He asks why I kept lying for her. I guess it’s a reasonable question. I only hesitate because that’s a worse story—I lied because I eventually grew as desperate to be away from her as she was me. I lied because once I hit my teens, she began to resent my youth and my appearance, and every time one of her boyfriends hit on me, she’d find a way to make it my fault.
I’m embarrassed, once it’s out—by how much I shared, by how gross it all is when laid bare. “It probably sounds pretty trashy compared to all your past relationships.”
He shakes his head. “It’s weirdly similar to my past relationships. At least the last one.” He pulls the blankets around my shoulders as the air conditioning kicks on. “Kate didn’t really know either of her parents. Her mom overdosed when she was little and she had no clue who her dad was. She grew up in foster care.”
“She grew up in foster care but got into Stanford?”
“She’s crazy smart. Probably to her detriment, since it allowed her to hide a lot of shit from me and from her employer for way too long.”
I’m not sure it’ll do me any favors to learn more about his smart, beautiful wife who went to Stanford and was super fun. But there’s a lot more here, a lot more he doesn’t discuss about the baby and how it affected him, and he might need to tell someone. I suspect he never has. “How did you meet?”
“We both went to Stanford undergrad and Wharton for grad school,” he says. “We were never in the same class, but we met at an alumni event in San Francisco. I don’t even remember which school it was for.”
There’s another internal pinch—she went to Stanford and grad school. I barely finished undergrad at a school no one’s heard of.
“And she moved out to the middle of nowhere for you?”
He stiffens again. “Not really. She moved because she was pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but…” He shrugs.
Was there ever a time when he was excited about the pregnancy? I’m not sure how to ask, and before I can try, he rolls me on my back.
“Why are we talking about this when we’ve got a bed and some privacy?” he asks, his mouth on my neck, his hand running over my hip.
I’m not about to argue, but it also feels a little intentional, the way he closed the conversation when he did.
WE SEPARATE EARLY in the morning—me back home and him to the airport—and I am still deliciously bruised and battered and swollen-lipped when Jeremy finally brings the twins home, hours later than they were due.
Sophie and Henry launch themselves at me as I walk out the door and I pull them against me, pressing my nose to their heads simply to breathe them in.
Jeremy drops their backpacks on the ground. “I figured you’d be doing a whole lot of nothing with them, so it didn’t matter when they came home.”
He wants me to be angry. He wants to feed on my anger like it’s a banquet and he’s starving. I won’t give him the satisfaction. I tell the twins to go inside. “That’s a violation of our interim agreement,” I reply calmly, once they’re out of earshot. “I wouldn’t advise doing it again.”
“Where were you last night?” he demands.
“What makes you think I was anywhere?”
He blinks. Only once. It’s his version of a long pause. “Sophie needed something. I called the cabin, and you didn’t answer.”
“I go lots of places when you’ve got the kids, Jeremy,” I reply. “I could have been anywhere.”
His nostrils flare. I can practically hear the way his teeth are grinding. “Don’t make a mistake you can’t fix.”
There’s an unmistakable warning in those words. He knows I was somewhere he didn’t want me to be, and the only reason he’s not outright accusing me of it is because he acquired that knowledge in a way he shouldn’t have. God, I should have been more careful. The separation agreement is in place, so technically I’ve done nothing wrong, but Jeremy isn’t one to let the truth get in his way.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do,” he says. “And if your behavior is reflecting poorly on the kids, I’ll have to intervene on their behalf. I don’t want to do that to you, Lucie, but I will if you force my hand.”
“Again, what makes you so certain that I went anywhere? Maybe I just wasn’t inside when you called.”
“If you weren’t making such a spectacle of yourself in public, I might believe you.”