Chapter Twenty-Three
Mara called me directly, which surprised me enough that I almost didn’t answer.
“I need to tell you something,” she said, “and I need you to let me finish before you hang up on me.”
“Go ahead.”
?
“The photo,” she said. “The one my mother posted. I didn’t know she was going to do it. I found out the same time you did, from a nurse asking if I wanted to see how many likes it got.”
“Elias already told me that part.”
“He doesn’t know the rest,” Mara said. “My mother didn’t just post it.
She’s been building a folder. Photos. Old messages between me and Elias from years ago, before you two even met, taken out of context.
She’s planning to go to a reporter if he doesn’t, in her words, ‘do right by our family publicly.’”
?
I sat down slowly at the kitchen table. Theo was asleep in the bassinet beside me, three weeks old, entirely unaware of the machinery of adults grinding on around him.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier for you if she succeeded?”
“No,” Mara said, and her voice cracked in a way I recognized, because I’d heard it in my own voice on a hundred nights since March. “Because I’m alive because of that man, and I will not let my mother use my life to destroy his marriage. That’s not gratitude. That’s just theft with better PR.”
?
We talked for forty minutes. She told me about her mother’s grief, twisted sideways into control, ever since Mara’s father died young and Diane decided nothing else would be allowed to slip through her fingers uncontrolled.
She told me she’d started seeing a therapist too, mostly to figure out how to separate her own life from her mother’s plans for it.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, near the end, “he chose you. Eight years ago, and every day since. I was never a competition he almost lost. I was a debt he was always going to pay, whether or not it cost him everything.”
?
“That’s not exactly comforting,” I said.
“I know. But it’s true, and you deserve true more than you deserve comforting. I’ve read enough of your husband’s texts to know he’d agree with me.”
?
I laughed despite myself, and Mara laughed too, and for a strange, suspended moment, the two of us—the wife and the woman with his kidney—sat on either end of a phone call and simply breathed in the same relief.
“What do you want me to do with this?” I asked. “About your mother.”
“I want you to tell Elias to get ahead of her,” Mara said.
“Before she does it for him, ugly and half-true. He needs to tell the whole story himself, publicly, on his own terms. It’s the only version that will actually protect Theo from growing up and finding this on the internet instead of hearing it from his own father. ”