10. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Glenn opens the door before I finish knocking.
He’s in sweatpants and an old college T-shirt, hair wild, phone still in his hand from my call, and when he sees my face he doesn’t say a word.
He just steps forward and pulls me in, suitcase and all, and I fall apart on his doorstep for the second time in a month, except this time the grief is mine.
He gets me inside. He sits me on the couch, wraps a blanket around my shoulders, puts a box of tissues in my lap, and pours two cups of tea neither of us is going to drink. Then he sits down across from me and waits.
The whole story comes out in pieces, between sobs, out of order. The test. The two lines. The joy. The drunk stranger in the study, the locked door, the morning, the kitchen.
“He accused me of sleeping with you,” I say. “He thinks the baby is yours.”
Glenn goes very white, then very still. When he speaks, his voice has dropped into a register I’ve never heard from him.
“He what?”
“He thinks we’re having an affair. The dinners, the late nights. He put it together into…” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. “He screamed at me, Glenn. He asked whose it was. He said I’d pass another man’s child off as a Knightley.”
“That absolute bastard.” Glenn is on his feet. “That paranoid, self-destructive bastard. I’ll kill him. I’m going to drive over there and beat the truth into him.”
“No.”
“Willow, he called you a…”
“NO.” I grab his wrist. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t go over there.”
“He needs to know what those dinners were! One sentence, Willow. I tell him one sentence and this whole insane thing falls apart.”
“And then what? He didn’t believe ME, Glenn.
His own wife, twelve years, standing in front of him telling the truth, and he chose the lie.
You think he’ll believe it from you? He’ll just decide you’re covering for me.
And you’d be outing yourself to a man who currently hates you, to save a marriage he already threw away.
” I shake my head. “I’m not trading your secret for his approval.
Not after everything it’s cost you. He didn’t trust me.
That’s the whole story. Nothing you say fixes that. ”
Glenn stands there vibrating with fury, and then the fight goes out of him. He sits back down.
“Fine. I promise.” He drags a hand through his hair. “But I want it noted that I hate this.”
“Noted.”
“How did he even know about the dinners?”
“I don’t even know how he knew. The dinners, the nights I stayed late. I don’t know if he read my texts or someone told him or what.” I pull the blanket tighter. “Does it matter? He took the kindest thing I’ve ever done, being there for you, and he turned it into filth.”
Glenn’s jaw works. He picks up his tea, sets it down without drinking.
“He believed it, really and truly believed I could do that to him,” I say, and my voice comes apart on the last word. “You should have seen his face, Glenn. He looked at me like I was garbage. Twelve years, and he looked at me like I was nothing.”
“Come here.”
I move to his side of the couch and he puts his arm around me and I cry into his shoulder, and it occurs to me through the mess of it that we’ve done this before with the roles reversed, a month ago, a lifetime ago.
“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” I say wetly. “He lost his husband. I lost mine. Except mine is still alive and hates me.”
“Mine would have liked you,” Glenn says quietly. “He did like you. He used to say you were the only one of my friends with any sense.”
That gets a broken laugh out of me, which promptly turns into more crying.
Eventually the tears run dry. Glenn makes up the guest room, the one across the hall from the bedroom he can’t sleep in anymore, and he carries my suitcase up like a bellhop and sets it on the bench at the foot of the bed.
“Stay as long as you need,” he says. “I mean it. This house is too quiet anyway.”
“Glenn. Thank you. I didn’t know where else…”
“You came exactly where you were supposed to come. That’s the end of that sentence.”
I sit on the edge of the guest bed after he leaves, in the quiet of a house soaked in someone else’s grief, and I put both hands over my stomach.
“It’s just us for a while,” I whisper. “Your dad is… your dad made a mistake. A big one.”
The nausea hits without warning, a wave of it rising fast, and I barely make it to the bathroom across the hall before I’m sick, retching until there’s nothing left. When I look up, Glenn is in the doorway, holding my hair back off my face, his expression unreadable.
“Willow. That’s the third time since you got here.”
I don’t answer him. I don’t have to. We both hear the thing under the sentence, the question that isn’t about today at all.