Chapter 16
In the quiet after Candice asked Nathan for the truth, Nathan’s shoulders fell. The ocean beside them lapped along the sand. When Nathan opened his mouth to speak, Candice flattened her palm between them and said, “Please, don’t lie again. I can’t take it. Not anymore.”
This shut Nathan up for another full minute. Candice felt on the edge of a cliff, poised to jump. Or had her question about his affair been the jump itself? Was she already in free-fall, headed for a crash?
“I know you know I heard you,” Candice said gently.
“That night, the night we had the party at the house, the night my mother died. I was in the guest room, resting, when you and Janie were talking in the hall outside. I heard everything, obviously. I should have spoken to you about it immediately, but…”
Nathan closed his eyes. “You lost your mother. You had other things on your mind. Other things besides your loser husband, who didn’t know how to stay loyal.”
Candice felt as though the window of her heart was opening up. She took a bigger gulp of air than she had in months. He’d admitted it. This was it. Finally, they could face the truth.
Nathan rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, Candice,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say.” He let his hands fall with a thump to the table, then said, “It’s over. I don’t know if that’s any consolation, but it is.”
Candice was surprised. “What happened?”
Nathan shrugged.
“Did you end it?” Candice asked.
“Things were getting out of hand,” Nathan said. “I was worried, I guess. I don’t know.” His face crumpled after that, and he let out a strangled laugh. “I’m lying again.”
Candice didn’t understand what he meant at first. “What do you mean?”
“I was going to let you believe that I ended things,” Nathan said.
“I was going to let you believe that I took this big step forward for our family and for our relationship. But it’s not true.
The truth is, Janie freaked out. She hated all the gossip circling about us, and she was worried that it would affect her writing career down the line.
More than that, though, I think she fell in love with someone else.
There was always some other guy she was hung up on. ”
Candice pressed her palms together as hard as she could.
It was her turn to pity her husband, to think that for months, he was competing with a twentysomething man for the attention of a twentysomething woman.
Maybe he always knew he was going to lose that race.
Maybe he always thought he could fall back on his wife and children.
But I couldn’t help him with that. It was over.
Tears filled Candice’s eyes, but she blinked them away quickly. She had no interest in showing this man that he’d gotten to her.
“I’m lost,” Nathan said finally, his eyes widening.
“I thought I could write my way out of all these awful feelings, but I can’t.
My writing is not going well. I hear myself lying to your brother and sister about that, and it sickens me.
But for the weeks since Janie broke up with me, for the weeks since you came to the Vineyard, I’ve been walking and drinking wine and watching bad TV. ”
Candice didn’t say that he sounded like a person with a broken heart in a film.
“I need the kids to love me,” Nathan said suddenly, turning his face away from hers. “I can’t bear for them to hate me.”
Candice felt another crashing wave of pity. “They’re always going to love you.”
“Not when they find out what I did,” Nathan said. “Maybe they’ve already figured it out, I don’t know. I know Sarah read the book.”
Candice wanted to ask her husband why he’d felt the need to come out so publicly with his affair from the pages of his “autofiction,” but she decided it didn’t matter now.
She could imagine a few months from now, when The New Yorker would publish a piece about their impending divorce, about how clear it had been to everyone that Nathan was having a fiery affair.
All Candice could do was ignore all that press, she guessed.
Or maybe she could ride the press wave and get her own book published?
No, she resolved then. She would not write about Nathan, their marriage, or their children.
It was Nathan’s deal to write about real people and subsequently ruin their lives.
The only people Candice was interested in writing about were her mother and her mysterious aunt.
She wanted to dig deeper into the past, if only to save herself from the future.
Candice thanked her husband for his honesty. “It’s been a long time coming,” she said.
Nathan groaned and rubbed his forehead. “Is there any way we can fix this? Beth and Reggie went to a great marriage counselor last year. Maybe we could…”
Candice shook her head slowly. “I don’t want to fix it.”
“You want to give it all up?” Nathan asked. There was a childlike tenderness to his voice. “Our entire story? Our entire life? Because I don’t want that, Candice. We have a beautiful world, one that we started building when we were in our twenties. To throw that all away now would be…”
“A waste?” Candice finished. Her heart felt cold. She wondered if she would regret this. But the truth was, she could not imagine living with Nathan after this betrayal. She could not see a way through this. Maybe that was her fault. Perhaps it was how things had to be.
Nathan saw that there was no arguing with her on this. “We can keep talking,” he said, standing up. “I love you, Candice.”
Candice couldn’t bring herself to respond.
She listened as Nathan walked from the table and went into the house, where he’d surely perform all the duties required before bed.
Maybe he’d tuck himself beneath the sheets and wait to hear her footsteps in the dark.
But Candice wouldn’t come to their bed tonight.
She knew she’d spend as long as she could in her mother’s study, digging deeper into a story that she couldn’t fully understand yet.
Maybe, when and if she got tired, she could stretch out on the sofa in the study.
She could fall asleep listening to her mother’s old songs.