Chapter 10 Pinehurst Knows #2
"You felt terrible. You felt terrible while texting Blake about what you were wearing while he sat next to me on the couch.
You felt terrible while telling him not to think about seeing me at the salon.
You felt so terrible that you kept doing it for months without ever once considering telling me the truth. "
"I was going to tell you."
"When?"
She doesn't have an answer. She stands there in the doorway of my salon with tears running down her face and she doesn't have an answer because there isn't one.
She was never going to tell me. She was going to keep doing what she was doing until she got caught or until she got bored or until Blake left me for her, whichever came first.
"Please, Lara. I know you're angry. But we've been friends for years. Doesn't that count for something?"
"You're the one who decided it didn't count for something, Hailey. Not me."
She stands there for another few seconds. Then she turns and walks out. The door closes behind her and the salon is silent for about five seconds before Mrs. Patterson, who is waiting for her appointment, says, "Well."
Cheryl catches my eye. She gives me a small nod.
I go back to work.
The following Monday morning Mike Donnelly, Blake's foreman at Premiere Construction, stops by the salon.
He doesn't come for a haircut. He comes because his wife sent him.
His wife is friends with Patricia who heard it from Mrs. Gallagher who heard it from Cheryl.
The chain of information has reached Blake's workplace.
Mike stands in the doorway of the salon looking uncomfortable. He's a big man in work boots with dust on his jeans and he clearly doesn't want to be here.
"Hey, Lara," he says. "I just wanted to check in. My wife told me about the situation. I'm sorry."
"Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that."
"Blake's been off all week at work. Showing up late. Not focused. The guys are starting to notice." He pauses. "A couple of them heard about it already. Small town."
"I know."
"For what it's worth, we all think you handled it right. What he did was wrong."
He leaves. I stand at my station and I process what just happened.
Blake's coworkers know. The men he works with every day, the guys who eat lunch with him and ride in trucks with him and spend forty hours a week on jobsites with him, now know that he cheated on his fiancée with her friend while stealing from their shared savings account.
I think about what that means for Blake practically.
Construction crews are tight groups. They spend long days in close quarters doing physical work and the culture runs on trust and respect.
If the guys on Blake's crew don't respect him anymore then every day at work becomes uncomfortable.
Every lunch break. Every ride to a jobsite.
Every conversation that stops when he walks up.
Blake is going to feel the consequences of his choices every single day in a way that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that Pinehurst is small enough that your reputation is your identity.
Pinehurst knows.
The town doesn't just know the facts. The town has opinions.
And in a place where everybody knows everybody and gossip is the primary form of social currency, those opinions carry weight.
Blake can't go to the gas station without wondering if the cashier has heard.
He can't walk into a restaurant without scanning the room for people who are looking at him.
He can't show up to a jobsite without feeling the shift in energy when his crew goes quiet.
Hailey has it worse in some ways. Blake is a man who cheated, which is common enough that some people will shrug it off as typical male behavior even while disapproving.
Hailey is a woman who slept with her friend's fiancé.
That's a different category of betrayal in the eyes of most women in Pinehurst and the judgment is harsher and more personal.
I've heard from Sierra that Hailey hasn't been going out.
She's ordering groceries for delivery. She called in sick to work three days in a row. Her social media has gone dark.
I don't feel good about that. I thought I would.
I thought watching Hailey suffer would feel satisfying after what she did to me.
But it just feels heavy. She made her choices and those choices have consequences and I'm not going to apologize for telling the truth.
But watching another person's life collapse isn't the victory I imagined during those long nights lying next to Blake in the dark.
Blake calls me that night. This time I answer.
"Everyone knows," he says. His voice is flat. Angry. Defeated. "Everyone. My coworkers. My mom's friends. People I've known my whole life. You told everybody."
"I told the truth."
"You could have kept this between us. You could have just walked away."
"No. I couldn't. Because you were already calling people and telling your version. You were telling Chase and Ronnie and Sierra that I left out of nowhere. You were making yourself the victim. I had to tell the truth because you were telling lies."
"This is my life, Lara. You're destroying everything I have in this town. I grew up here. My family is here. My job is here. And now every single person looks at me differently."
"Your affair destroyed your reputation. I just stopped hiding it for you."
"You didn't have to go public. You didn't have to tell Cheryl. You didn't have to let it spread through the whole town. That was a choice you made."
"And sleeping with my friend was a choice you made. Every single day for months you made that choice. You made it when you texted her. You made it when you booked those rooms. You made it when you came home to me and lied about where you'd been. Every day, Blake. You chose this."
He's quiet for a long time. I can hear him breathing. I can hear the TV in the background and I wonder if he's sitting on the same couch where I told him I knew. I wonder if the apartment still has the empty spaces where my things used to be or if he's already rearranged to fill the gaps.
"I lost my friends," he says. His voice is quieter now. "Chase won't return my calls. Sierra told me she doesn't want to talk to me. She said I make her sick. Ronnie is barely speaking to me and I have to see him around town. Alana unfollowed me on everything."
"You lost your friends because of what you did. Not because I told them about it."
"Hailey won't talk to me either. She's blaming me for everything. She says I should have ended it earlier and that I put her in an impossible position."
I don't respond to the Hailey part. I don't feel sorry for him about Hailey.
I don't feel sorry for him about any of it.
But I also don't feel the satisfaction I expected.
The fantasy version of this moment was triumphant.
The reality is just exhausting. He sounds sad and I sound tired and neither of us sounds like the people we were a year ago.
"I have to go, Blake."
"Lara, please. Can we just talk? In person? One conversation. That's all I'm asking."
"No."
I hang up. I put the phone down on Raina's kitchen table and I pour a glass of wine and I sit in the quiet of my sister's apartment and I let the silence settle around me.
Raina comes in a few minutes later. She looks at my face and she sits down next to me and she doesn't ask what happened because she can tell.
"It's done," I say.
"How do you feel?"
I think about it honestly. I think about Blake's flat voice and his anger and his defeated admission that everyone knows.
I think about Hailey crying in the salon doorway.
I think about Mike Donnelly standing in his work boots telling me his crew thinks I handled it right.
I think about Cheryl's small nod. I think about the weight I've been carrying for weeks and how it feels now. Lighter. Not gone. But lighter.
"I feel like I did the right thing," I say.
Raina puts her hand on mine.
"You did."
We sit there for a while. The kitchen is warm and the wine is good and outside the window the streetlights are coming on along Raina's block.
Somewhere across town Blake is in our old apartment, or maybe at his mother's house, or maybe driving around trying to figure out what's left of his life in Pinehurst. Hailey is in her apartment not answering her phone.
Chase is home processing what he learned about his oldest friend.
Sierra is mad. Ronnie is quiet. Alana has removed Hailey from her contacts.
The truth went out and it did exactly what Raina said it would do. It didn't need help. It didn't need embellishment. It didn't need theatrics or revenge plots or public humiliation campaigns. It just needed to be spoken out loud. The truth is its own consequence.
I take another sip of wine and I think about tomorrow.
Tomorrow I will go to the salon and I will cut hair and I will talk to clients and I will live my life in the town where all of this happened.
It won't be comfortable yet. But it will be honest. And for the first time in months, honest feels like enough.