“It could harm your sales, for sure,” he said. “Maybe they won’t want to publish the next one.”
“Okay, I know this is a lot to handle. But, like, you think my publisher is going to be upset that the lady who writes about a diabolical teenage genius girl who causes chaos in her small town is the person responsible for that whole panic?”
“You’re kind of a role model figure—”
“I’m not at all. I am not that famous in any way. Okay, Aaron? Focus. Do you understand? I’m telling you now. Not anyone else. I’m telling you. I should have told you sooner, but I think, a few days from now, maybe, you’ll think about all of this and realize how fucked up it would have been to tell you at literally any point in our relationship, how there was never a good time to tell. Okay? And this is not a good time, either, I get it. But it’s happening, and I’m telling you.”
“But, what exactly are you telling me?”
“Aaron, just, I made it, okay? I really did. I have the original poster, the first one I ever made. And then I made, like, hundreds and hundreds of copies and I put them up and then things got weird and then it was out of my hands.”
“I’ve seen those posters in town,” he said suddenly. “I saw one on the bulletin board at the library. Remember? I told you I’d seen it. And how weird that was?”
“I remember, yeah.”
“Did you put that up?”
“Did I what now?” I asked, stalling. “Put what up?”
“The poster! Did you put that specific poster up on the bulletin board of our local library, Frankie?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I did.”
“So you still do it,” he said. “So you kind of, like, never stopped doing it.”
“I guess not,” I said. “Not as much as before, but, yeah, I still do it.”
“Why?” he asked, almost shouting. “That’s so messed up, Frankie. And . . . and you have that T-shirt and you wear it around the house.”
“Well, Jesus, it’s not like the fucking shirt is evil or anything, Aaron. I didn’t bring some cursed object into the house.”
“You did, though,” he said. “Kind of, you did. You have that poster.”
“Okay, I thought you’d be mad that I hadn’t told you before, but it sounds like you’re mad that the physical object is in our house. Which is very weird.”
“It’s all weird!” he said. Aaron could get shouty when he was confused, like if he raised his voice, the world would understand that it needed to clarify some shit before things got out of hand. “I am mad that you didn’t tell me, that you lied to me, but I am also mad that you keep putting the poster up and you have it in the house, and you seem obsessed with something that happened twenty years ago.”
“It happened to me, though,” I said. “It happened to me, so I am obsessed with it. It’s confusing. I can’t explain it all in thirty minutes and then everything will be fine. But, Aaron, and I need you to understand, okay? I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad that I made it. And I am never going to feel bad that I made it.”
“Do you feel bad that you never told me?” he asked, and he looked like he was going to cry.
“I do. Of course I do. But I never told anyone. I never told my mom, okay? I never told anyone else about it. But, like, would you not have married me?”
Aaron didn’t say anything.
“Aaron?”
“I don’t know how to say it. It’s like . . . I think it would have been better if you said you’d cheated on me. It would make more sense, you know? You’ve done something, and it is going to change our lives, whether I want it to or not, and I don’t really know how to express how freaking mad I am about it.”
“I understand that you are mad, and I know that you have every ri—”
“And I feel angry that, if this woman hadn’t found out, you never would have told me. I would have died and not known.”
“I am so sorry. I really am.” I was about to ask him if he’d ever done anything that he’d regretted before, to get him to understand, but I knew his answer would be something like stealing a pack of gum when he was six, because he was so lovely and honest and had never lied to me about anything. And I had made people die from insanity. I just stopped trying to explain myself.
“And, I hate this, but I guess for as long as we live, I’ll know that there was this thing you were going to keep hidden from me. And I guess I’ll never know if there’s more.”