Chapter 27
Audrey
"Kids—go outside and play before dinner's ready."
Nora doesn't look up from the couch when she says it.
She's got a throw pillow in her lap, fingers working the corner of it, eyes on me.
The kids thunder past. Eli stops to ask if he can bring the soccer ball, and Nora says yes without breaking her stare.
Then the screen door bangs, and it's just us.
I'm still standing in the entryway with the keys in my hand.
I sat in the driveway for five minutes before I came in. Visor down, mirror flipped, pressing the pads of my fingers under my eyes like I could push the puffiness back where it came from. I ran through the things I'd say if anyone asked. Long rehearsal. Headache. The cake delivery ran late.
None of it worked. I can feel my face. It's the kind of swollen tightness that no amount of practice can cover.
"Sit," Nora says.
I sit.
The cushion gives under me, and I keep my eyes on the coffee table, on the ring of condensation Eli left there this morning that I never wiped up. Nora shifts so her knee touches mine.
"Talk. What happened?”
My throat closes. I look at the water stain.
"Audrey."
"Rehearsal," I manage. The word comes out wrong, cracked down the middle.
She waits.
And I give in. Sort of.
I tell her about the side room. The way Jenna said can we talk for a moment with that soft, kind lift at the end, like she was offering me something.
The door closing. Two women I've known for fifteen years standing behind her, nodding along in that gentle way that's worse than shouting. The careful sentences. How they don’t think I should be in the play.
I don't give her the rest. I don't tell her about the police officer her grandmother saw, or the man coming and going late at night, or the part where they said Eve, like the role itself was evidence against me.
I can't get my mouth around those pieces yet.
They're still lodged somewhere under my ribs.
Nora listens. Her expression shifts while I talk—goes tight at the jaw, then careful, then something flat and cold that I've only seen on her a handful of times.
She doesn't interrupt. Somewhere out in the yard Eli shrieks with laughter and Sophie shushes him, and the ordinary sound of it makes my chest pull tighter.
When I run out of words, she's quiet, looking at the side of my face.
Then, gently, she asks, "Is this about Asher?"
My head comes up.
"What—" The keys slide out of my hand onto the cushion. "How did you—how do you—"
"Nate told me."
"He what?"
I drop my face into my hands.
"He promised. He promised he'd let me tell you." The words come out muffled into my palms. My ears are hot.
"Oh, he tried." There's a smile in her voice. "He had every intention of keeping that promise, Auds. It's a good thing he's not the one up on that church stage trying to act, because he looked guilty the second I saw his face on my phone screen. I made him tell me."
She pats my shoulder. The hand stays there.
"What I don't get," she says, and now the smile's gone, "is why you didn't tell me. We tell each other everything."
I peek out from between my fingers.
"You're not mad?"
"No." She says it fast. No hesitation in it at all. Then she grimaces. "Well. Not at you. I'm mad I have to play nice with the Wanda-hater if that's the jerk you actually like."
My mouth tilts before I can stop it. She catches it and points at me like she's won something.
"There she is."
I let my hands fall into my lap. The relief of it moves through me slowly, loosening something in my chest I didn't know I'd been gripping so tight.
She inhales once.
"Is this just a phase?" she asks. "Are you just—sleeping with him? Nate wouldn't tell me much once I'd wrung the truth out of him. He kept saying that's hers to tell. So—" She gives me a look. "Tell me."
I feel the guilt hit my face. "I really was going to, Nor." My voice wobbles. "I just didn't know how. Or when. I kept waiting for the right time, and I could never find it."
"Like with Thomas?"
I go still.
"What do you mean?"
Nora looks down at her hands. She turns her rings around her fingers, once, twice, then she lets out a breath.
"You never told me what happened with you and Thomas. Before you got engaged."
Something drops out from under me.
"You—" My eyes burn. "You knew? Why didn't you say anything?"
"Same reason you just gave me. I figured you'd tell me when you were ready.
" She shrugs, but it's a small, sad thing.
"I saw how sick you were, Audrey. All those trips to the bathroom.
You couldn't keep anything down for weeks, and you kept telling everyone it was a stomach bug.
I got it out of Mom. Eventually. She didn't want to say. "
My throat tightens.
"Mom wouldn't speak to me after she found out." I hear it land in my voice, the old bitterness dug in deep. "She never told me what she did. But I know she forced Thomas into proposing."
Nora's head comes up.
"Audrey. No."
"Nora, there's no other way that—"
"She wanted to." Nora turns toward me fully now, one knee up on the cushion. "She marched around the kitchen for a week, working herself up to it. But I wouldn't let her."
Everything in me goes quiet.
"I told Thomas," she says.
My hand comes up to my mouth.
"You did?"
She nods.
"I told him. About the pregnancy." Her voice softens. "And he didn't say a word. He just got his keys and drove straight to the jewelry store. That same afternoon, Auds. Nobody had to push him anywhere. He was already halfway out the door."
I'm shaking my head. The tears are coming now, and I can't stop them, can't get ahead of them.
"There's no way Thomas picked out that ring. That's why I always thought Mom—the ring was too—it was exactly what I would've—"
"Oh, Audrey." Nora laughs, wet and quiet, reaching for my hand. "You think I was going to let that man walk into a jewelry store and play Russian roulette with a diamond? On you?" She squeezes my fingers. "I helped him pick it out."
Something breaks open in my chest.
Not loudly. Not in a way that has a sound. Just—a wall I've been leaning against for eleven years giving way all at once, and me falling through the space where it was.
He chose me.
The thought arrives whole. He drove to the store. He was already going. He chose me.
The couch is solid beneath me. The water ring sits on the coffee table. The kids' voices come thin through the screen. All of it stays exactly where it is while the ground shifts somewhere underneath. I press my palm flat against my chest, unable to pull in a full breath.
I've spent every day since the funeral believing the whole thing started as a sentence handed down at my mother's kitchen table, a ring pressed into Thomas's hand, a man doing the decent thing because someone made him.
I built a marriage on top of that. I built a grief on top of that.
And it was never true.
"I'm sorry." It comes out broken, my face crumpling. I pull her in, both arms, my forehead against her shoulder. She smells like the lavender hand cream she's used since we were teenagers, and the familiarity of it undoes me a little more. "I'm so sorry."
"Shh. Don't." Her hand moves up and down my back, slowly. "Don't you be sorry, Auds. I'd do anything for you. You know that." She pulls back enough to look at me, wiping the stream of tears from under my eyes. "I was just surprised you had it in you, is all. You were always the good one."
I close my eyes.
"The suppressed one," I say. "Not the good one, Nora. I envied you. You were always so brave. You just did whatever you wanted."
"Yeah. You called that being brave." She makes a face. "Pretty sure Mom called it pig-headed."
A laugh jerks out of me, ugly and surprised, half a sob still riding it. Nora's grinning now, and I'm wiping my face with the heel of my hand. For a second, we're teenagers again, two girls on a couch, back before life got complicated.
She lets me settle, lets my breathing come back down.
Then she asks, "Is it serious? With Asher?"
I look at her. I don't reach for anything to soften it.
"Nora. I love him."
She tips her head back against the cushion and looks at the ceiling. But she's smiling. I watch it spread across her face, slow and real.
"Does he know yet?"
"No." I look down at my hands. "I haven't told him."
"That jerk," she says, "is one hell—" She stops. Glances toward the screen door where the kids are yelling about something in the yard. "—is one H-E-double hockey sticks of a lucky guy."
"Baseball bats."
She blinks. "What?"
"H-E-double baseball bats."
Nora throws her head back and laughs, the full sound of it, the one that fills a room. "Seriously?"
"He told me it had to be baseball." I feel my face go warm. "If I wanted to be with him. It was a whole thing."
"You really love him, huh?" It's not a question anymore. She's just looking at me.
I look back down. There's a heat climbing my neck that has nothing to do with crying.
"I don't think I've ever felt this seen before."
I laugh softly and wipe under my eyes.
"Who notices somebody always rushing to beat the microwave timer? Who thinks to turn the beep off because it stresses someone out?"
Nora's mouth twitches.
"Apparently a giant baseball player," she says.
I shake my head.
"He pays attention. He makes me feel..." My voice softens. "Cherished."
I put my face back into my hands, the memory of trying to defend him feeling too fresh.
Her hand returns, moving up and down my back.
"Jenna thinks I fell for one of his tricks," I say into my palms. "That he's exactly what everybody says he is. The playboy. And I'm the sad little widow who fell for it."
The hand on my back goes still.
"If that man does any kind of funny business with you," Nora says, and her voice has gone very flat and very calm, "I swear to you, Audrey. I will personally castrate him and send him to hell and back indefinitely until he's begging to come back as Wanda's scratching post."
I laugh into my hands.
"But—" I start.
She covers my hand with hers and waits until I look at her.
"But," she says, "I think you need to care a whole lot less about what other people think."
"Nora—"
"Mom and Dad are gone." She says it plainly, without flinching, the way only she can. "The kids will adjust—"
"They already know."
She pauses. Something in her face dips—just for a second, just enough that I catch it—the small drop of realizing she's the last one to be told. Then it's gone. She recovers before I can even feel bad about it.
“Even better," she says. "That’s two less people to worry about.”
"Jenna's still—" I start.
"Jenna's going to talk. So will the rest of them.
" She says it like she's reading a forecast. "They talked when Heath and I split, and I don’t even live here anymore.
They'll find somebody new to chew on by Christmas.
It's what they do." She sighs. "I know you.
You keep telling yourself you're protecting the kids.
From what, Auds? A mother who's actually happy?
Sophie's spent over a year watching you hold yourself together with both hands.
You think she can't tell the difference between that and watching you finally breathe? "
I don't have an answer.
"The whole congregation could put it to a vote, and it wouldn't mean a single thing.
Not one of them gets a say." She takes my phone off the side table and presses it into my hands, folding my fingers around it.
She ducks her head to catch my eyes. "The only one still grading you—is you. And honey, you've been a brutal judge."
I look down at the phone in my hands.
"Go on," Nora says. She squeezes my fingers around the case, once, and her voice drops to something soft and certain. "Go make your second chance happen."