My natural disposition prods me to object, but something in me strains toward the idea like a plant toward sunlight.
“What are you talking about?” Mary asks, glancing at me with wide eyes. “Did something happen with your job?”
Smooth, Maisie, real smooth.
“Let’s just say the blog and I had a parting of the ways.”
“Why didn’t you tell—” Mary has the grace to cut herself off, without forcing me to do the dirty work for her. Because, come on. She kept something this big, this explosive from us for six months. What is one week of funemployment next to that? I feel another spurt of old resentment, but it doesn’t stick.
She’s too lost right now for me to be mad, or at least for me to act mad.
“Molly’s going to be doing something bigger and better,” Maisie says, stepping in, “just like you.”
I hear a groggy and slightly panicked voice in the background. “Maisie, it’s happening again,” and then the distinct sound of someone vomiting.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
“Uh-oh is right,” Maisie says, scrunching her nose. “I cannot bend over nearly well enough to help him clean all of this, and I’ve realized that having a person who is sick to their stomach clean up vomit only leads to more vomit, thus perpetuating the spiral.”
“The only reasonable solution is to abandon the cottage. You can spend the rest of your babymoon camping on the beach.”
I glance at Mary, hoping our banter is soothing her hurt some, but she’s not looking at me. Her gaze is focused on her engagement and wedding rings on her left hand. They’re perfect. Glenn actually asked her to put together a spreadsheet of the ones she liked, ranked in order of preference, before he proposed, because he’s just that kind of a guy. But she’s looking at them like she just dipped her hand in dogshit. Suddenly, she slips them off and leaps out of her chair.
Before I can stop her, she runs to the sink and throws them into the garbage disposal.
“Mary?” I ask in shock. She’s not exactly the soul of impulsivity, so it makes sense that she needs some help with it. “Mary, if you’re sure you don’t want to pawn those to buy yourself some seriously satisfying breakup bling, we can go toss them off a mountain or something. But the only thing you’re going to accomplish by throwing them in there is messing up Maisie’s plumbing.”
Maisie perks up. “What’s going on over there?”
A panicked look lights up Mary’s face as she lowers her hand into the sink. “I can’t feel them! They’re gone!”
“Get your hand out of there,” I say, because I’ve seen way too many horror movies to think this will end well. “I’ll get someone to come over and get it out.”
My mind instantly shoots to Cal. He’d help us. A smile almost comes out at the thought that it would be his second Molly-related plumbing emergency in a matter of two days.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Mary says, her face crumpling again. “I feel so messed up.”
Something hitches in me. A cruel part of me wants to say, Now you know. Now you get it. But I wouldn’t do that to her.
“Maisie,” I say, “go help Jack. Don’t look for house cleaners on Craigslist, though. Some of the ads are code for prostitution.”
“What?” she squawks.
“We’ll be in touch.”
“You better be,” she says. “And no irreversible damage to the plumbing before the baby’s born.”
“Noted.”
She hangs up, and I shut the laptop, going to Mary. She’s sitting on the floor now, next to the sink, and my mind ventures backward again. To another talk we had. Only I was the one who was next to inconsolable then.
She looks up at me, her lips wobbling, and I know she’s thinking about it too.
Maisie doesn’t know about that talk we had. No one does.
“I’m sorry,” Mary says.
I don’t have to ask why she’s apologizing.
“There’s no reason for us to talk about the past,” I say, managing to keep my voice even. “Everything turned out for the best.”
But she hoists herself to her feet and finds and holds my gaze. “I used to think it was best to keep things neat and tidy, to avoid any unpleasantness, but I was wrong. Obviously, I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.” She laughs, although it’s so devoid of humor, it can hardly be called laughter. “You tried to talk to me that day, and I shut you down, and we’ve never been the same. I worry we never will be.”
She’s not wrong, but she’s also shattered, and I don’t want to step on any of the small glassy bits of her and break her further.
“You were right that day,” I say, although a pinch of bitterness seeps into my voice, into my veins. “I was probably imagining things. Anyway, it’s better that I stayed with Maisie. She probably never would have started the shelter otherwise. Or met Jack. And it would have taken you a long time to finish your degree. We wouldn’t have Aidan.” Screw Glenn. He doesn’t get a mention on my list of positives for obvious reasons. “So it worked out for all of us.”
Except for the pit it left inside of me.
Except for my inability to live my life without thinking about it, every day.
Because I grew up thinking my father was perfect, that he was the kind of man worthy of admiration and emulation, and immediately after I found out he wasn’t, he died. And when I tried to talk to my big sister about it, my big sister who knew so much and handled everything without any apparent effort, she shut me down. She told me I was imagining things and that I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, because Dad wasn’t here to defend himself.
“It wasn’t just a suspicion, was it?” she says softly. “You knew something about Dad. Did you see him with that woman?”
I head back to the table and retrieve my coffee, take a long, deep sip of it, savoring the kick of whiskey.
I smile at her, just slightly. “It was my first and last big investigation. Dad always did encourage me to become a reporter.”
I pick up her mug and bring it to her. We’re both going to need bolstering to make it through this.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and I know she means it. I want it to be enough.
I’m not sure it is.
“It’s not that you didn’t believe me, is it?” I ask quietly, taking her other hand and leading her to the couch in the living room. We sit down together.
“I didn’t want it to be true, and I didn’t think any good would come of it. They were both gone. It was too late to fix anything, and I didn’t want to remember him that way. It wasn’t how I wanted any of us to remember him. Maisie…”
“Would be crushed,” I agree, my voice calm and even, but anger leaks into it when I say, “Do you think it’s how I wanted to remember him? All these years, I’ve been stuck with that knowledge. With no one to talk to about it. Every day, I think about it. We all thought we knew him, but we were wrong. Mom never knew that he was betraying her, and now she never will know.”
“I’m glad that she didn’t,” Mary says.
I want to rage at her, to say the truth is always better. That Mom deserved the truth so she could make up her own mind, but who am I to talk?