5. Paige
— ? —
Paige
Sunday dinner at the Aldridge house, six days out, and Maria has seated us the way she’s seated us for a decade: Frank and Maria at the ends, Cole and me on one side, Wes and Tara on the other.
Tara at the family table. I never questioned it before - she’s been coming since our second Christmas, the orphaned best friend folded into the clan, Maria’s “third child,” and it used to make my chest warm, watching my two families braid together.
Now I sit across from her passing the green beans and understand I’m looking at the longest con in this house’s history: my husband got his mistress adopted by his own mother.
“Tara, sweetheart, you’re not eating.” Maria frowns down the table. “You’ve been picking for weeks. Are you sleeping?”
“Wedding diet,” Tara says, patting her middle over the loose linen dress. “Have to fit next to the bride.”
“You girls and your nonsense. Frank, tell them.”
“You’re all perfect, eat the potatoes,” Frank says, not looking up from carving, and the table laughs, and I watch my mother-in-law spoon extra onto the plate of the woman carrying - no.
Not that. Even I can’t be carrying that theory to a Sunday dinner.
Picking at food, loose dresses, no wine - I file it under stress and slide the folder to the back of the drawer, because some doors you don’t open six days before you burn the house down.
The renewal is the only topic. Maria has opinions on the processional.
Frank has been assigned a tie. Tara walks the whole table through the seating chart on her phone - “Margaret is at nine, which is the table farthest from the bar, don’t fight me, Frank” - and my husband sits beside me with his arm across the back of my chair, thumb tracing my shoulder, holding court about the caterer, and to any camera in the room we are the luckiest family in the county.
“Speech!” Maria taps her glass with her fork when the plates are cleared. “Frank. You promised you’d practice.”
“I’m saving it for Saturday.”
“Practice on us. That’s what family dinner is for.”
Frank sighs the sigh of forty years, stands, raises his iced tea, and looks down the table at Cole and me.
“Twelve years ago, I watched my younger son marry a woman too good for him.” Laughter; Cole clutches his chest, wounded.
“Twelve years later, she still is, and the fact that he knows it is the only evidence I have that I raised him right. To Paige and Cole. May the next twelve be honest and kind.”
“Honest and kind,” the table echoes, glasses up.
Honest and kind. I drink to it, and across the table Tara drinks her water to it, and beside her Wes turns his glass one full rotation on the tablecloth before he lifts it, and my husband drinks deepest of all.
“That was beautiful, Dad,” Cole says. “I’m stealing half of it Saturday.”
“You steal everything,” Wes says.
It lands as a joke - Frank chuckles, Maria swats at him - but the two brothers hold each other’s eyes for a beat longer than the joke needs, and Cole’s smile stays exactly where it is without moving at all, and I add the moment to the ledger under a brand-new column.
Then Cole’s phone buzzes face-down by his bread plate.
He doesn’t touch it. That’s the tell I’ve learned - the old Cole reached for every buzz, the manager, the deal-closer. This Cole lets it lie and keeps talking, and exactly ninety seconds later he pats my shoulder and says, “Work thing, two minutes,” and takes the phone out toward the porch.
Forty seconds after that, Tara sets down her napkin. “I’m going to steal some air before pie.”
She goes out the kitchen door. The other door.
The table talks on - Maria and Frank in a warm argument about pie versus cobbler - and I reach for my water glass and lift my eyes and find Wes looking at the kitchen door.
Not glancing. Looking. Jaw set, fork down, one thumb pressing a slow line into the tablecloth, and there is a whole ledger behind his eyes, and I know that ledger, because I keep one exactly like it behind mine.
He feels me watching and turns.
Twelve years of family dinners, and I could count on one hand the times Wes Aldridge has held my eyes longer than politeness.
He holds them now. Two knowers, recognizing each other across the potatoes - except neither of us knows the other knows, so the moment just hangs there, enormous and unspendable, until Maria says “Wesley, pie or cobbler, you’re the tiebreaker,” and he says “both,” and the table laughs, and we let each other go.
Cole and Tara come back through their separate doors ninety seconds apart, and my husband’s hand returns to my shoulder, and dessert is served.
Wes finds me on the porch afterward, while Cole helps his mother with the leftovers containers - Maria sends us home provisioned for a siege every Sunday, it’s her love language, tupperware.
“Here.” He hands me the bag. Cobbler and pie both; the tiebreaker shares his winnings. “You were quiet tonight.”
“Big week.”
“Mm.” He leans on the rail beside me, arms crossed, looking out at the dark yard, and Wes Aldridge’s silences have never needed filling, which is maybe the thing I’ve always liked best about standing next to him. “You ready for Saturday?”
“Everyone keeps asking me that.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I look over. He’s already looking at me - that same steadiness from across the potatoes, patient, unhurried, a man who reads load-bearing walls for a living - and for one reckless second the whole thing rises in my throat.
He watches the doors too. He keeps the same ledger.
I could say four words on this porch and not be alone in it anymore.
“I’m ready for it to be over,” I say instead. “The waiting. I’ve never been good at the part before the thing.”
Something moves through his face - weighed, considered, shelved. “No,” he says finally. “Me neither.”
“Wes! Grab the door for your brother!” Maria calls, and the moment folds itself up and goes back in its box, and my husband comes out with his arms full of a week of his mother’s cooking, and we drive home with the radio on, provisioned for a siege.
Tuesday night, he comes downstairs carrying the toolbox.
“Tara’s garbage disposal died. She’s got that whole thing Thursday, people coming over - I told her I’d look at it tonight.” He’s in the gray henley, jeans, boots. Handsome. Handy. He kisses me on his way to the door. “Hour, maybe two if it’s the unit itself. Don’t wait up.”
“Tell her hi,” I say from the couch. “Oh - I might run to the studio later. The Hendricks anniversary order, the peonies came in ugly, I want to rebuild the centerpieces before Bree sees them.”
“That’s my girl. Two artists, burning the midnight oil.” He points at me with the toolbox, charmed by us, by the whole tableau. The door closes.
I give him nine minutes.
The studio is real - the peonies really are ugly, Bree really would faint - and it’s also perfect, because the drive to the studio passes within two turns of Tara’s street, and a woman can miss a turn.
I park where the sedan parks, in the shade past the landscaping trailer, one street over with a gap-toothed view between buildings, and I turn off my headlights, and I wait, and I hate every cell of what I’ve become, and I stay anyway.
His car is already at the curb. The toolbox, I will note for the record, is still visible on the back seat.
Her porch light is on.
The door opens before he knocks - she was watching for him - and Tara steps out into the yellow light in a slip of a dress, and my husband takes the porch steps two at a time, and there is no hello, there is no doorway small talk, there is no garbage disposal in the state of things.
He kisses her the way he hasn’t kissed me in years.
Both hands in her hair. Her arms inside his jacket.
Her heel popping up off the ground like a girl in a poster, and it goes on, and on, on the porch, under the light, in front of God and the landscaping trailer and me, two people so deep inside twelve years of getting away with it that they’ve stopped checking the street.
I don’t cry. I keep waiting for the crying and it doesn’t come.
What comes instead is a terrible, crystalline focus - I watch my husband’s hand slide down my best friend’s spine to the small of her back, the exact spot he used to find on me across crowded parties, his homing signal, I see you, I’m coming - and the last unbroken thing in me, some stubborn holdout that had survived the texts and the trap and the shower, quietly closes its office and turns off the light.
The front door shuts behind them.
A minute later, upstairs, a lamp comes on. Then goes off.
I drive to the studio. That’s the part nobody will believe, later - that I actually went, that I stood at my workbench at eleven at night in the flower cooler’s hum and rebuilt the Hendricks centerpieces with my hands shaking so hard I dropped the shears twice.
Peonies, ranunculus, garden roses. Anniversary flowers.
Twenty-six years, the Hendrickses. I wired every stem like a surgeon and cried exactly once, briefly, into the greenery, where it wouldn’t stain anything, and then I finished the job, because the flowers were never his, and some things I get to keep.
He comes home at 1:40 a.m. The shower runs. The man showers more than any home repairman in America.
When he slides into bed, his hair is wet and he smells like soap over soap, and he fits himself against my back and drapes his arm over me, and I let my breathing stay long and slow and asleep.
“Disposal fixed?” I murmur, drowsy, wifely.
“All fixed. Flywheel was jammed - penny down the drain, if you can believe it.” Details. Always the details; my husband builds his lies to code. “How were the peonies? You get the centerpieces where you want them?”
“Rebuilt all six. Bree will never know.”
“That’s my girl.” His lips land on my shoulder. “Two jobs done tonight. Look at us.”
Look at us. Two liars in one bed, debriefing - him reporting from her porch, me reporting from the shadows across her street, each of us swallowing the other’s story whole, and only one of us knows there are two stories.
The arithmetic of that should not be comforting.
It is anyway. It’s the only advantage I have.
“Poor Tara,” I sigh into the pillow. “She’s helpless over there.”
“Completely helpless,” my husband agrees, pulling me closer. “Go back to sleep.”
Helpless. On the porch, under the light, her heel in the air.
“You’re a good man,” I tell the dark, and feel him smile against my skin, feel him actually smile, and that’s the moment - not the texts, not the porch - that’s the moment I stop being sad and start being dangerous.
Four days.
In four days, everyone we know is going to watch me fix everything.