The Stranger by Harlan Coben

maybe for now, this distraction would be helpful. The other team scored. The parents moaned and dissected what their defensemen had done wrong to cause the goal.
    Thomas ran onto the field.
    Adam could feel the relief coming off his wife in waves. Corinne’s face went smooth. She smiled at him and said, “How was work?”
    “Now you want to know?”
    “Sorry. You know how I get.”
    “I do.”
    “It’s kinda why you love me.”
    “Kinda.”
    “That,” she said, “and my ass.”
    “Now you’re talking.”
    “I still have a great ass, don’t I?”
    “World class, prime Grade A, one hundred percent top sirloin with no fillers.”
    “Well,” she said with that sly smile she broke out far too little. “Maybe one filler.”
    God, he loved the too-rare moments when she let go and was even a little naughty. For a split second, he forgot about the stranger. A split second, no more. Why now? he wondered. She made remarks like that twice, thrice a year. Why now?
    He glanced back toward her. Corinne wore the diamond studs he’d bought her at that place on Forty-Seventh Street. Adam had given them to her on their fifteenth anniversary at the Bamboo House Chinese restaurant. His original idea had been to stick them in a fortune cookie somehow—Corinne loved opening, though not eating, fortune cookies—but that idea never really panned out. In the end, the waiter simply delivered them to her on one of those plates with a steel covering. Corny, cliché, unoriginal, and Corinne loved it. She cried and threw her arms around him and squeezed him so hard that he wondered whether any man in the world had ever been hugged like that.
    Now she only took them off at night and to swim because she worried the chlorine might eat away at the setting. Her other earrings sat untouched in that small jewelry box in her closet, as ifwearing them in lieu of the diamond studs would be some kind of betrayal. They meant something to her. They meant commitment and love and honor and, really, was that the kind of woman who would fake a pregnancy?
    Corinne had her eyes on the field. The ball was down at the offensive end, where Thomas played. He could feel her stiffen whenever the ball came anywhere near their son.
    Then Thomas made a beautiful play, knocking the ball out of a defender’s stick, picking it up, and heading for the goal.
    We pretend otherwise, but we watch only our own child. When Adam was a newer father, he found this parental focus somewhat poignant. You would go to a game or a concert or whatever and, sure, you’d look at everyone and everything, but you’d really only see your own child. Everyone and everything else would become background noise, scenery. You’d stare at your own child and it would be like there were a spotlight on your kid, only your kid, and the rest of the stage or field or court was darkening and you’d feel that warmth, the same one Adam had felt in his chest when his son smiled at him, and even in an environment loaded up with other parents and other kids, Adam would realize that every parent felt the exact same way, that every parent had their own spotlight directed at their own kid and that that was somehow comforting and how it should be.
    Now the child-centricity didn’t feel quite as uplifting. Now it felt as though that concentrated focus wasn’t so much love as obsession, that the single-lens single-mindedness was unhealthy and unrealistic and even damaging.
    Thomas ran down on the fast break and dumped a pass off to Paul Williams. Terry Zobel was open to score, but before he couldshoot, the referee blew the whistle and threw the yellow flag. Freddie Friednash, a middie on Thomas’s team, was sent off for a one-minute slashing penalty. The fathers in the corner had a group conniption: “Are you kidding me, ref?” “Bad call!” “You gotta be blind!” “That’s BS!” “Call them both ways, ref!”
    The coaches caught on and started in too. Even Freddie, who had been jogging off at