25. Emily
— · —
Emily
It’s forty minutes to Ciara’s house, and I spend all forty rehearsing a thing there’s no good way to say.
I’d texted her the night before. Nothing that gave it away, just are you home tomorrow?
I want to come by, it’s been too long. She’d written back in under a minute, three exclamation points, of course!
Come anytime, I’ll make us lunch. That’s Ciara.
No questions, no suspicion, just glad I reached out.
It made my stomach turn, knowing what I was bringing into her kitchen under a friendly little text.
How do you tell a woman her husband has been cheating on her for over twenty years?
That the other woman was her best friend, the one who brought casseroles when she was sick and stood up at her wedding?
I run through openings the whole drive and they’re all terrible.
Soft ones that take too long, cruel ones that come too fast, careful ones that sound like a lawyer reading a statement.
There’s no version that doesn’t detonate in her kitchen.
By the time I turn onto her street I’ve given up on finding the right words and accepted that I’m just going to say the true ones and let them land however they land.
And underneath all of it is the question I can’t shake.
What if she already knows? What if I walk in there and say it and her face does nothing, because she’s been carrying it for years, smiling at me over coffee the whole time, exactly like my mother did?
I keep telling myself there’s no way. Ciara’s not like that.
But I told myself the same thing about my own mom for twenty-five years, so I don’t get to be sure of anyone anymore.
I’m driving over there to tell her the truth, and I’m also driving over there to find out if she’s another person who looked me in the eye and lied.
Her house looks the same as it always has.
Yellow shutters, a tidy little garden out front, a wreath on the door she probably made herself.
It’s a house that looks like love lives in it, and for most of my life I believed that, believed this was the warm house and mine was the cold one, never once guessing the warm house might be built on the same rot as everything else.
I park at the curb and sit there a minute with my hands on the wheel.
I could turn around. I could let her keep her yellow shutters and her wreath and her version of things. Maybe that’s kinder. Maybe the kind thing is to let a person keep the life they think they have.
No. I don’t get to decide what she can handle. If she doesn’t know, she deserves to. And if she does, I deserve to stop being the only fool at the table. If it were me, I’d want someone to tell me, even if it wrecked me. Especially if it wrecked me.
I get out of the car.
She opens the door before I reach it, already smiling, because she always lights up when she sees me, she always has, and the smile falters the second she gets a real look at my face.
“Emily? Honey, what’s wrong?” Her eyes go wide. “Is it your mother? Did something happen?”
“Mom’s fine. Nobody’s hurt.” I swallow. “Can I come in?”
She steps back to let me in, and her hands are already starting to flutter, like they do when she’s worried.
I follow her into the kitchen, the same kitchen where she fed me after school for years, where she asked about my day and actually waited for the answer, back when my own mother couldn’t be bothered to look up.
There’s a dish towel over her shoulder, bread rising under a cloth on the counter, the whole place smelling like cinnamon.
And I’m about to take a wrecking ball to all of it.
“Sit down,” I say. “Please. I have to tell you some things and they’re bad.”
She doesn’t sit. She just stares at me, the dish towel still over her shoulder. “Emily, you’re scaring me.”
“Henry and I are divorced.” It comes out flat because if I let any feeling into it I won’t get through the rest. “It’s done. Has been for a few weeks now.”
“Divorced?” She presses a hand to her chest. “Oh, honey. You never said a word. What happened? You two were so happy, you were...”
“We weren’t. I just got good at pretending.” I make myself keep going. “He cheated on me, Ciara.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Her face crumples for me, all that easy warmth turning toward my hurt, and it makes what’s coming so much worse. “I’m so sorry. Do you know who the woman is? Is it from work?”
“You could say that.”
“Who?”
I can’t say it sitting across the kitchen from her. But there’s no soft way in, so I just say it. “Carmen.”
The towel slips off her shoulder. She doesn’t pick it up. “What?”
“It’s been going on for a long time.” I keep my voice as gentle as I can, because none of this is her fault. “I’ve known for a while. I’ve had time with it. You haven’t, and I’m sorry, but you needed to hear it from someone who loves you.”
“No.” She’s shaking her head, fast, like she can shake the words back out. “No. Not my Carmen. Not with Henry, she wouldn’t, she’s known you since you were girls...”
I cut her off. “There’s a baby.”
She stills.
“The baby,” she whispers. “She told me it was someone from a party. Some man she didn’t even get a name for.” Her hand comes up over her mouth.
“The baby is Henry’s, Ciara. That’s why there was no name.”
I watch her face while I say it, because I came here half-terrified I’d find my mother’s blankness there, that flat nothing that means somebody already knew.
It isn’t there. She’s coming apart in front of me, real and ugly, right here in real time.
The knot I’ve carried all morning loosens a little, even in the middle of all this. She didn’t know. She’s not one of them.
“Oh my god.” It’s barely a sound. She reaches out and grips the back of a chair like the floor moved. “Oh my god, Emily.”
I give her a second. There’s no second that’s long enough, but I give her what I can, because the next part is worse and I’d take it back if I could.
“Did you truly not know?” I ask.
“No!” She denies it immediately. “She told me that she doesn’t want a lot of people to know about the baby. She was embarrassed. But I could never imagine that her baby... my grandchild is...” she sobs. “Oh God!”
I should stop here. She already looks so distraught. Should I wait for another day?
No.
I can’t. She has to know everything now.
“There’s more,” I say. “And I need you to sit down for this one. It’s about my mother.”
She looks at me, and my heart breaks for this woman. She sits up straight and clutches her skirt. “Tell me.”
I take a deep breath. “My mother has been having an affair with John. Your John. For over twenty years. Since back when we were kids.”
The kitchen goes completely silent. Somewhere a clock ticks. She looks stunned. Her tears have stopped. I brace myself for whatever her reaction might be. Anger? Devastation? Would she blame me?
“No.” She says it quiet at first. Then louder. “No. Daphne’s my best friend, Emily, she’s been my best friend my whole life. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re upset, you’ve had a terrible shock, and you’re, you’re mixing things up.”
“I’m not mixing anything up.”
“John would never. He’s a good man, a good husband, all these years he’s...” Her voice climbs, frantic now, almost angry, and it’s not anger at John, it’s anger at me for putting this in the room. “Why would you even say this? Why would you come into my house and say a thing like this to me?”
“She told me herself, Ciara. I met her yesterday.”
That stops her. “What?”
“She came to yell at me for getting a divorce. She... she’s known since the beginning that Carmen and Henry were having an affair and that he’s the father of the baby.
I yelled at her, asking why she chose Carmen instead of me.
That’s when she snapped, and told me about the affair.
She was somewhat proud of it, if anything.
Told me she loved him first, that he was always supposed to be hers, that he’s going to leave you for her any day now.
” My voice cracks. “She’s been telling herself that for twenty years.
She treats Carmen better because she thought John would be with her if she showed she could be a good mother to his daughter. ”
“No.” But it’s smaller now. The fight is going out of it word by word, because some part of her is already running the tape back, all those years, all those little things that never quite added up. “No, that’s... that can’t...”
Her face has gone very still and very white, and then it begins to crumple, slow, like a building coming down floor by floor.
“She knew...” she starts, “that Carmen’s baby is Henry’s?”
I nod. I want to comfort her, to hold her hand. But my touch might not be welcome. And it’s clear that she didn’t know anything before I told her. Nobody can fake this level of devastation.
“All this time,” she whispers. “I thought we were happy. He tells me he loves me every single morning, says it before he leaves for work.” Her voice breaks apart. “My perfect family.”
She breaks down completely then, and I’m out of my chair and around the table before I’ve decided to move, my arms around her, holding on while she shakes apart in her kitchen.
“I’m so sorry,” I keep saying. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to tell you like this. I didn’t want to tell you at all. But you deserve to know.”
“No.” She grips my arms, and when she pulls back to look at me her eyes are streaming but there’s something underneath the tears, something hardening.
“No, don’t be sorry. You did the right thing.
You’re the only one in all these years who loved me enough to tell me the truth. Everyone else just let me be a fool.”