6. Emily
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Emily
The resort shows up through the trees like something out of a brochure, cabins scattered through the pines, a big lodge with windows looking out over a lake, mountains stacked up blue and hazy behind it.
The bus crunches into a gravel lot and everybody starts grabbing bags, shrieking over how different everyone looks.
I just sit for a second and breathe it in.
Pine and cold water and somewhere underneath it, woodsmoke.
Tara and I get Cabin Seven, down a winding path near the water.
It’s small but cute, two twin beds under blue-and-white quilts, a window over the lake, the whole place smelling like pine and polish.
I drop my suitcase on the bed by the door and sink down onto it.
After four hours of being hyperaware of Richard Reed three feet across the aisle, the quiet is almost a shock.
We don’t get to keep it long. On the walk up to check in earlier I’d clocked Carmen’s old crew already staking out a table in the lodge.
Brittany, Madison, a couple of the others filling out the seats, every one of them seven years older but not one bit kinder.
Brittany had looked me up and down and said, loud enough to carry, “Oh my God, is that Emily? I heard she married her manager from that little restaurant,” and the whole table had done that tinkly little laugh they’ve been doing since we were fifteen.
I’d kept walking. I’ve had a lot of practice keeping walking.
Twenty-some years of Carmen and her flying monkeys taught me that the only thing worse than their attention is letting them see it land, so I’d given them nothing, not even a flinch, and felt their stares cool against my back the whole way to the front desk.
“Okay.” Tara shuts the door and spins around. “We’re alone. Nobody can hear us. I want the whole thing.”
“I told you the basics on the bus.”
“You told me facts. The text, the stakeout, the baby.” She flops cross-legged onto her own bed, facing me. “Now I want the feelings. How are you actually doing, Em?”
I open my mouth to say fine. Close it. She’d see right through me, she always could.
“I’m angry,” I say instead. “I’m so angry I can barely think. At Henry. At Carmen. I’m angry that people keep picking her, my whole life, and she just takes them and smiles about it. At myself, mostly, for not seeing it sooner.”
“That tracks.”
“And I’m scared shitless.” That one’s harder to get out.
“I don’t have a job. I’ve got a little money saved, not much.
I don’t have anywhere to go after this except maybe your couch.
I spent the last couple years letting Henry make every decision, and now I can’t even pick what to eat without second-guessing myself. ”
“You’ve got my couch as long as you want it.” She says it flat and certain, no hesitation. “I’m in the city now, did I tell you that? Got a place, got a job, the whole adult thing. I’m a vet. Cats and dogs and the occasional furious parrot.”
“You’re a vet?” It startles a laugh out of me. “Since when do you have your life together?”
“Since recently, and don’t get used to it. Point is, I’ve got a couch and a door that locks and a spare spot that’s one hundred percent open to a heartbroken best friend. That’s not charity, by the way. That’s just us.”
The kindness of it lands somewhere raw and my eyes sting, so I look at the floor until it passes, because I am not doing this right now. “Thanks, T. Really.”
“So what’s the actual plan? Long game.”
“Divorce. A job, whatever I can get. Start over from nothing.” I pick at the quilt.
“I keep thinking I should’ve caught it sooner.
The late nights, how he’d get weird every time I mentioned Carmen, how he blew up when I floated calling Ciara.
I was so busy trying to be a good little wife I missed the whole thing happening right under my nose. ”
“That’s not on you. He lied to your face for a year. You’re not stupid for believing your own husband.”
“I know. Logically I know that.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Doesn’t shut up the voice telling me I’m an idiot, though.”
Tara is quiet a second. Then, “You want to know what I think? I think he spent two years making you feel like nothing. That’s what guys like him do. They wear you down so slow you don’t even notice you’re shrinking.”
“Cheery.”
“It’s true, though. And listen, you figured it out and you got out. That’s huge, Em. Most people don’t. Most people just stay and let it eat them alive.”
The tears I’ve been holding back all week shove up against the back of my throat, and I swipe at my eyes before they can spill, because I hate crying, hate the weak helpless feeling of it. “I don’t feel like I got out. I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, well, nobody does.” She leans across the gap between the beds and squeezes my knee. “You’re gonna be fine, Em. I mean it. And anyone who says otherwise can deal with me.”
“You’re awfully threatening for somebody who’s five-foot-two.”
“Element of surprise. Nobody expects the tiny vet to throw hands.” She grins, and I laugh, and a little of the weight slides off my chest. This is why I came. Not just to get away from Henry, but to remember there was an Emily before him, one who laughed at things and stood up straight.
I stand up before the feelings can win, brush my hands off on my jeans, and dig in my pocket for the thing I’ve been carrying since this morning.
The ring. My wedding ring. I slid it off in the cabin bathroom an hour ago and I’ve been turning it over in my pocket ever since, this little gold band that’s supposed to mean forever, till death, all of it. Funny how that shook out.
“What’re you doing with that?” Tara asks.
“I don’t know. Pawn it. Keep it as a warning to my future self.” I hold it up and the diamond catches the light. “It’s supposed to mean something.”
“And?”
I look at it one more second. Then I think about the kiss on my cheek I felt nothing for, the thirty dollars, the baby in the yellow blanket, and the whole rotten lie of the last two years, and something in me just goes done.
“Fuck it.”
I walk out the cabin door and down to the little strip of beach, Tara scrambling after me asking what I’m doing. I wind up and throw the ring as hard as I can out over the water. It arcs up, catches the sun once, and drops into the lake with a tiny plunk. Gone. Just like that.
“Holy shit,” Tara breathes. “Did you just...”
“I did.”
“Em, that thing was worth like five grand!”
“Don’t care.” I’m shaking, but I’m also lighter than I’ve been in years, like I just set down something I forgot I was hauling around. “It was a lie. The whole marriage was a lie. I don’t want one piece of it left on me, not even the part worth five grand.”
Tara whoops like a kid at a ballgame, both fists in the air. “That’s my girl!”
I’m laughing, the sound startling in the quiet morning, giddy and a little unhinged, when somebody else laughs behind us. Deeper. Warmer. I know that laugh now.
“For a second there I thought I was watching a movie.” Richard is leaning against a tree at the head of the path, hands in his pockets, grinning like he caught me doing something far more interesting than littering in a lake. “Nice one, Em.”
Heat crawls up my neck. “That was supposed to be a private moment, Reed.”
“Sorry. Didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Then you should’ve quietly scurried off.”
“Now where’s the fun in that?” He pushes off the tree and ambles over, and Tara, the absolute traitor, suddenly remembers somewhere urgent she needs to be.
“You know what, I have got to shower, I smell like bus.” She’s already backing up the path, grinning ear to ear.
“Em, I’ll catch you at the lodge! Take your time!
” And she’s gone, practically skipping, leaving me alone on a beach with Richard Reed and the very obvious agenda of a woman playing cupid.
He drops down onto the flat rock by the water and pats the spot beside him. I sit, because not sitting would mean admitting the sitting matters.
“So.” He looks out at the lake, at the spot where the ring went under. “Marriage is over, huh.”
“Yep.”
“How’re you feeling about it?”
I think about lying, decide I’m out of practice and out of patience. “Mostly angry. And disappointed. At myself, mostly. There’s this thought I keep having, and I hate it, because I know it’s wrong, and I can’t make it stop.”
“What thought?”
“That I should’ve seen it sooner. My husband had a baby with another woman. And not just anyone. Carmen.”
His whole face screws up like he smelled something gone off. “Carmen Halter? Christ. Your husband’s got no taste.”
I cut him a look. “Excuse me?”
“Not you, obviously. I mean he’d have to be brain-dead, cheating on you with that.” He shakes his head. “It’s almost impressive how stupid that is.”
“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”
“Because you’re worth like a hundred of her, sunshine.” He says it easy, like it’s just a fact. “You’re smart, you’re hot, you’re actually funny. Carmen is nothing but spray tan and spite.”
My face goes hot and I have to look at the water. “She’d kill you if she heard that.”
“She’s welcome to try.” He huffs a laugh.
I decide I’ve already thrown my wedding ring in a lake today, so I might as well keep being honest. “You know she had her sights on you the whole senior year, right?”
“God, don’t remind me.” He shudders, full-body. “It was genuinely creepy. I never gave her one ounce of interest and she’d still turn up everywhere I was, hanging off my arm at parties, acting like we were a thing. Took me three months to figure out which hallways to avoid.”
“It went further than that, you know.” The next part’s been sitting in my chest for years. “Any girl who got too close to you, Carmen made her life hell. Rumors. Whatever it took. She was territorial about you, even though you weren’t hers.”
He goes still. “She did what?”
“Mm-hm.” I keep my eyes on the lake so I don’t have to watch his face do whatever it’s doing.
“She wasn’t quiet about it either. Some sophomore asked you to a dance one year, I forget her name, and like a week later there’s this rumor going around about her, bad enough she switched schools that fall.
That was Carmen. She wanted you, and she wasn’t gonna let anybody else get near you. Simple as that.”
He turns on the rock and grabs my shoulders, both hands. His eyes have gone dark and intent, and it knocks the breath clean out of me. “Did she ever do that to you? Come after you, because of me?”
The heat of his hands soaks straight through my sleeves. I have to remind myself how words work. “Relax, Reed. We grew up together, I had her figured out by middle school. She couldn’t get to me like she got to other people.”
“That’s not what I asked.” His grip doesn’t loosen, and there’s something raw under all that intensity, something that looks almost like guilt. “Did she ever come after you because of me, Emily?”
And the thing is, I don’t actually know.
The whispers I tuned out, the drink Madison “accidentally” dumped down my back at somebody’s party while Carmen laughed like it was Christmas, the doors that seemed to close before I ever reached them.
Maybe. Maybe I was just invisible enough that she never bothered.
“Maybe,” I admit. “I don’t know. I kept my head down so much back then. When you’re trying that hard to be invisible, it’s hard to tell who’s actually messing with you and who’s just ignoring you.”
His hands tighten once, then slide off my shoulders slow, like he doesn’t want to let go. “I hate that girl,” he says, low. “Always did. And if I’d known she was making your life harder on top of everything else, I’d have done something about it.”
“You were seventeen. You didn’t owe me a rescue.”
“Maybe not.” He looks at me a beat too long. “Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have wanted to.”
We start walking, slow, along the waterline. The sun’s burning the last of the mist off the lake, everything going gold and ridiculously pretty, and I’m far too aware of how close his arm is to mine.
“So what is it you do now?” I ask, because I need to put my brain somewhere that isn’t his hands.
He smirks, and something behind it goes deliberately vague. “Oh, you know. Bit of business here and there. Regular office guy.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Why don’t I believe that for a second?”
He laughs, and then his arm comes up and loops around my shoulders, pulling me in easy as anything. He dips his head close to my ear, close enough that I feel the warmth of his breath on my jaw. “Why don’t you find out?” he says, low and slow. “We’ve got three days, don’t we?”
Damn him. He knows exactly what that voice does, the bastard, because my whole body lights up like a struck match and I have to lock my knees to keep from leaning into him. I shove him off by the shoulder instead, hard enough to make my point and not nearly hard enough to mean it.
“Challenge accepted,” I tell him.
He laughs, delighted, and the sound follows me the whole walk back up the path.
I tell myself it’s nothing, just Richard being Richard, just the leftover crush of a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
I tell myself I’ve got bigger things to deal with than a too-handsome man and a three-day deadline.
I tell myself a lot of things, and not one of them slows my heart down even a little.
By the time I reach the cabin I’ve half talked myself into believing I have it under control. Then my phone buzzes in my pocket, and my mother’s name lights up the screen, and every good feeling I just scraped together drains straight out through my feet.
I stare at it. I knew this call was coming. I just didn’t think it’d find me this fast.