Chapter 19
NINETEEN
TORI
“When you moved out, that didn’t give you permission to disappear, bitch.” Skye shoves Alis with her foot from across the couch, nearly tipping a very full glass of Cab Sauv into Alis’s lap.
She yelps and jerks the glass overhead like she’s blocking a volleyball spike. “I’m sorry! I’m so bad at peopleing.”
“The worst,” Skye says. She is in pajama shorts with tiny lightning bolts on them and a cropped sweatshirt that reads COFFEE best friends.
I love these two women more than my own life.
“I did ask,” Skye concedes, and then, magnanimous as ever, changes the subject. “Okay. Wedding. Give me a morsel. Venue? Dress? Cake I will pretend to be allergic to while eating three slices?”
Alis’s smile flickers. “We, um… we haven’t gotten far. I’ve been so busy, you guys.”
I nudge her knee. “Busy is valid.”
“I know,” she says, but she’s looking at her hands now, rolling her stemless glass in small circles.
“Also, I didn’t want… I didn’t want to be insensitive.
To you.” She lifts her eyes to mine, careful.
“It felt weird to walk in here and babble on about wedding stuff when you’re… doing the divorce thing.”
The room shifts, the air going quieter around the edges. The candle on the side table—something Skye labeled “Put your books here” because of course she did—pools amber light over the spines. Skye’s gaze jumps to me and back to Alis, like she’s waiting for the right quip to re-inflate us.
“It’s okay,” I say, and I mean it the way you mean something and also have to push it through a narrow place inside yourself to mean it fully. “Your joy doesn’t hurt me. Not even a little. It helps.”
Alis’s throat works. She nods, sits with me, eyes steady, then inhales and tips us on a different axis.
“Can I ask you something?” she says. “And you can tell me to shut up if I’m out of line.”
“Always,” I say.
“I don’t pry. I never have. I try to respect your boundaries, because I want people to respect mine. But—we’ve been best friends since kindergarten. Why didn’t you tell me?” The words aren’t sharp. They are soft and bewildered, like she found a bruise and is trying to remember how it formed.
The questions come in rapid fire. “What happened? Why did you leave him? You showed up at the apartment and said you were moving in while I was moving out and I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Why didn’t I know anything?”
The sip of wine I took while she was speaking hushes in my mouth. I look at Skye on instinct—half for backup, half for a map—and she only lifts a shoulder. Absolutely not at all helpful.
“I keep your secrets,” Skye says, simple and unadorned. “I kept hers, too, when I needed to. I’m a vault, babe.”
It hits two ways at once: relief, hot and immediate, that Skye didn’t dump me into anyone’s lap to be fixed; and a thin, embarrassed sting at how I have to explain practically everything to someone I love—my best friend, no less.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice is steady until it isn’t. “Okay.”
I don’t offer up a play-by-play, but I also don’t do her the disservice of skimming over the truth of what happened.
I tell her the most important parts—the infertility, the comments, the fights.
Walking on eggshells, never being enough.
The breaking point that was Belle and Alex’s funeral, the night Skye finally said something at that bar.
The night he came home drunk and punched a hole in the wall right next to my face.
How I made the decision right then that I was leaving, and how Skye drove to Moraine to help me make a final plan to leave while he was out of town.
How I asked her not to tell anyone—partly because I was ashamed, but mostly because everything seemed to happen either when Alis’s life was falling apart or finally coming together, and I never wanted to add to or take away from those things.
When I finish, Alis has both palms over her mouth like she’s trying to press the air back in. Tears streak down her cheeks. She shakes her head, once, twice, and then lowers her hands and her gaze to her lap. She’s quiet, contemplative, and then…
“I knew he was selfish,” she says, breathless with it.
“Alis—”
“No,” she stops me. “Let me say what I need to say.”
I nod, and she continues. “I knew how he was in college. I didn’t want you to marry him, Tori. You know that—I told you I was worried. But after the wedding, I thought… people change? Or they don’t and you learn to… I don’t know.”
She gives a helpless little laugh that isn’t a laugh.
“I knew you were trying for a baby, but then you started grad school and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.
And then Belle…” Her mouth trembles. “Everything changed when she and Alex died. All I could see was Sunny and my grief. And even when Skye moved back to Moraine, and then you and Chase moved home and we were all together again… I don’t know. Was I selfish?”
“No, honey,” I reassure her. “You’ve never been selfish a day in your life.”