“Rosalind, let me explain—”
“You’re in our son’s bed, Bernard. Explain that part first.”
Piper, fully dressed now and edging toward the door, made the mistake of speaking up. “He told me this was his own apartment. A vacation rental he keeps for business trips.”
Rosalind turned toward her, something in her expression making the younger woman flinch back. “This is my son’s home. The son whose apartment key you apparently believe your boyfriend legitimately owns.”
“I didn’t know,” Piper said, gathering her purse. “I swear, I had no idea any of this was—” She didn’t finish the sentence before hurrying past Rosalind and out the door, clearly deciding that whatever she’d walked into wasn’t worth staying to defend.
Once the front door clicked shut, Rosalind turned back to Bernard, who had at least managed to pull on a pair of pants by then.
“How long.”
It wasn’t a question so much as a demand.
“Fourteen months,” he admitted quietly.
“And how, exactly, does a fourteen-month affair end up conducted inside our son’s apartment?”
Bernard’s face went through several visible stages of calculation before he finally answered. “Gavin thinks I use the spare room here occasionally when I’m working late downtown and don’t want to drive all the way home. He gave me a key himself, over a year ago, thinking he was doing something kind for his aging father.”
“So our son handed you the key to his own home, out of love, and you’ve been using it to bring a woman younger than his wife into his bed.”
“When you say it like that—”
“There’s no other way to say it, Bernard.”
