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She is completely red, her hair a mess.
“Bullshit!” I laugh in her face, shoving her away, no longer able to tolerate anything less than the truth. “You married me not because of that stupid napkin, but because you let me shove my fingers, and a chocolate bar, and my tongue into every hole of yours I had interest in invading while you still had a boyfriend. Because that’s what we do. We run people over to get to each other. We destroy everything in our way, other than ourselves.”
The cab driver gives me a look of interest, listening with his tongue out, practically panting. Probably should’ve kept the chocolate bar bit to myself.
“You’re lying. You’ve never sought me out.” She points at me, manic.
I laugh harder. I can’t help it, because now that the truth is coming out—why not let it all out? She deserves to know what her mother did, even if it makes both her parents intolerable arseholes.
I turn around and stomp back toward my cottage (feck the car), and she follows me, because I hold the one thing she wants—the truth.
“Try again, Rory. Why do you think I hated you so much? Why do you think I married Kiki? Why do you think all the bad shit happened? I chased you around, and your mother told me you wanted nothing to do with me. She said I should move on. That you’d found another lad to keep you warm at night. She sent me the pictures you took of me, with the god-awful things you wrote about me on the back of them.”
I turn around to see her face morphing from angry to horrified.
Her features twist in pain. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said when I screwed you six ways from Sunday and gave you enough orgasms for a decade of PornHub material. Yet apparently, I tried too hard. And you know what? I did. I did try far too hard, because I wanted no one else to compare.”
“No one did compare!” she screams in my face. “Happy? No one compared, which is why I didn’t date until Callum came along. There was no other guy. I wrote those things on the back of your pictures because I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and Summer gave me an exercise in trying to find the bad things in you, and those were the only things I could come up with. You were damn near perfect. When I came back from college, I turned my room upside down so many times, desperate to find your photos, because they were the only thing I had left of you. And I didn’t want to look you up on social media, because I still honored the stupid contract. I cried days and nights about those pictures, Mal.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, taking a deep, cleansing breath. “I sent you dozens of letters. They were redirected to your New Jersey address, and you never saw them.”
“Jesus.”
“The cherry on the shit cake? Your mother told me I got you pregnant and you had an abortion.”
There’s radio silence from her side of the bare shoulder of the road, so I open my eyes to look at her. She is staring back at me, stunned.
“Is it true?” I ask quietly.
She shakes her head slowly.
Thank God.
“I’m speechless right now,” she admits.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But also, sort of relieved, because now you’re angry at someone else.”
“Is that why you and Kathleen got married? Had a child?”
“Yes. I mean, no…I don’t know.” I shake my head, pacing back and forth.
The cabbie dumps her suitcase and backpack onto the side of the road and drives away, leaving us in this field, and it’s getting dark, and cold, but neither of us seems to care.
“This is how it happened: I got so furious with you, I pulled a Glen and went to get myself two bottles of something terribly strong to knock myself unconscious. Kathleen was there, at the newsagents, and she sort of jumped into my car without my consent, but I was so lethargic, I didn’t even have the strength to kick her out. We got piss-drunk. Well, I did, anyway, and that’s how it happened.”
There are tears clinging to Rory’s lower lashes, and I wish I could kiss them away, but I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t know if we ever will be. I try to ignore the possibility of never kissing my wife again.
“You slept with my sister, Mal.”
“She…”
I know this will be the first and last time I say this. Not just because Kathleen is dead and I honor her memory, but mainly because I never, ever want Tasmin to know how she was conceived. She doesn’t deserve this horror of a story. I refuse to saddle her with a truth that has nothing to do with her.
