house at 6:30. He’d told her he was driving in from Kansas City. He’d told me he was driving in Sunday night. He’d told Ashley he was on a job site in Springfield until Tuesday.

At 6:30, Lauren would be in the kitchen. Ashley would be on the couch. I would be in the reading chair by the front window.

The front door opened at 6:41.

I heard him before I saw him. The jingle of his keys hitting the entry table. The little grunt as he set his duffel down. The way he called out, “Hey, hon, I’m home, is Caleb here?”

He rounded the corner into the living room.

He saw Ashley first.

I have never seen a human face do what his face did. It wasn’t shock exactly. It was more like a system failure. Like watching a computer try to open too many files at once. His mouth opened. His hand came up halfway. His eyes moved to Lauren in the kitchen doorway, and then, slowly, they slid to the reading chair.

To me.

“Bec,” he said.

Just that.

I did not stand up.

“Sit down, Daniel,” Lauren said from the kitchen. Her voice was the calmest thing in the room.

He didn’t sit down.

“What is this.”

“You know what this is.”

He looked at Ashley. At her stomach. At me. At Lauren.

“Please,” he said.

I don’t know who he was saying it to.

“Please what,” Ashley said, and her voice was so small I barely heard it.

“Please let me explain.”

Lauren walked into the living room and stood behind the couch, one hand on the back of it, the other holding a mug of coffee like she was hosting a book club.

“You have twenty minutes,” she said. “Then I want you out of my house, and Monday morning my lawyer files. You can spend those twenty minutes any way you want.”

He sat down on the ottoman.

He put his face in his hands.

And for the next twenty minutes he did not explain anything.

He cried. He said our names, all three of them, in rotation, like he was working through a list. He said he was sick. He said he’d meant to tell each of us. He said he loved his son. He said he loved his daughter. He said he loved the baby. He said he loved his wife.

He never specified which one.

At the eighteen-minute mark he looked up at me, and his eyes were red, and he said, “Bec, the day at Kroger. I want you to know that was real.”

“Lauren told me about the truck,” I said.

He looked at Lauren.

Lauren looked at her coffee.

“I parked next to you,” he said, to me. “I saw you go in. I waited. I’m not going to lie to you about that. But when you came out and you smiled at me before you even knew I’d hit you, Bec, that was real. That smile was real.”

I stood up.

“Daniel,” I said.

He looked up.

“Your twenty minutes are up in ninety seconds. I’m going to use them.”

He waited.

I opened my mouth to say something big. Something final. Something I’d rehearsed on the drive over about how he’d taken the one small window I’d left open after my divorce and climbed in through it like a thief.

Instead I said, “The kitchen. In Nixa. The sage green.”

“What about it.”

“Did you like it. Actually.”

He blinked.

“I hated it,” he said. “I’ve always hated that color.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked past him. I picked up my purse from Lauren’s entry table. I did not look back.

At the door, Lauren caught my elbow.

“You okay to drive?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ll do it anyway.”

She squeezed my arm.

“Rebecca.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “He did. You just told me.”

I walked out to my Corolla and I sat in the driveway of a house I’d never been to before, next to a basketball hoop belonging to a fourteen-year-old boy I’d never meet, and I called my mother for the first time in three weeks.

“Mom,” I said, when she picked up.

“Rebecca? Honey, what’s wrong.”

“I need to come home for a while.”

“Come home.”

I started the car.

Behind me, in the beige two-story house, Ashley was still on the couch. Lauren was still standing behind it. Daniel was still on the ottoman.

I have wondered, since, what happened in that room after I left. I have not asked.

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