It turned out that Natalie had been having secret Zoom calls with Helen and the priest while I was at work.
For weeks. They told the priest that I was on board, just that I didn’t want to attend because I had been raised differently.
They picked the date carefully with Natalie confirming we would be out of town. They never intended to tell me.
Helen just couldn’t resist the bragging.
Helen had felt like she had won.
“You lied to me!” I exclaimed. “Every single day for weeks, and now… Who are you?”
“I didn’t want to fight, Ethan,” she whispered.
“So instead, you decided to betray me?” I asked.
“You could have told me, Natalie. We could have spoken about this… I would have tried to understand it all.
If I knew that it meant so much to you… I would have tried.”
She said Helen pressured her. She said she didn’t know how to say no.
But she did know how to keep it a secret.
I called the church. I didn’t expect much.
But to my surprise, the priest was kind. He apologized profusely. He said that he would never have performed the baptism if he’d known I didn’t consent.
“I love what I do, Ethan,” he said on the phone.
“But I respect people more. If I’d known the truth… I’d have never…
she’s a child from a mixed-faith family, she should have had the chance to choose.”
He was more honest with me in five minutes than my wife had been in five years.
When Natalie found out, she exploded.
“You got my mother banned from her spiritual home!” she screamed.
“Are you hearing yourself?” I just stared at her. “Again, Natalie, who are you?”
She backed down. My wife said she was sorry.
She said she’d go to therapy. That we could fix this.
“Our marriage is more important… we’re…
Ethan, Lily needs the both of us.”
But I couldn’t unhear it. I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t un-feel it.
She didn’t just keep a secret.
She chose her mother over me. She chose silence over truth. So, I chose my own.
I contacted a divorce lawyer.
I haven’t filed yet, but I asked all the relevant questions. About assets. About custody.
About supervised visitation. I asked about how to protect my daughter from people who don’t believe I matter.
Natalie says I’m punishing her for “one mistake.”
“You’ve done worse, Ethan,” she said one evening when I was washing the dishes after dinner.
“You mean the time I forgot to call you after spending a night out with the guys? Yeah, that was worse than committing our daughter to a faith she doesn’t know a thing about.”
It’s been a few weeks now.
And I’ve moved into our home office, sleeping on the couch. Lily still curls up on my chest during cartoons. That sweet girl still begs me to sing the “tickle toe song” at bedtime.
But if I’m being honest, something’s shifted in me.
And in Natalie, too.
We were just not the same.
A week later, Natalie asked to meet me. She wanted to talk, just the two of us.
“I’m ready to explain everything,” she said.
We met at the park near our old apartment, the one with the crooked swing set and that one bench that always caught the last of the evening sun.
She was already there when I arrived, sitting with her hands tucked under her thighs, eyes trained on the lake beyond the path. Kids laughed somewhere behind us.
Dogs barked.
Life, somehow, had kept moving.Continue reading…
