17. Paige
— ? —
Paige
It started with Melissa’s warning in that driveway. Within a week it’s texts from people I haven’t heard from in months, women from the Whitmore circle, old college friends, a cousin of Cole’s I met twice, and every message wears the same costume: careful sympathy zipped over morbid curiosity.
I don’t judge you for Wes, but you should’ve just told Cole the truth instead of letting him find out like this.
Reading that one four times doesn’t improve it.
No one’s taking sides!! But Jen said there are pictures?? From YEARS ago?? I just think you deserve to know what’s being said. Love you. Praying.
Paige. It’s Diane, Cole’s cousin. He’s really struggling. Whatever happened between you two, he didn’t deserve to find out about you and his brOTHER this way. Family is everything.
Heard you KNEW for two months and still let his mom buy a dress for that circus. Cold. Hope Wes was worth it.
The phone goes face-down on Wes’s kitchen counter, and across the island, the man I have apparently been sleeping with for years reads my expression the way he reads a level.
“How bad?”
“Your brother has rewritten our marriage. In his version, I fell for you years ago, he strayed because his home was already empty, and Tara merely took advantage of a broken man.” Coffee, both hands, holding it for warmth I don’t need.
“It’s good, Wes. It’s genuinely good. A cheating wife is better brunch material than a twelve-year con.
People aren’t believing it because it’s true, they’re believing it because it’s a better show. ”
Wes is quiet for a moment. Then he takes off his tool belt, hangs it on the hook by the door, and says, “Go put on whatever makes you feel bulletproof. We’re going to dinner.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“It’s a counterattack.” He’s already rolling down his sleeves.
“He’s telling the whole county we’ve been sneaking around for years.
So we stop sneaking. We sit in the middle of the loudest restaurant in town, at a table with candles on it, and we let every phone in the room take its pictures.
Hiding feeds his story, Paige. Nobody photographs people with nothing to hide. ”
“That’s either brilliant or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Both. Wear the green dress. The one from Mom’s birthday two years ago.” A beat, and the tips of his ears go faintly red, twelve years of noticing escaping through one sentence. “If you want.”
Marlowe’s on a Tuesday night is candlelight, white tablecloths, and half the zip code pretending not to look at us.
Walking in on Wes’s arm turns every third head. By the bread basket, the whisper current is fully operational, and by the wine, Jennifer and Brad have materialized at a table across the room with the worst sight lines and the best intentions of using them.
“Don’t look now,” I murmur, “but the Whitmore delegation has arrived.”
“I clocked them at the door.” Wes doesn’t turn around. His hand rests on the tablecloth, palm up, an offer with no pressure in it at all. “Your move. We can be two in-laws having a sad logistical dinner, or we can be what he’s afraid of.”
“Which is?”
“Real.”
Every camera-shaped object in the room is pointed at this table. Cole’s version of me lives in those phones, the scheming wife, the years-long liar, and here is a man offering me his open hand in public and letting me decide what the picture says.
Putting my hand in his is the loudest thing I’ve ever done quietly.
His fingers close around mine, calloused and warm and completely steady, and somewhere behind me a fork stops mid-air, and the whisper current becomes a whisper flood, and Wes smiles at me across the candles as though the room is empty.
“There,” he says. “Now the photos are true, at least.”
“You realize we’ve just confirmed his story for half this room.”
“No. His story is that we lied for years.” His thumb traces one line across my knuckles, and the candle flame does obscene things to the architecture of his face, and this is a strategy dinner, I remind my pulse, a strategy dinner.
“The truth is I took you to dinner after his divorce papers were filed, in public, with witnesses and a wine list. Let them hold the two stories side by side. Liars sneak, Paige. We’re eating bread. ”
“Strategic bread.”
“The most public carbohydrates in the county.”
A laugh gets loose across the table before it clears security, and his eyes go bright at the sound in a way that has nothing to do with strategy, and mine drop to his mouth entirely without authorization, and the room, the phones, the Whitmore delegation all thin out to static.
Not the time. Not the place. Everyone saw your marriage die a month ago.
His thumb crosses my knuckles again and the static wins.
Which is, of course, when Jennifer arrives at our table with her sympathy face on.
“Paige.” Both hands clasped over her heart, volume set to carry. “I just have to say, seeing you out, after everything, you’re so brave. And Wes. It’s wonderful that she has family with her.” A beat, precision-timed. “Even now.”
“Jennifer.” Wes doesn’t release my hand. If anything his grip settles in. “How’s Brad? Still telling people he’d have caught the punch?”
Her smile flinches at the edges. “Everyone’s just so heartbroken over it all. Both sides. Cole’s absolutely gutted, you know, he showed us the most devastating…” She catches herself with theatrical grace. “Well. It’s not my place.”
“Show us,” I say.
“Sorry?”
“Whatever he showed you. The devastating thing. Show us, Jennifer, you clearly drove over here to-” The smile drains off her face, and mine stays where it is.
“No? Then let me guess. He has photos he never quite produces. He has proof he can’t show you yet, for legal reasons, for my sake, out of kindness.
He’s protecting me.” Around us, three tables have given up on their own conversations entirely.
“You’ve known me for eight years. You watched him renew vows to me while his mistress sat pregnant in the second row.
And you drove across town on a Tuesday to test his script on my face.
So run the test, Jennifer. Caught, or robbed? Look me in the eye and pick one.”
Jennifer stands at our table holding a clutch and a dead script.
“Enjoy your dinner,” she finally manages, and retreats toward Brad, who has developed an intense relationship with the dessert menu.
Wes lifts his glass, unhurried. “You,” he says, “are going to be very bad for his campaign.”
“He’s had twelve years of rehearsal. I’ve got a green dress and a temper.”
“I know which one I’d bet on.” He touches his glass to mine, and under the table his knee comes to rest against my knee, deliberate and warm through the tablecloth, and stays there.
Half this room is photographing us and my only coherent thought is his hands, what those hands build, what they would do if I asked, and I should not be thinking about his hands at a strategy dinner with my divorce still wet. I think about them anyway.
The entrées arrive, and with them a strange, tilting realization.
“I don’t know your coffee order.”
Wes looks up from his plate. “What?”
“You know mine. You’ve known mine for a decade, you hand me the right cup at every family thing and I never once clocked it.
Turkey, not Italian. The green dress from your mom’s birthday.
You’ve been quietly fluent in me for twelve years, and I just realized I couldn’t tell a stranger three true things about you.
” Setting down my fork feels ceremonial. “So. First date rules. Coffee order.”
“Black. Gas station quality preferred. Ray says my taste in coffee is a workplace hazard.”
“Favorite meal.”
“Whatever’s hot at 6 a.m. You’re going to be very disappointed in me as a restaurant companion.”
“Currently thriving. The thing you’re proudest of building.”
He considers it, turning the stem of his glass.
“A porch swing. Eleven years old, crooked as sin, Grandma Rose sat in it every summer until she couldn’t do stairs.
She said the crooked part was her favorite.
Said level things bore her.” His eyes flick up, catch me looking, hold.
“Your turn. Three true things. Not his versions. Yours.”
“I hate peonies.” It comes out of hiding all by itself.
“Fifteen years arranging them for brides because they photograph well, and I hate them, they’re cabbage with a publicist. I wanted to be a botanical illustrator at nineteen and let a professor laugh me out of it.
And I have not slept a full night since the vineyard, except.
” Stop. Too late to stop. “Except the nights I can hear you moving around downstairs. Which you do, quietly, until my light goes off. Which I’ve noticed. ”
The candle does its work on his face, and his knee presses mine a half-degree firmer, and neither of us looks away, and somewhere in the room a phone is definitely capturing the exact moment the smear campaign becomes retroactively true.
“Busted,” he says quietly.
“Extremely.”
“I’ll stop if it-”
“Don’t you dare.”
The rest of the most photographed meal of my life passes with his knee against mine and the room forgetting, table by table, to keep watching.
The next morning, the smear requires a house call.
Cole’s rental sits in a complex of identical rentals, and he opens the door before my second knock, rested and freshly shaved, in a soft gray sweater engineered to say harmless. The contrast to my under-slept face is a set design.
“Paige.” A pleasant surprise, apparently. “I was hoping you’d come.”
“I’m not here to talk. I’m here to tell you to stop lying about me and Wes.”
“I haven’t been lying.” He leans on the doorframe, casual, reasonable.
“I’ve been having honest conversations with people who care about us.
Helping them see the whole picture. Two months, Paige.
You wore my ring and rehearsed my funeral for two months - that’s not slander, that’s the timeline.
You smiled at my mother, you let her buy a dress, you rehearsed a speech, and people find that chilling once they hear it.
I don’t even have to embellish. And our marriage had problems long before Tara.
You were distant for years. You pulled away, and I didn’t know how to reach you, and… ”
“Stop. You ran this draft at the hospital.” Watching the sentence land is almost worth the drive. “Word for word, Cole. The locked door, the distant wife. You should number your scripts, you’re starting to repeat material.”
His jaw tightens a click before the sweater-softness reasserts itself.
“Nice dinner last night,” he says. “Very cozy. Jennifer sent pictures. You know what everyone sees in those, don’t you? Confirmation.”
“Funny. Wes said you’d need them to be secret to sell it. There’s nothing secret about bread at Marlowe’s.”
“There’s nothing innocent about my brother’s hand on my wife.”
“Ex-wife requires only your signature. Speaking of which. Sign the papers and this all stops mattering.”
“I will.” He straightens off the doorframe, and here it comes, the thing the whole conversation was built to deliver.
“My parents are hosting a dinner Sunday. To talk everything through, as a family. Mom’s setting the table herself.
You’re invited. Wes too.” The smile arrives with nothing behind it.
“One room, both stories, and the people who’ve known us longest get to look us in the eye and decide.
That’s fair, isn’t it? That’s all I’ve ever asked for. One conversation.”
“And if I don’t come?”
“Then Sunday it’s just my voice, my mother’s table, and my version.” A shrug, gentle as a scalpel. “You’ve seen what my version does with a week and a phone, Paige. Imagine it with a captive audience and her pot roast.”
The parking lot asphalt holds steady under my feet the whole way back to the car, which is more than I can say for anything else.
Sunday. His board, his opening move, his mother’s table.
Behind me, from the doorway, pitched exactly loud enough to reach: “Tell my brother to come too. He has as much to answer for as I do.”