What Happens After

by Portia Moore

  What Happens After

  Copyright © 2015 by Porsche Moore

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design:

  Murphy Rae, Indie Solutions

  Cover Photography:

  MHP Photography

  Editing and Proofreading:

  Cassie Cox, Joy Editing and Chelsea Kuhel, Madison Seilder

  Interior Design and Formatting:

  Christine Borgford, Perfectly Publishable

  WHAT HAPPENS AFTER

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  HOW CAN YOU love someone when you know they will never truly love you back because they can’t ever love you back? Your brain should stop you from loving them. There should be a defense mechanism embedded deep within you to stop your soul from allowing you to give your heart to someone who doesn’t deserve it, who doesn’t even want it, someone who couldn’t have it even if they did want it.

  Unfortunately, there’s no fail-safe for love, no brake to stop you from throwing your life—and the lives of those around you—completely out of balance. There are no warning lights or flashing danger signs. There’s nothing to stop the planted seeds from growing and taking root. And once they grow, there’s nothing you can do about it. Your desire to water those wretched seeds only increases. Once you realize those seeds weren’t supposed to grow, it’s already too late. At seventeen, you haven’t got a clue . . .

  HE LIED TO me. What’s worse than him lying to me as my husband and the father of my child, my so-called soul mate, is that he lied to me as my friend. Our history, our bond, our love, didn’t stop my best friend from lying to me all these years. He kept secrets from me, and it hurts. It hurts so badly—the half-truths, the deception, the words I never ever thought I’d use . . . it all hurts.

  I never thought that anything associated with love could be so painful, but love betrayed definitely is. This unfathomable heartache snuffs out all of my urges toward forgiveness because now I know the truth. At least what I imagine the truth to be—those images run continuously through my mind.

  The love that once was so sure has been replaced by anguish . A pain that erases the joy and closeness we shared, pushing it further and further away, like a mirage—unreal. Our history seems more like an illusion. Only vague images of our love and life together remain, but those spectral images are tainted.

  While my own memories are like a half-forgotten dream, those moments I imagine are all too vivid. Everywhere I look, I see betrayal, and I can’t get his duplicitousness out of my head. My faith has been shaken to the core. Those thoughts become an unbearable weight, a sickening fog that suffocates me, a stench so bad it chokes all the beauty and joy out of life. All that remains is blinding rage, anger, bitterness, and hatred. These thoughts turn my consciousness into an abyss that I can’t escape. I secretly pray for the moment I’ll feel nothing because anything is better than this.

  Adultery.

  Affair.

  Betrayal.

  Words I try to escape from as the hours tick by. It feels like time has slowed down, but in reality it is moving so fast it sneaks up on me—like a thief in the night. I look in the mirror at the fine lines that have formed around my mouth and eyes, things I overlooked before but are like flashing lights now. I wonder when this happened. When was my youth stolen? Did it happen when Christopher turned ten, or did it happen when I first saw my grandchild? Is today just the first day I noticed them? This morning when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see them, but they were there. Right? I just never noticed until now. I wasn’t even alarmed by the increasing number of grey hairs I’ve accumulated over the years. Why should I worry over trivial things like that anyway when there’s so much more to regret?

  I always knew life was precious. You realize it when you find out you’ll never be able to produce it. When you find out that you’re unable to do the one thing you believe you were put on the planet to do—your God-given right as a woman to bear children. I have come to appreciate that fertility is a gift, not a right, even though I’m slightly resentful. The realization of just how precious the gift of life is became even more evident once I heard the words, “You have stage-three breast cancer.” Aging, living is a blessing, not something to worry about. When I was able to say, “I beat cancer,” I quit worrying about the small things. If I could survive cancer, I could survive anything. To wake up in the morning and take a breath became so much more of a welcome event than one would ever think.

  So it isn’t a wonder why today, of all days, I notice the things I didn’t use to care about but today mean everything.

  I wish I were just being dramatic, but without hesitation, I can say being alive doesn’t seem as important as it once was. These badges of maturity feel less like an honor and more like a punishment, a cruel inside joke I’m not in on.

  What else could I think of it as?

  My husband, my dear husband, the man I love more than anything in the entire world, has always made me feel beautiful. When I said wrinkles, he said laugh lines, and not only that, he said they made me more beautiful than the day he first met me. I believed him.

  I believed him because he’s my best friend, my confidant, my own personal superhero . . . or at least he was yesterday. Today, he’s my personally-crafted villain. One who knows my weaknesses and knows me better than anyone else in the world. I’ve shared my deepest secrets with him. He’s been my glue when my world was on the cusp of falling apart several times over—at least I thought he was. Maybe he wasn’t, or maybe he was for a while, or maybe it was all a façade.

  Maybe I was just a fool. I must have been a fool, an arrogant one. Because until today, I never understood why the women I grew up with felt self-conscious about their appearances as each birthday passed. Because I knew it all, I had it all figured out—they’d married the wrong man. I thought that if you married your soul’s true mate, a life partner, they should appreciate who you are now, who you’ve grown to become. My husband, my best friend, told me that, and like a fool in love, I never once questioned it—until today.

  Because today is the day I found out that my husband—my best friend, the man I turned my world upside down for, whom I gave my youth to, my best days, my joy, my entire self—has not only been screwing my son’s best friend but also has a child with her. Before today, I considered her—the twenty-seven-year-old without a single laugh line who grew up before my very eyes—like a daughter. But now I know her as my husband’s lover.

  So today, I look in this mirror and see every single thing that makes me different from the girl he fell in love with and the girl he betrayed me with. Today, I question all the times I stood in front of this mirror, pulling myself together to greet each day with a smile while I fought the flesh-eating monster living inside me, to make life easier for him. Today it all seems pointless, worthless! If I’d
just given in when death came for me, I wouldn’t be experiencing the pain I’m in now, a fate that seems worse than death. I hate thinking like this! I hate these thoughts, but they’re honest and feel more real than anything else today. Truer than love, more honest than forgiveness, and more authentic than the last twenty-five years of what I thought was an unbreakable marriage.

  I want to cry and vomit at the same time. Maybe I could just crawl into myself as if I didn’t exist. Here I stand, forty-nine years old, a woman and mother who beat the odds of advanced cancer. Yesterday morning, I felt invincible. Now I feel as fragile as a seventeen-year-old whose heart has been broken, crushed, demolished.

  A grown woman decimated and paralyzed.

  It’s hard to remember how to move. Not so much in the literal sense, even though my limbs feel heavy, but how do I get out of this space I’m in? How do I escape from what feels like a prison? My husband has cheated, broken my trust, and produced a child with my son’s best friend.

  When I think about Christopher, all of this feels so much worse. He had to be the one to tell me. The words that came from his mouth crashed all around me. They were the worst words I’ve ever heard, words so jarring, so life-altering, so unbelievable my psyche couldn’t comprehend them. My soul sang out to God, Please, please let what he just said, what was just released into the universe, be a mistake. Somewhere in my mind, I believed it could be changed, that there was an error that could be easily fixed. That it could be taken back. But it couldn’t. It couldn’t ever be taken back.

  I’d give anything just to have found out first so my son wouldn’t have had the burden of delivering the message from hell. To say things that had to have been almost harder for him to say than for me to hear . . . my baby . . . their baby. My son has a sister, a half-sister.

  My husband has a child, a biological one. One I could never give him, no matter how much I wanted to, but she could. A twenty-seven-year-old who can barely remember where her keys are was able to give my husband a child.

  “Mom?” Christopher’s voice comes from the other side of the bathroom door, where I’ve been for I don’t know how long. A half hour, or has it been two hours? “Mom, can I come in?”

  His voice is low and laced with sorrow, like when he was a little boy who’d done something bad and was coming to tell on himself.

  I try to muster up sound from my dry, constricted throat. “Umm, one minute, honey.”

  I move quickly and turn on the sink to splash water on my face. I try but fail miserably to mask my pain, the dull, throbbing ache coursing through me that has my breath tightened and my head heavy. I attempt to break out of the catatonic state I’ve been trapped in and conjure up any amount of strength to hold myself up, to keep my emotions from pouring out of me. My son . . . my son needs to see that I’m not a complete blubbering mess even if I have to fake it. I take one more breath before opening the door.

  I open it and look at the man I’ve raised since he was five years old. He used to be so small. Now he’s a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered, and can appear intimidating but wouldn’t hurt a fly. When I look into his eyes, I never know who I’ll see: the mild-mannered gentleman with a heart of gold or the person who’s built a wall around himself to protect himself from being hurt. I should’ve taken notes on how to build that wall.

  His big green eyes find mine. They shift from my face to his feet several times before I force myself to give him a smile and hug him the way I did when he was a little boy.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.” His voice quivers.

  I rub his back and open my mouth to tell him everything will be okay, that this all will work out, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t lie to him, because I know how it feels to be lied to, betrayed, and treated like a child who can’t handle life’s realities.

  “I shouldn’t have told you like that. I-I—”

  His voice gives in, and I pray for him to have the strength he needs—that he doesn’t fall apart. He has his own daughter he has to be strong for now. My and his father’s problems should be just that—ours. But I know life doesn’t work like that; love doesn’t allow you to just shift burdens that you want to help carry.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” I say, commanding my voice to steady.

  “How could they do that to you, to us? How could he do that, Mom?”

  I can see his distress as I continue to rub his back, hoping to calm him down. “I don’t know.”

  I’ve been trying to figure out how he could lie and betray me and his son, how he could do so without guilt, how he could continue to live as if nothing had changed, and I can’t come up with anything. Christopher lets me go and turns his back toward me, grabbing a towel and wiping his face. I walk past him out of the bathroom and sit on the settee in my bedroom.

  “Is your dad still out there?” I ask quietly, gesturing to my bedroom door where his father has been camped out.

  “Yeah, he fell asleep.” He’s cross, his jaw tight and his hands clenched into fists.

  As angry as I am with William, I loathe what I’ve just seen, the look of hatred and bitterness that flashed across his son’s face at the mention of him.

  “You should come back to Chicago with me and Lauren. You can’t stay here with him.”

  My thoughts haven’t even gone beyond what I heard tonight, but he’s right. I can’t stay in this house with him. I don’t know if I can stay in this house at all, where they . . . where he and Lisa . . .

  “This is my fault. If I wasn’t friends with her . . .” he mutters.

  I gently grip his chin and make him look at me. “This is not your fault. You had nothing to do with this.” My voice is stern, but he shakes his head. I see his anger intensify.

  “That’s the thing. He didn’t think about me. He didn’t think about you! I can’t forgive him for this. There’s no way we can get past this.”

  I put my face in my hands and try to think of life without William. A day without William. To think that the William I believed in is no more. He’s a lie, a distant memory. No longer my protector, my confidant, my best friend. I squeeze my eyes shut and rub my temples. How do we get past this? How do I save my family when the damage is beyond repair? I fought cancer with all I had to save my family. I knew the family would crumble without me. At the time, William and Chris had been at odds because of Cal, and without me as their buffer and mediator, I knew they’d be lost. Now at least Chris has his own family, a beautiful little girl and a wife who loves him the way I loved William.

  Loved William?

  I wish after all of this I could truly use past tense with confidence. At least whatever happens, Christopher will be fine. He has to be.

  “Do you want to leave in the morning?”

  His question interrupts my thoughts.

  “I just want to sleep right now, I think. We’ll figure everything out tomorrow,” I tell him, squeezing his hands.

  He looks at me with worry and concern, and a moment later, his face is hard and his expression has gone cold. “Do you want me to make him leave?”

  His voice is low and bitter, which makes my stomach drop. I can’t take more fighting, more confrontation, confusion, and anger. Is this all that’s left of my family? No. It can’t be. I want to fix it, but how do I fix it when I’m broken? How do you fix yourself after you break?

  IT’S SEVEN IN the morning. I’ve been sitting in the chair by my window since five. I’ve been dressed and ready to go since before then, but I can’t seem to bring myself to walk out the door. I watched the sun rise, leaving the darkness of the previous night behind, and living on a farm, early mornings are normal. If only I had a miracle to do the same with my life. I dread the idea of leaving my room. I haven’t seen William working outside, so there’s a good chance he’s still outside my door—camped out, wanting to talk, wanting to apologize, wanting to explain. There’s no way to explain sleeping with your son’s best friend.

  There’s no explanation that can make this be
tter, nowhere to move forward. I barely know any details about the how or when. Then again, anything that increases my knowledge isn’t going to help either; it’s only going to hurt. I can’t take any more hurt than I already have.

  I still have a son and a family. A family that needs me, that I can’t run away from. My faith teaches forgiveness, but how can I forgive this? How can I forgive him and mean it? How can I forgive him for having a child outside of our marriage? How can I forgive betrayal, lies, and secrets? I should have had Chris ask him to leave last night. How can I face him without wanting to rip off his head or bursting into tears?

  I open the door and sigh with relief when I see that William isn’t sitting next to it. I’m relieved, but I also feel disgusted with myself because I’m disappointed by his absence. I haven’t felt this conflicted since I was a teenager. I close the bedroom door and cautiously make my way down the stairs to the kitchen. I usually cook breakfast every morning no matter what. This is the first time I haven’t since I was sick. No, that’s not right. There was also that time when Chris went missing and I left Lisa to wait on him while Will and I went looking for him, and . . . I feel sick.

  I try to push her name out of my mind because whenever I think of it, I feel rage boil up from the pit of my stomach. I’m angry at her, at him, at myself. How could I not see it? How could I not have a clue that something was going on between them? How could I not notice my husband was having an affair right under my nose? I have to be the biggest idiot on the planet. Before I step over the kitchen threshold, the smell hits me. As I step in, I see a plate already fixed with waffles, grits, fresh fruit, and sausage.

  “Good morning.”

  I look up and see Will step into the kitchen from the pantry. He looks a mess. He looks how I feel. I try to speak, but no words come out of my mouth.

  “I-I made breakfast. I tried to make it healthy. You’ve been talking a lot about that lately, and I’ve listened,” he says, his blue eyes encapsulated by puffy eyelids. His hair is completely disheveled, as if he’s run his hands through it a thousand times. His five o’clock shadow is pronounced and his dimples absent because his lips are pressed so firmly together.