by Liz Fenton
Beth appears and gives me a questioning look as Isabella brushes past her toward the master bedroom.
“Can you go? I need to talk to Isabella alone. And tell Nick he needs to go home too. That I’ll talk to him later—please,” I whisper to Beth as I pass her.
I find Isabella sobbing in our closet, breathing in James’s gray cashmere sweater. I start crying at the sight of her. At the grief I know she must feel but that I will never understand. The loss of a child.
“I’m so sorry, Isabella. I was going to tell you everything. I just—”
“You just what?” Isabella cuts me off. “Forgot to tell me you’d moved on?”
“No, it’s not that. If I told you, then I’d need to explain who Nick is. How I met him. And that would hurt you.”
“More than I’m hurt right now?” She continues to cry as she cradles his sweater.
“No. I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I’m so sorry,” I choke through my tears.
“It’s bad enough you never gave me a grandchild. How could you? Did you even love him?”
Yes. I loved him more than anything. But I’m not sure that was enough.
The words bubble up inside of me, but I don’t speak. I didn’t want it to be like this—I had imagined this conversation going very differently, and certainly not starting off with her witnessing me kissing Nick.
But no matter how it started, it’s time to tell her. Not to defend that I’ve begun to have some good days where James doesn’t infiltrate my thoughts, but because she deserves to know the truth about how her son died.
“Isabella, I think you should come sit down. There are things you need to know.”
“What could I possibly still need to know? After I’ve seen my son’s widow making out with some guy in a motorcycle jacket just six months after his death?”
“James wasn’t who I thought he was.”
Isabella frowns. “What are you saying? Don’t you dare slander him just so you can feel better about what you’re doing here. My son loved you. No matter what I said, he always defended the things you did,” she says, her voice rising. “James gave you everything, and you—”
I put my hand on her arm to interrupt her. “I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll be blunt. James was having an affair. That’s why he was in Maui. He’d been seeing her for months. And she was pregnant with his child. Yes, you’re right, he may have loved me. But I think he loved her too.”
Isabella lets out a cry, and I put my arms around her shoulders and hug her as tightly as I can. We stand like that for several seconds until Isabella pulls back, her mascara running down her cheeks. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. I promise I’ll explain everything.”
She walks over to her tote and pulls out a package of tissues, removing one and dabbing each eye delicately. “I’m ready now.”
I sit down on the bed and pat the place next to me. “Okay,” I say. And because there’s no room for lies in this version of my life, I start from the beginning and don’t stop until every drop of truth is revealed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
JACKS—AFTER
Nick’s front door opens just as I’m about to turn the knob.
“Hey!” he says, a huge smile spreading across his face. “I didn’t think I’d see you tonight—I was just heading out for ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” I cock my head.
“Yeah—you got a problem with that?” He smirks. “I was stressed about your conversation with Isabella and thought I’d eat my feelings.” He laughs.
I smile. “That’s why I’m here—I wanted to talk to you about what happened at the house earlier today. It was pretty awkward.”
“I know.” He grabs my hand. “I’m sorry about the whole boyfriend thing. I totally overstepped,” he says, and looks down at his cowboy boots. “It’s just that . . . Jacks . . . I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Suddenly I forget what had seemed so important as I’d driven to his house—the questions I had for him about how he acted. All I can think of is what Nick just revealed. Involuntarily I flash back to when James whispered that he loved me for the first time in my ear right before we fell asleep in his bed, his breath tickling my ear. I push the memory aside and let Nick’s declaration sink in, let his words settle in my chest.
Thankfully he keeps talking. “And I know this is selfish, but I wanted her to know it.” He looks back up. “I wanted you to know it.” His gaze is so intense, it feels like he’s looking through me.
The truth is, I’ve been falling too. I can tell by the way I rush to text Nick when something funny happens, like last week when I’d been in Starbucks and discovered a sock stuck to the back of my pant leg, the dryer sheet failing to do its job. I know by how my stomach flutters when his name comes up on my phone, and he’s calling me sometimes four or five times a day—just to hear my voice. I was sure of it when I couldn’t sleep at night and I’d think of him first, wishing he were beside me to wrap his strong arm around my waist. It’s been a long time, but my heart still remembers the feeling of the first gasps of love.
I tilt my chin up and kiss him, deciding not to be scared. “For the record, I’m falling in love with you too,” I whisper, the words feeling foreign as I say them out loud. James was the only man I ever loved until now. But James was the past. Nick is the future.
Nick pulls me in for a deeper kiss. I lose my balance, and he catches me before I stumble, causing the moment to pass. And I’m grateful, because I don’t want to have the conversation. To dissect what it all means.
“Come on, let’s go eat the shit out of our feelings,” I say as I laugh awkwardly. “I could go for some mint chip—and let me guess, you’re a rocky road kind of guy.”
“Nope.” He shakes his head, a smile playing on his lips.
“Chunky Monkey?”
“Try again.” He closes his door and rattles the knob to make sure it’s locked.
“Pistachio.” I frown, and he gives me a blank stare. “What?” I ask.
“Pistachio, really?”
“Fine, I give up.”
“Vanilla,” he says proudly.
“Vanilla?” I squint at him. “I would have never guessed that. It’s so—”
“Boring?” he says, taking my hand.
“Maybe a little,” I say.
“I like that it’s predictable, easy, never disappoints.”
I laugh. “Kind of like you?”
“Maybe,” he says before kissing me, his lips soft.
As we’re pushing through the front doors to go outside, Nick’s arm slung over my shoulder, a woman with wiry short blonde hair and cutoff jean shorts nearly collides with us. “Sorry,” she says, looking up from her phone and glancing from me to Nick, her eyes widening at him.
“No problem,” I say, and she gives me a once-over, then hurries toward the elevator, her barely-there shorts rising up in the back with each stride, her pumps clicking against the floor.
“Did you see the way she looked at us?” I ask once we’re out on the sidewalk. “Do you know her?”
Nick nods. “She was one of Dylan’s roommates. They never got along very well.” He frowns. “I haven’t seen her in months.”
After we order our ice cream cones and settle on a bench outside Baskin-Robbins, I recount my conversation with Isabella to Nick. He said he wanted to know how it went, and I decide that if we’re going to have a real relationship, I need to share. But still, it feels weird, talking about my ex-mother-in-law with my new boyfriend. In between licks of my mint chip, I tell him how she fired question after question, some curious, some accusatory, and how I’d tried my best to hold my voice steady as I revealed the ugly truth about James. About me. About our marriage.
At first it seemed that she held me somewhat accountable for James’s indiscretion. And I didn’t argue the point—I had accepted that I wasn’t an innocent party in our union. I hadn’t cheated, but I’d betrayed him in my own way. But as I told her about m
y journey to Hana, how Nick had helped me find a bit of closure to fill the gaping hole James’s death had created inside me, she began to soften.
She left two hours later. Her tears had finally dried up and were replaced by forced acceptance. “I’m sorry he did this to you,” she said as she stood and grabbed her things. “I always prided myself on my close relationship with my son—I wish he had trusted me enough to come to me. Obviously I didn’t know him as well as I should have.”
“We all have secrets,” I said as we walked to the door. “Some are just bigger than others.”
“True,” she pondered. “I have one more question.”
“Anything.”
“How do I move on from this? Because it’s not like I can call and yell at him for being so irresponsible—for being so selfish! I feel like I have nowhere to place all this anger I’m feeling.” She gave me a sad smile. “If I’m being totally honest, I had really wanted to direct it your way, but it’s not as simple as that, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“So then, what?”
I thought for a moment before speaking. “I think you let yourself love him just the same. He was your son. And he loved you. That will never change.”
“And you? Do you still love him? After all this?”
I thought back to standing on the cliff in Hana—the closest to James that I’d ever be again. In that moment I’d felt no anger, no resentment. Only love tinged with regret. I nodded. The next part I don’t tell Nick, knowing it would bother him.
“I will always love him, Isabella. But I’m also ready to move on. I hope you can understand that.”
“I can,” she said softly. “You know, I was wrong about you, Jacks. You’re much stronger than I ever gave you credit for.”
I laughed lightly. “I think we may have both been wrong about each other.”
Isabella hugged me one last time. “Take care of yourself,” she said, grabbing the box of James’s things I’d put aside for her, the wedding album sticking out of the top, and walked out my front door without looking back.
Nick kisses my forehead lightly after I finish telling him the story. “I know that conversation wasn’t easy. But for what it’s worth, I’m proud of you—I think you did the right thing by telling her the real story. She deserves to know.”
“The truth will set us free, right?” I whisper as I rest my head on his chest, his steady heartbeat comforting me.
The next morning, the pressure of Nick’s lips on my mouth prods me awake.
He moves in for a deep kiss that sends a shiver through my entire body. “See you later, sleepyhead.”
“Can you stay a bit longer?” I pat the bed next to me. “Maybe do what we never got around to because I passed out. Sorry about that.”
“I wish I could.” He tugs at the bottom of the T-shirt he loaned me last night and raises his eyebrow. “But I’ve got to get to the station. The guys texted that it was a rough night, so I want to get there a bit early and relieve them.”
I smile as I watch concern fill his eyes. “I love how much you love your job,” I say, thinking about my classroom that I’d just returned to last week. How good it felt to take in each and every one of my new fourth graders’ faces, to sit in the chair behind my desk and watch them as they read their textbooks, to let myself get excited about a field trip we were taking to the discovery museum. The school had offered to extend my leave of absence, but I needed to get back to teaching. It was what reminded me I was still me.
Nick kisses me again. “Stay as long as you want, okay? It’s Sunday! Enjoy yourself. I set the espresso maker out for you. I know what a beast you are without your caffeine.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Says you.” He laughs when I swipe at him, and I watch him walk out of the room.
A few hours later as I’m leaving, I see the woman from the night before hovering in the hallway outside of Nick’s front door. She flashes me a surprised look, then rushes away, but she abruptly stops and turns her body halfway around, as if she doesn’t know which way she’s going.
“Did you need something?” I ask. “Nick’s not here . . .”
“I know. I saw him leave earlier.” She stares down at her cherry-red wedge sandals, then looks back up. “I was coming to see you actually,” she says as she takes a few tentative steps in my direction.
“Me?”
She rolls her eyes.
I think about the strange look she gave Nick last night. How she sized me up. “I know you must be upset about seeing Nick with someone so soon after Dylan . . .” I pause, remembering the conversation I had with Isabella. How hard it was for her to see I’d already moved on. “But it’s complicated.”
She crosses her arms.
“Listen . . .” I stop, realizing I don’t know her name.
“Briana,” she says.
“Look, Briana, I get it. You’re upset about Dylan. My husband died too. They were in Maui together, having an affair. I’m not sure if you realize that. But that’s how Nick and I met—we were both devastated to discover the people we loved weren’t who we thought.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Her harsh tone stuns me. We stand there for a few moments, neither of us breaking eye contact, and finally, I speak. “Where do you get off coming here and attacking me? We’re all upset. We all lost people.”
“You really think Dylan was over there cheating on him when she died?”
“What else would you call it? They were engaged.”
“Oh my God. You really don’t know.” Briana takes a step backward as if she suddenly needs to distance herself from my ignorance.
“Know what?” I ask.
“Dylan and Nick had broken up months before she went to Maui.”
I feel as if the air is being sucked out of my chest. I struggle to take in a breath. They weren’t engaged?
Briana seems oblivious to my shock. “Dylan dumped him because . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence.
“Because she wanted to be with my husband, James,” I finish, almost instinctively trying to defend Nick.
“I think she hoped he would leave you,” she adds, and I fight back my tears. Was that what James had been planning? To leave?
“Are you . . . are you sure they had broken up?” I ask, trying to find the logic in it. But my mind keeps drifting back to Nick, the sweet man who’d reached over and wiped a drip of ice cream off my chin, then kissed me where it had been just to make sure it was gone.
“She told me everything—the night before they left for Maui. She was so upset. Nick had started stalking her—he wouldn’t accept that it was over.”
Nick . . . a stalker? I shake my head.
“You don’t believe me? Why would I make it up? I’m taking a big enough risk coming here.”
“What does that mean? A risk?”
She looks past me as if she’s worried someone might be coming. “After she gave him the ring back, he freaked out.” She lowers her voice slightly. “She told me he followed her, threatened her. She thought about getting a restraining order.”
Restraining order? Against Nick? Are we even talking about the same man?
I grab the doorjamb, thinking about James—how he’d lied to me for so long. How I’d been so oblivious. Nick can’t be a liar too. There’s no way I could be that wrong twice in a lifetime.
Briana stares at me for a moment, and I silently pray that she’ll tell me she’s mixed up, she doesn’t have her facts straight, she’s sorry she bothered me.
“I realize you don’t know me,” she says. “I could be some crazed ex-roommate making shit up. And you don’t want to believe it. But it’s true.” She sighs. “I wish I still had her journal. It was all written in there. But it’s gone—her parents have it.”
“Journal?”
“I’ve said too much already.” She makes a face like she’s sorry. “Just be careful, okay?” She gives me one last long l
ook, then hurries down the hallway, disappearing into the stairwell.
I call after her. But the door slams behind her, and this time she doesn’t come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
DYLAN—BEFORE
She didn’t know what it was about this particular cloudy Monday morning, just three months after accepting Nick’s proposal, that was giving her the courage to break up with him. All she knew for sure was that ever since the night James had invited her to Maui, her engagement ring felt even tighter, her chest even more compressed, her heart even less invested. She wiped the foggy bathroom mirror and stared at her reflection, wondering how she could’ve been so in love with Nick and could barely conjure that feeling now.
They’d met just eighteen months before, when she’d moved from Phoenix. The first time she’d seen the firefighter in her building was when he’d gotten off his motorcycle in the parking garage. She’d watched him guide his bike in and put his helmet away with such care, she was almost entranced. Another time she’d been behind him in the line at Peet’s, staring at his dusty cowboy boots, never having known a man who had owned a pair. She found them sexy.
And then one day she’d been standing by the mailboxes, and she heard a male voice make a joke about all the junk mail in her hand. It turned out the voice belonged to the firefighter. She’d always had a thing for civil servants. Something about the uniform, about them protecting people, keeping them safe. Police officers. Paramedics. Even a security guard once.
He’d asked her out somewhere between small talk about how many trees the vast amounts of junk mail were killing and their mutual agreement that the hazelnut coffee at Peet’s was their favorite. And even though when she told Briana about her date, her roommate had made a snide remark about not shitting where you eat, Dylan had just laughed. Because there was something about him. It might have been the way he cocked his ear toward her whenever she spoke, like she was about to say something important. Or maybe it was the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, which was often. Whatever it was, she wanted to know more.
