20. Paige
— ? —
Paige
Tara is in the back booth, her hands wrapped around a cup of decaf she isn’t drinking. Heavily pregnant, exhausted, and even now the room bends around her the way rooms always have. I used to envy that about her. Now I mostly feel tired.
Wes wanted to come with me. I told him no - this conversation needs to happen between me and the woman who helped destroy my marriage, without men complicating it further.
“Thank you for coming,” Tara says as I slide into the booth across from her.
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know. I wouldn’t have, if I were you.”
The waitress appears, and I order coffee I don’t want just to have something to do with my hands. When she leaves, Tara starts talking.
“Cole’s been parking outside my building. Watching. I called the police twice, but they said there’s nothing they can do unless he threatens me.” She laughs, hollow. “He doesn’t need to threaten. He just has to be there.”
“What did he say when he came to your apartment?”
Tara’s hands tighten around her cup. “He’s not trying to win you back anymore. That ship sailed after the dinner at his parents’ house. Now he just wants to burn everything down.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s been calling his mother. Every day.
Multiple times a day.” Tara meets my eyes.
“His version has evolved. It’s not just that you and Wes were involved - now it’s that you ‘isolated him,’ that Wes ‘manipulated a grieving woman,’ that the baby is proof of how cold his marriage was.
He’s not asking for forgiveness anymore.
He’s making sure that if he’s exiled, you’re exiled too. ”
“And I’m supposed to take the enemy’s map at face value.”
Her cup stops mid-turn. “You think I’m still running his errands.”
“I think fifteen years is a long habit, and you’ve lied to me over hot drinks before.”
“Fair.” She sets the cup down and meets it head on. “Then don’t trust me. Check every word I say against what he does next. I’m not asking for faith, Paige. I’m asking you to be ready.”
I think about Maria. About how she hasn’t called in four days.
“It’s working a little,” Tara continues, sounding wretched.
“She called me yesterday. Maria. She wanted to know if what Cole’s saying is true.
I told her it wasn’t, but-” She stops. “She sounded like she wanted to believe him. Like it would be easier if it were true, because then she wouldn’t have to accept what her son really is. ”
My coffee arrives. I wrap my hands around it but don’t drink.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I owe you. I owe you twelve years’ worth of truths I should have told, and I can’t undo any of them, but I can at least tell you this one.
” Tara leans forward. “Cole doesn’t want reconciliation.
He doesn’t want closure. He wants you to suffer.
He wants Wes to suffer. And he’ll keep going until he runs out of ammunition. ”
“What would you do? If you were me?”
Tara turns her cup one slow rotation before answering.
“I’d refuse to give him a show. That’s what he wants - confrontations, scenes, drama he can spin into his narrative.
Every time you react, you give him material.
” She looks down at her belly. “I’ve spent twelve years reacting to Cole.
It never got me anywhere but deeper into his mess. ”
I consider this. The urge to fight back, to confront, to make him see what he’s done - it’s so strong it tastes like copper in my mouth.
But maybe that’s exactly what he wants.
In the parking lot, Wes is leaning against his truck.
“I know,” I say before he can speak. “I told you not to come.”
“I stayed in the parking lot. That’s different.”
I almost smile. “You were worried.”
“You were meeting the woman who helped your husband cheat on you for twelve years. I wasn’t going to be half an hour away.”
I close the distance between us and let him fold me into his arms. He smells like soap and sawdust and something that’s just him, and I breathe it in like it’s the only clean air I’ve had in weeks.
His hand slides up my spine and settles at the back of my neck, and my body - my traitorous, exhausted body - responds the way it always responds to him now: heat pooling low, pulse jumping under his fingers.
We’re in a diner parking lot. The woman carrying my ex-husband’s baby is thirty feet away behind plate glass. This is not the moment to want him.
I press closer anyway.
“Cole’s not going to stop,” I say against his chest. “Tara thinks he’s going to keep poisoning everything until there’s nothing left.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to fight him. I want to confront him, make him see what he’s done, force him to take responsibility.” I pull back enough to look at Wes’s face. “But that’s his move, isn’t it? Forcing scenes. Creating drama. If I play his game, I become part of his narrative.”
“So don’t play.”
“How? He’s already gotten to your mother. How do I fight something I can’t even see happening?”
Wes cups my face in his hands. His thumbs trace my cheekbones, tender and sure.
“You don’t fight it,” he says. “You outlast it. You keep being the person he’s lying about, and you let the people who matter see the difference. My parents know who you are, Paige. They’ve known for twelve years. Cole can poison for a while, but he can’t erase that.”
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done - to do nothing. To trust that years of who I actually was will outweigh weeks of Cole’s whispering.
But Wes is right. If I become what Cole wants me to be - reactive, dramatic, controllable - then he wins. He gets to be the victim of his crazy ex-wife instead of the architect of a twelve-year lie.
“Okay,” I say. “We outlast it.”
“We outlast it,” Wes agrees.
We drive home in silence, his hand holding mine across the console.
When we pull up to his house, his mother’s car is in the driveway.
She’s sitting on the porch steps in the dark. Even from the truck, I can see she’s been crying. She stands when the headlights hit her, and her face is doing something complicated - grief and shame and resolution all at once.
I can’t tell, from her expression, which son she came to choose.
Maria doesn’t wait for us to reach the porch. She meets us halfway up the walk, her hands clasped in front of her like she’s praying or trying to hold herself together.
“I couldn’t do it over the phone,” she says. Her voice is raw, scraped clean of everything but honesty. “I had to say it in person.”
Wes goes still beside me. I feel his hand tighten on mine.
“Say what?” he asks.
“That I’m sorry.” Maria’s eyes are on me, not her son.
“I hugged you in my own living room. I called you my daughter. And then I still spent three weeks letting Cole call me every night, telling me stories that made me feel better about what he did. And I-” She stops.
Swallows. Starts again. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. So I pulled out the photo albums.”
Neither of us speaks.
“Twelve years of them,” she continues. “Every Christmas, every birthday, every random Sunday dinner. And in every candid shot, in the background of every picture where I thought I was just capturing family memories - there’s Wes.”
She turns to look at her older son. “Always three feet from Paige. Never closer. Looking at her when he thinks no one’s watching, and looking away the second anyone might catch it.”
Wes’s hand is trembling in mine.
“I raised that boy,” Maria says. “I know what it costs him to want something quietly. Cole wants things loudly and takes them. He always has. But Wes - Wes wanted you for twelve years and never once let himself have you.”
“Mom-” Wes starts.
“Let me finish.” She holds up a hand. “That’s not a man who ran an affair.
That’s a man who broke his own heart to protect his brother’s marriage.
I was too scared to see it because seeing it meant seeing what Cole really is.
” Her voice cracks. “I wasn’t a good enough mother to make him into a better man.
That’s the truth I’ve been running from since the vow renewal. ”
“This isn’t your fault,” I say.
“Maybe not all of it. But I raised him to think charm was the same as character, and I have forty years of soft words I used instead of the true ones. That’s on me.”
She steps closer, and her hands come up to cup my face - the same gesture she made at the dinner, but different now. More certain.
“You were always my daughter,” she says. “He’s the one who forgot.”
The words crack something open in my chest. Tears spill down my cheeks before I can stop them.
“I’m not asking you to forgive Cole,” Maria continues. “I’m not even asking you to forgive me. I’m just telling you that I see you. I believe you. And whatever happens next, you’re family. Both of you.”
She pulls me into a hug, and Wes’s arms come around both of us, and we stand there in the front yard for a long time - three people choosing to be a family despite everything that tried to tear them apart.
Later, after Maria has gone home with promises to call tomorrow and a casserole she pressed into my hands “because you look too thin,” Wes and I are alone.
The house is quiet. The lights are low. And I feel cracked open, scraped raw, like all my protective layers have been stripped away and I don’t know how to rebuild them.
I reach for Wes.
Not frantically - not like the workshop, all heat and urgency and twelve years of denial. This is different. This is slower.
This is the first time without any ghost in the room.
He understands immediately. His hands come up to frame my face, gentle, questioning.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Tonight’s been a lot. If you need to process-”
“I’ve spent three weeks processing. I’m done processing.” I rise on my toes to press my lips to his. “I want to feel something good. I want to feel you. And I want to do it without Cole or Tara or any of the ghosts in my head telling me I shouldn’t.”
Wes kisses me back - soft at first, then deeper, his tongue sliding against mine in a way that makes my knees go weak.