“There would probably be some kind of investigation if like, authorities saw it, right?”
“No way that would happen. It’s not even true,” I say.
Willa shrugs. “I don’t think that matters, dude. Can we prove that it isn’t?”
They both stare at me, and the one person who can prove it pops into my head like lightning.
Novak.
ONE MORE TERRIBLE TRUTH
Willa puts on one of her favorite Korean dramas, and the three of us watch it together and hang out for most of the afternoon. Once they leave, though, I barricade myself in my bedroom for the next few hours, trying to decide what to do. Maybe I won’t need to do anything. Maybe this will all blow over and no one will see the post or even care about it. But what if someone does? What if my dad gets into serious trouble over a lie?
I lie in the center of my bed, trying to make sense of what I know. Of what Mom meant by close. Of what could have been happening between my father and Ms. Novak that was so intimate that my dad needed to change jobs, and that, even after everything, my parents still split up.
Soon, exhaustion from all the emotional stress of the morning sets in and I fall asleep. I don’t wake up until a reminder in my calendar chimes, telling me that I’m supposed to go to the diner tonight. But with this rumor going around, and after I yelled at Dom, I know I’m not going to.
I call Dolly’s. Pop picks up. “Dolly’s Diner. How can I help ya?”
“Hey, Pop,” I say. My voice sounds all croaky from crying or sleeping or both. “It’s Cleo. I’m not going to make it in to help out tonight. I’m not feeling well. Is that okay?”
“Of course, honey. Dom mentioned you had to leave early from school. Anyway, take all the time you need.”
I say thank you and hang up before I roll over to stare at the wall, praying that I can fall back to sleep and pretend everything that has happened today was a dream.
The next time I wake up, my window is dark and Mom’s warm hand is on my shoulder.
“Cleo, honey, how long have you been sleeping?”
I glance at the time on my phone. “A while,” I say. I sit up and stretch and I watch my mother slip off her high heels.
“What really happened with Ms. Novak?” I ask right away.
She reaches up and pulls down one of my snow globes. It’s the one of Hogwarts. She shakes it and then crawls into bed with me. We watch the fake snow as it swirls around the miniature castle. I haven’t seen my mother this still maybe ever. I search her face and then her eyes find mine.
She looks as if she’s sizing me up. She’s studying me like I’m a gas tank and my face is the gauge. Even though I called her a few hours ago sobbing, I still myself, putting on the best Poker Face I can muster. I try to look as tough as I can. And I guess she decides there’s enough room inside me for one more terrible truth.
“Your father is in love with her, Cleo.”
“In love…with Ms. Novak?” I say, stunned.
She nods. “He came home one day and told me that he felt we’d been growing apart since your grandmother passed away.” She looks down at the snow globe again. “He said I’d been working like a fiend and that he felt like I had no time for him. He said I made him feel like nothing he did was ever good enough. And maybe I did throw myself into work after we lost her, but he got a little bit lost too.” She takes a deep breath, and I put my hand on hers where it still holds the snow globe. “I think he’d already decided to move on, and a bigger part of me wanted him to be happy than to stay with me if I made him sad. He could tell I wasn’t my best self with him either. So separating just made sense.”
“So…did he cheat? On you?” I ask. I touch her perfect hair. I think of her intense and steady devotion to everything.
“I wish it were that simple, Cleo. But no, not exactly. We were changing, or maybe we’d already changed. And I don’t think either of us was willing to make the kinds of compromises and sacrifices the newer version of the other person needed.”
I nod. I kind of understand that part at least. It’s like Layla and all the new music she started listening to, the way she got into makeup and hair and chorus and forgot about the things we both used to love. It’s like me wanting everything to stay the same when nothing was ever going to. For a second, I hate my father and Ms. Novak for hurting my mother as much as I hate Sloane and Layla for hurting me. But as my mother continues speaking, outlining her and my father’s slow descent, I see that she made some mistakes too, just like I did.
None of this is as simple as it seems.
“I wish you’d told me,” I say.
“I always thought you deserved to know,” she says. “That people change. That love and life are fluid. That even your heroes can make choices that fall into shades of gray. But your father thought it was a bad idea, that it might be too complicated for you to handle. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he was just saying that to protect himself. To protect the way you saw him as this great, flawless guy.”
I’m a little embarrassed that I was holding on to the childish sentiment of things lasting forever, of people being perfect. Even now, I don’t want to let it go.
“He did know Layla and I were fighting, though,” I counter. “So maybe he thought it would be too much for me—this on top of everything else.” As soon as I finish the sentence, I can hear myself defending him even though I have no reason to. I don’t know when my father became superhuman in my head.
* * *
—
We shift from my room to hers and order takeout. We’re talking and eating, sitting in the center of her big, soft bed, in a pile of bare brown feet and blankets.
“Sorry,” I say to my mom, because I don’t want her to think I’m taking his side in this. We’ve all lost something because of what’s happened: a love; a life, even my own quiet innocence, though that couldn’t have lasted much longer. She smiles softly.
“It’s okay. In his defense, I think he was right. After Ma died, I wasn’t as emotionally available to him as maybe I should have been.”
As if to illustrate her point, her work phone rings and she reaches for it. I move it away from her neat red nails and shake my head.
When we finish eating and I go back to my room to finally change out of my uniform, I’m feeling a hundred times better than I did when I first got home. It’s funny how a dose of honesty and Chinese food does that for a girl.
I pick up my phone from where I set it before I fell asleep, and I have a bunch of missed texts from Daddy. I don’t think I can answer them right now. I finally read the texts from Sydney and Willa. I even have a few from Jase.