41. I’ve Got You
i've got you
alyssa
The subject line was harmless.
Family is important.
I had my thumb over delete before I read the sender, already filing it with the estate-planning spam and the DNA-kit ads. Then the name loaded under the subject and my thumb stopped moving. Rebecca Marsh.
The mistress who lived while her lover, my husband, didn’t.
I opened it, telling myself later that I shouldn’t have, but the truth is there was never a version of me that left it sitting in my inbox unread.
Dear Alyssa,
I know this is coming out of nowhere. I know I’m the last person you want to hear from.
I started this email a hundred times over the years and never sent it, because for a while I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to put something on you that might not be true.
But she has his eyes. She’s had them since the day she was born and there’s no pretending otherwise anymore.
Her name is Lily. She’s five. Malik was her father.
She and Micah are half brother and sister. I don’t want anything from you. I just think, someday, they might want to know each other. Children shouldn’t have to carry what the adults did.
I’ve attached a picture.
There was a photo clipped to the bottom, a little gray thumbnail with a download arrow. I did not touch it.
Five. Conceived while Malik was still coming home to me with his tie loosened and a story about his demanding boss. Born after he was already in the ground.
I closed my laptop slowly, with both hands, then I sat in the quiet and said the thing my mother put in all of us before we were old enough to spell it. Keep it moving. Be strong. You’re fine.
You have a sister, someday I would have to find the words to hand my son. Her mother was married to the man who killed your father. I felt my stomach turn over and I got up and went to the sink and ran the water but didn’t throw up.
By evening I had Zhaire and Zaria while Simone ran errands, and I made grilled cheese and quizzed the kids on their spelling words and laughed in the right places, but my laugh came out of me hollow.
Simone sensed it. She came back for them and looked at my face. “You good?”
“Tired. Long tomorrow.”
She didn’t buy it but hugged me anyway. “Call me,” she said. “Whatever it is.”
I said I would, with no intention to.
Later, I heard the beeps of Julian's key code. Micah had gone to bed, and I’d turned the lights off as the dark came down.
The dark was the only thing in the house that wasn't asking me to be okay.
Julian came in, found me by the shape of me on the end of the couch, and didn't reach for a switch either.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting down.
“I'm fine.”
“You're sitting in the dark.”
“I like the dark.”
He just sat at the other end of the couch and waited, which was worse than a question, because a question I could have answered with a lie.
“His mistress wrote me. The one he got shot with.” I said finally. “She has a little girl. Five.” I made myself say the rest. “Malik's daughter.”
He went very still.
“Says she wants them to know each other,” I laughed in disbelief. “Like it's a nice thing. Like I should be glad.”
He slid closer to me. “Alyssa.”
“I didn't know. Five years he's been gone, and there's a whole human, Julian. A child I didn't know about. He was out there makng babies, while I was at home washing his clothes… like a damn id—iot.” I came apart on the last word.
Julian got an arm around me, and I laid my head on him and felt myself crack open.
I’d never really cried. Not since the first week, when there was a funeral to plan, and a toddler to keep upright and then creditors, and investigators, and trials.
Somewhere in there I'd decided crying was a thing I'd get to later, and then I decided crying was a thing he wasn't worthy of.
And now five years of it arrived at once, and it was not graceful. It bent me.
I grabbed a fistful of Julian’s shirt and held on. “I hate him!” I got it out. “I hate that he — I never got to —” I couldn't finish one of them. “He just left all of it. On me.”
“I know, baby.” His hand moved slowly on my back. “Let it out, Lyss.”
“Nobody ever —” I dragged in a breath that shook the whole way down. “The funeral, the lawsuits, the murder trial, Micah. Everybody needed me up.”
“You don't have to be up right now.” His lips stayed at my temple. “I've got you.”
And that was the one. Not don’t let it get to you, or stay strong, or you gotta push through, which is what people said as a kindness. Nobody had told me I could put it down. They told me how to carry it.
Julian told me I could put it down, and so I did.
I cried until my ribs hurt, and my eyes burned, and my throat was sore.
I couldn't distinguish any one thing I was crying about from another.
He didn't shush me. He didn't tell me it would be okay.
Didn't reach for a single one of the sentences people reach for.
He just kept his arm around me, and his hand at the back of my head, and held the whole weight of it without trying to set it aside faster than I was ready to.
When my sobs turned to hiccups, and then to a long quiet, he wiped my face and pulled a blanket over both of us, and didn't move me.
“I'm a mess,” I said into his soaked shirt.
“You're tired. Rest.”
Next thing I knew I woke to gray light, in my bed, still in his arms, with my face stiff from dried tears.
“Hey,” he said, when he felt me come up. “How you feel?”
I ran my reflexes through my mind. Fine, slept great, all better, sorry about last night. But they did not fit my mouth. “Wrung out,” I said honestly. “But lighter, though.”
He didn't answer that, just pressed his mouth to the top of my head and left it there as the morning came up around us, and I lay there letting myself be held.