Cora and Paulo came to the car to greet Selena, Paulo giving her a big squeeze and an encouraging pat on the back, then ushering the boys inside with their luggage and big box of toys. Cora took Selena into an embrace.
“I’m sure it will just be a couple of days,” said Selena. There was a weight on her shoulders that she couldn’t shift off, a deep fatigue tugging at her brain.
“As long as you need us,” she said. “We’re here.”
Inside, they got the boys settled in the room that was just for them, another one adjoined by a jack-and-jill bath for their two cousins, Lily and Jasper. Paulo said that he’d tend to the kids, and Selena and her mother went to the kitchen, where Selena told her everything. The cheating, Geneva not showing up for work. Not the girl on the train.
“This is all just some crazy thing,” she heard herself say. “A misunderstanding.”
That could still be true, right? She pulled a tissue from the box Cora had produced, dabbed at her eyes.
Cora pulled the folds of her blue cashmere wrap tighter around her. “But he slept with her?”
Selena turned to the door to the kitchen, which her mother had pulled closed. The kids, especially Oliver, had a way of sneaking up.
“Yes,” Selena admitted. She felt her face redden, her eyes fill again. “He did.”
Her mother reached for her hand.
“But you don’t think—”
“That he has anything to do with her disappearing? No,” said Selena, a shock moving through her. “Of course not.”
But of course everyone was going to think that, if it came out. Which, it still might not. Geneva would turn up. All of this was going to be a big nothing. So what if Geneva’s car was there all weekend and she’d missed a date with her sister, hadn’t turned up for work? Maybe she’d met someone, went on a bender. It happened, right? Even to nice girls like Geneva. Who wasn’t such a nice girl, after all, was she? Sleeping with Graham, and now rumors of issues with her last employer. So, maybe Geneva was somebody else entirely than she pretended to be. That happened all the time.
“No,” Selena said again, adamant in her mother’s silence. “He’s a man-baby, not a monster, Mom.”
“No,” said her mother gently, patting her hand. “Of course he’s not.”
She thought of him standing in the shadows, that unreadable expression. Maybe Graham, too, was someone other than he pretended to be. And she, like her mother, was the incurious wife so wrapped up in work and family and the inner hurricane of her own thoughts that she missed what was right in front of her. Like that big ape dancing in the background of a video where the viewer was focused on counting basketballs. Almost no one ever saw the ape at all, so concentrated were they on the bouncing orange orbs.
“Selena,” her mother said. “Are you listening?”
“Sorry,” she said, snapping back from her thoughts.
“You need a lawyer, sweetie. You should call Will.”
“I already did,” she said. “He’s meeting us in an hour.”
Which hurt. It hurt to call him, her kind, handsome, successful criminal defense attorney ex who was a loving, faithful guy. Right. Why would she want to spend her life with someone like that?
Her mother pushed a strand of her gray-blond bob behind her ear, looked down at the table between them.
“When I look back on the mistakes I made in my marriage, I’m ashamed,” she said. “I thought I was protecting you girls. I turned away from the truth, made excuses for a man who didn’t deserve it.”
“I’m not doing that,” said Selena. She didn’t like how defensive she sounded, felt. “I know who he is.”
On the kitchen counter was a framed portrait of all of them—Selena, Graham, Stephen and Oliver, Marisol, her now ex-husband Kent （another cheater）， Jasper and Lily. It was last Christmas. They were all relatively intact less than a year ago.
“Those days, you tried to stay together for the children,” she said. “But now we know how toxic it can be for children to grow up in such an ugly marriage.”
“Mom, please,” she said. She didn’t really want to talk about her mother’s marriage, how maybe it was a poison and even now they were all still feeling its effects. “We’ve been through this. You did what you thought was right. And I’ll do the same.”
Cora reached for Selena’s hand.
“You girls are strong,” Cora said. Her hand felt frail, but her grip was tight. “Stronger than I was.”
Was that true? Did it require more strength to stay in a bad marriage, or to walk away?
“What does that mean?”
“That you won’t make the same mistakes I did. You don’t have to. We’re here for you, to support you in making a change.”
Selena found that she couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. She didn’t want her to see how scared, how uncertain she was. The rest of her life was like a cliff she was about to walk off, hoping she had wings.
“We tell the girls who come to the shelter that our main objective is to give them time, space, safety to find a new way,” said Cora. “Many of them have nothing. You have everything.”
Cora and Paulo volunteered at the woman’s shelter in town, and Paulo took shifts at the suicide hotline. They were the kind of people who helped others, asking nothing in return, both of them. But the reference irked her.
“I’m not a battered woman, Mom.”
She thought of how she’d thrown that robot at Graham and he’d just stood there and taken it. It wasn’t the first time. Once she’d slapped him hard across the face.
“There are all kinds of abuse,” said Cora. “I wish someone had said to me, hey, I’ll help you find a way out of this mess. So that’s what I’m saying to you.”
Selena didn’t know how to respond, the words thank you were so tangled up with fear and her injured pride that she just couldn’t push them out. So she just got to her feet.
She had to go meet Graham and Will at the station where they were scheduled to answer questions for the police. She and Graham had agreed not to talk about his affair with Geneva. Graham had deleted all the videos from her computer and from the web application for the camera.
If the police really come looking, they’ll find the files, and know I deleted them, he said.
He was right. She’d researched this. Apparently there was software like Oxygen Forensic that allowed the police to recover deleted files. Or they might access those videos from the camera company, which likely stored them on their cloud. They’d need a warrant, of course. She was praying that it wouldn’t come to all that.
Why did she let him do it? Why didn’t she make him come clean to the police? Because she couldn’t. She didn’t believe he would hurt Geneva. But those videos would start a narrative, one that was too familiar, too easy for the police to make dark assumptions about.
Don’t give them anything, Will had concurred. Make them come looking. Don’t answer any questions beyond what you’ve told them already until I’m present. Not a word. Are we clear?
Won’t that make us look like we’re hiding something?