2. Emily
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Emily
Three days later, I’m at the kitchen table with my second coffee gone cold, thumbing through a week’s worth of junk mail, when one subject line stops my finger flat.
I open it. A photo loads of a lodge tucked into a ridge of pine trees, a whole sprawl of cabins with a lake behind them, mountains stacked up gray and soft in the distance. Three days in mid-October, the leaves already turning up there.
My chest pulls tight and loose at the same time, this confusing little squeeze I can’t name.
Because I hated high school. I hated the cafeteria politics and the whispers, hated how I learned to fold myself small and quiet so I’d stay off Carmen Halter’s radar.
None of that is worth driving four hours to relive.
But then there was Tara, my best friend, the only person back then who made the whole thing survivable, gone to New York for college and then gone from my life entirely. And there was Richard Reed.
I shut that down fast. I’m a married woman, and married women don’t get a little jump in their chest over a name from high school.
The garage door bangs and Henry comes in wiping grease off his hands with a shop rag, smelling like the underside of his car.
“What’s that?” he says, nodding at the laptop.
“My high school reunion. It’s in two weeks.”
He leans over my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, and squints at the screen. “Cabins, huh? That actually looks pretty nice.”
“Right? I was thinking, what if we made a whole trip out of it? You and me, three days in the mountains. We haven’t done anything like that in forever.”
“When is it?”
“The fifteenth through the seventeenth.”
He straightens up and shakes his head before I’ve even finished the dates. “Ah, can’t, babe. We’ve got that big party booking that week, the anniversary thing for a packed house. I have to be there.”
“Oh.” I keep my voice light and my eyes on the screen so he won’t catch the dip in my face. “Okay. Yeah, no, that’s fine.”
“You should still go, though.”
I turn around so fast my neck cracks. “Wait, what?”
“You should go.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, like he hasn’t spent this past year acting the exact opposite. “Have some fun. See your old friends, drink bad wine, whatever people do at these things.”
And that, right there, is the part that doesn’t fit.
Because this is not my husband. My husband is the man who asked me to text him the moment I parked at the grocery store three blocks away, who sulked for a week when I went to my college roommate’s bachelorette two towns over and didn’t pick up by eleven.
He’s possessive, has been since the start, and early on it actually felt like being wanted, like proof somebody cared where I was.
It never even cost me much, since I’ve never had a big crowd of friends for him to keep me from.
But now he’s handing me a whole weekend, no questions, no conditions.
How easy it is, that’s what makes the back of my neck prickle.
“Really,” I say. Not quite a question.
“Yeah, why not? You work hard, you deserve a break.” He drops a kiss on the top of my head, dry and quick. “I’ll hold down the fort. It’s three days, I think I can survive.”
He’s already drifting toward the living room, already sliding his phone out of his pocket like the conversation’s been over for a minute and I just didn’t get the memo.
“Let me know what you need,” he says over his shoulder.
I watch him go, and the thought lands before I can stop it, fully formed and ugly. He wants me gone.
I make myself look back at the screen instead, at those cabins and that lake, and the want sneaks up on me harder than I expect.
Not for the reunion, God no, not for a gym full of people I spent four years avoiding.
For the quiet. For mountain air that doesn’t smell like fryer grease, for a porch and a paperback and three whole days where nobody’s clocking how long I’ve been gone or what I spent.
There are a couple of faces I’d genuinely love to see again, too.
Tara, mostly, who I lost somewhere between her New York zip code and my wedding, and who I miss more than I let myself admit.
I wonder if Carmen will come, and my stomach turns at the thought.
God, please no. Except there’s not a chance in hell she’d skip it.
Carmen was the queen bee of that whole school, and a bully underneath the gloss, the type who’d land a little jab at me every single time she got the opening, her pack of friends laughing right on cue.
I never gave her the fight she was angling for, so all I ever caught was the occasional dig, but I saw what she and her girls did to the ones who couldn’t disappear fast enough.
A reunion is a stage, and she does not skip a stage.
And, fine, Richard Reed. There, I thought it on purpose this time.
My first love, if you can even call it love when the other person barely knew you were alive.
He was the quarterback, the most beautiful boy in that whole building, a year ahead of me, the golden boy teachers let get away with anything.
We got stuck on student council together my junior year, his senior one, and that was when I figured out the book had nothing to do with its cover.
Under all that swagger he was funny, a little shy, kinder than anyone gave him credit for.
I fell so damn hard I scared myself. I never breathed a word of it.
Then he graduated and walked out of that school a whole year ahead of me, and that was that.
He probably wouldn’t even recognize my face.
He’s probably married, with a beautiful wife and a beautiful life, and good for him, really.
That’s not the point. The point is for three days I get to be somebody other than Henry’s wife waiting on Henry’s schedule, and that alone is worth the drive.
“Okay,” I call out. “I’ll go.”
“Great,” Henry says from the couch, eyes on his phone, and I can already tell he’s not listening.
***
Nine days later I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed folding a basket of laundry, sorting his undershirts from mine, and the reunion is five days out and I’ve packed the whole thing twice in my head already.
The shower’s running on the other side of the wall, steam ghosting out from the gap under the bathroom door, and Henry’s humming something tuneless in there like he does when he’s in a good mood.
A phone buzzes against the nightstand beside me, and I reach for it on autopilot, thumb already moving, before the weight registers as wrong. Heavier than mine, the case a different texture under my fingers. Not my phone at all. His.
I should set it down. I almost do. Then the screen lights with a notification, and the name on it is Carmen.
That stops me cold. It’s nearly nine at night, and tomorrow’s Wednesday, the restaurant’s one day off, so there is no work reason on earth for her to be texting him at this hour.
Put that beside how he blew up like a landmine over me wanting to make one phone call a few days ago, and before I can talk myself back out of it, my thumb is already keying in his passcode.
He still uses the same four digits he’s always used, the day we got engaged, and some small dumb part of me clings to that.
A man with something to hide changes his passcode. Right? That has to mean something.
Then the text loads all the way, and my heart just stops in my chest.
The baby has a fever Henry! I have no idea what to do. Come and help me.
My whole hand goes numb around the phone.
I read it once, twice, a third time, like if I stare long enough the words will rearrange into something that doesn’t mean what it means.
Carmen has a baby. Carmen, who I have known literally my entire life, who calls me to crow about every tiny win she’s ever had, who would have announced a pregnancy from a rooftop with a marching band and thrown herself a shower you could see from orbit.
Carmen has a baby, and not one single person told me.
And now she’s texting my husband, at nine o’clock at night, begging him to come over.
Why him? Why is Henry the person she reaches for when her kid spikes a fever?
The math starts adding itself up in my head whether I want it to or not.
Carmen went silent almost a year ago, which is exactly, precisely, enough time to get pregnant and have a baby.
Henry detonated when I so much as mentioned calling her family.
Henry, my homebody possessive husband, suddenly thrilled to have me out of the house for an entire weekend.
No. Stop. I’m spiraling, building a whole conspiracy out of one text and a bad mood. There’s an explanation. There has to be.
My thumb hovers over the message, though.
One tap and I could open the whole thread, scroll back through weeks, months, read every word the two of them have ever sent each other.
The temptation is a physical pull, my hand actually drifting toward the screen before I catch it.
Because here’s the thing about looking. Once I see it, really see it, I can’t unsee it.
Then I have to do something, tonight, half-dressed and shaking in my own bedroom, no plan, nowhere to go, a husband ten feet away behind a bathroom door.
I’m not ready. Not like this, not yet. So I lock the screen, and God, it costs me more than I want to admit.
Setting it face-down, walking away from the answer when it’s right there in my hand, that’s its own kind of cowardice, and I hate that I’m capable of it.
The water shuts off with a clunk in the pipes.
I set the phone back down exactly where it was, angled the same way against the lamp, and my hands won’t quit shaking no matter how hard I press them flat against my thighs.
Henry comes out a minute later with a towel around his hips, scrubbing at his wet hair with another one. “Laundry day, huh?”
“Yep.” My voice comes out even, and I genuinely don’t know how, because my pulse is going like a rabbit’s.
He picks up his phone off the nightstand and glances at the screen. His whole face tightens, quick, there and then smoothed over before I can be sure I saw it. “Hey, listen, I gotta head out.”
“What? Henry, it’s nine o’clock at night!”
“I know, I know. It’s Jerry. He’s having a rough one, just got dumped, needs somebody to throw back a few beers with him. I might end up crashing at his place, honestly.”
Jerry. Sure. He’s lying to my face and we both apparently know it, except he doesn’t know I know, and the cold little certainty of it settles right into my gut.
I make myself soften, make myself sound like a worried wife instead of a woman doing arithmetic.
“Oh no, poor guy. Is he okay? You want me to come with, keep you both company?”
“No, no, God, no, you don’t have to do that.
” It comes out a beat too fast. “He’s fine, mostly.
He just needs a guy to vent to, you know how it is.
” He’s already stepping into jeans, dragging a shirt over his head, and then, God help me, splashing on the good cologne, the one he saves for actual occasions.
“You’re putting on cologne to go drink cheap beer with Jerry?”
For half a second he freezes, and then he laughs it off. “Force of habit, babe.” He leans in and kisses my cheek, his mouth warm, smelling of that cologne, and I want to scream. “Don’t wait up, okay?”
The front door opens, then clicks shut, and the house goes silent around me.
I sit there in the middle of the warm laundry, a folded undershirt still in my lap, and I don’t move for a long, long time.
The fabric softener smell of it suddenly makes me a little sick.
Staying the night. With Carmen. The thought walks straight in and makes itself at home, and I can’t shove it back out.
Could it really be? Is my husband sleeping with Carmen Halter?
By midnight I’m still wide awake. I tried, I really did, lay flat in the dark for two solid hours staring up at nothing, but every time my eyes drifted shut that text was right there printed on the inside of my eyelids, waiting for me.
I give up and pad out to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water I have no intention of drinking.
The house is so quiet it hums. Funny, I never noticed how quiet it gets when he’s not in it, or maybe I noticed a long time ago and taught myself not to, same as I taught myself not to notice a hundred other things.
He wrote his own vows. Said the standard ones weren’t enough for what he felt.
I will protect you, Emily. I will never give you a reason to doubt me.
Stood up there in front of everyone we knew and said it out loud, and I swallowed it whole.
And now here I am at midnight, drinking tap water in the dark, doing math on whether my husband is somebody’s father.
I keep waiting to feel crazy, and I don’t.
That’s the part that scares me. I know what this looks like, I know what it adds up to when you set the pieces in a row.
But knowing and seeing are two different animals.
I’m not torching my whole life on a hunch and a notification.
I need to see it. My own two eyes, nothing left to argue with.
So here’s the plan. The reunion’s in five days. I’ll go, I’ll get some air and some distance, I’ll get my head clear. And then, when I’m good and ready, I’ll follow him.
I pour the water down the sink and go back to bed.
I don’t sleep. The text just keeps looping behind my eyes, narrowing down to the four words at the heart of it I can’t switch off. Come and help me. My husband is the first person she calls.