I quickly changed gears. “We should have a dinner party!” I said brightly. “Put that table to good use. I’ll make a big pot of spaghetti, you make the dessert, we can celebrate your beautiful new home.” She seemed unsure so I added, “I’d love for my girls to meet Savannah. Having a babysitter across the street would be a godsend.” I didn’t have much use for a babysitter, since Andy and I never went out. But it was a nice idea in theory.
“You want to do a party here?” Holly asked, and I suddenly realized inviting my whole family over to her house was terribly presumptuous.
I quickly backtracked. “Or we’d be happy to have you both over, that’s probably easier.”
“No,” she said, “I think having a party here would be nice.” And she smiled a little, which made me smile, too.
“We’ll do it together! You don’t have to make everything!” I assured her. I imagined us cooking together in her glorious kitchen. Everything looked so sparklingly new.
As I played the fantasy in my mind, she said something that surprised me. “I’ve never had a friend like you, Libby.” I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I too pushy? As I wondered what she meant by that, she added, “My old neighbors just kind of kept to themselves, y’know? I figured it would be even more like that here, but you’re like the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
I felt a flash of shame. Just a few short minutes ago I was trying to convince my husband she was a murderer, and here she was calling me nice? I was the opposite of nice, but in that moment, I vowed to rise to her opinion of me.
“You’re the one hosting!” I countered. “But I’ll make my husband do the dishes,” I assured her, then tried to lighten the mood with a joke. “You don’t want him cooking anything, trust me. The hardest recipe he can handle is microwave popcorn, and he still burns half the kernels.” She laughed, and a little snowflake of scone popped out of her mouth.
“Oh! I just spit on you!” she exclaimed, covering her mouth. I waved my hand in the air to assure her I barely noticed.
“I have a four-year-old, I’m used to getting spit on,” I joked. I took a bite of my scone, then relaxed back in my chair.
I had never had a friend like Holly Kendrick either.
And I was intrigued by where our budding friendship might go.
JACK
Three months ago
“My mother wants us to come for Thanksgiving,” Kate said as she rubbed oil on her face. She complained about how she was “drying up” since turning fifty, but I barely noticed the tiny lines around her eyes and mouth—to me she was more beautiful than ever.
“That’s fine,” I said from my side of the bed, silently hoping no one would be in jail by then.
I didn’t like to keep secrets from Kate. In our twenty years of marriage, I’d never had any secrets to hide. I’d never been tempted to have an affair. I didn’t gamble, get drunk, or do drugs—not even pot. Every dollar I made went through Kate. She was so good at managing our money that I made her the CFO of my production company. As a board member, she not only knew exactly how much money we had coming in, she also knew where I was, and who I was with, at all times. As the saying goes, she knew where all the bodies were buried. And I used to like it that way. But now it was a problem.
I had friends who were serial liars. They had affairs, and hid money in cash—which they blew at the track, the craps table, the occasional back alley. Big portions of their lives were walled off from their wives, and they were masters at keeping their debauchery secret. “Compartmentalizing,” they called it. What she doesn’t know, they would say, can’t hurt her.
Did the wives know about the gambling and affairs? Some did. Some also didn’t care. I had a co-star who slept with multiple women who weren’t his wife during our film shoot. When I asked him about it—Does your wife know you run around?—he said simply, She likes having a ski house. I took that to mean yes, she knew, but considered a ski-in, ski-out in Aspen fair compensation for her husband’s indiscretions.
“OK, I’ll get the tickets,” Kate said, then closed the bathroom door for privacy. I’d held her hand as she’d had a baby taken out of her abdomen, but she still wouldn’t pee in front of me.
I had convinced myself that I was protecting Kate by not telling her about the accident. A man was dead. My role in it was so much worse than anything she could ever imagine. If I told her what really happened, it would ruin everything we’d built together, destroy everything she’d held dear. My end game was to protect Kate from pain, as she’d already experienced more than enough.