Lauren is quiet again, and I can hear her breathing, and I know she’s choosing her next words carefully because Lauren only does that when the truth she’s about to deliver is the kind that leaves a mark.
“What are you most afraid of?” she asks.
I pull my knees up onto the bed. “What if whatever was between us—friendship, whatever—was enough to keep him from being fully present in his marriage? Because I wasn’t trying to. I swear to God I wasn’t trying to take anything from Bree. I liked Bree. I meant every smile, and I never—”
“You’re not a homewrecker, Syd. You didn’t do anything wrong. You loved someone and you kept it to yourself for fifteen years, and that’s not a crime. That’s, uh—honestly, that’s kind of heroic in the saddest way possible.”
“I don’t feel heroic. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“Don’t throw up. Drink some water. Go to sleep. We’ll figure this out tomorrow.”
“What’s to figure out?”
“Whether you’re going to keep living in that man’s house pretending nothing is happening, or whether you’re going to deal with it.”
“I vote pretending.”
“I know you do. Go to sleep, Syd. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I hang up and lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling fan for a long time, and I hear his footsteps in the hallway — slow, deliberate, pausing outside my door for a second before moving on—and I close my eyes and press my face into the pillow.
The next few days are careful.
I don’t pull away entirely because pulling away entirely would mean leaving, and I’m not ready to leave because the twins need me, and I’m not going to punish them for their father’s inability to communicate like a functional adult.
But the couch nights are over. After the twins go to bed, I go to the guest room. I read my book. I don’t pour wine or sit on his sectional or put my feet anywhere near his thigh. I am pleasant and present and professional, and the word professional tastes like sand in my mouth because I’m not his employee, I’m his best friend, except I don’t know what that word means anymore either.
Archer gives me space. Of course he does, because that’s what Archer does—he stands at a distance and waits and hopes the problem resolves itself without him having to do anything messy or vulnerable. He’s been doing it his whole life. He did it the morning after we slept together. He did it when Bree started asking questions. He’ll do it until the end of time if I let him, because Archer Lockwood would rather lose a limb than be the first person to say the hard thing.
We orbit each other in the kitchen. We tag-team the twins. We communicate in logistics—pickup at one, Bree has themSaturday, I’ll be at the senior center until noon. He asks how my class went, and I say good, and he nods, and we stand on opposite sides of the island like two people who’ve never shared a bottle of wine or fallen asleep on each other or had a hundred deep conversations.
It’s awful. It’s the most awful thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some awful things, including dating a guy for three months because I liked his dog, and going to a timeshare presentation on vacation in Cancún because the free breakfast sounded good.
On Wednesday, I meet Winnie for coffee.
She takes one look at me across the table and says, “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Syd, you look like you haven’t slept in days.”
“I’ve slept.”
“How much?”
“Some.”
She flags the waiter and orders us both coffee without asking, which is the correct move. “Talk to me.”
I tell her about Bree. Not everything—not the full hallway conversation, not the kitchen after—but enough. I tell her Bree said something about the way Archer always looked at me, and that I overheard, and that it’s been eating me alive.
Winnie listens without interrupting, which is one of the things I like best about her. She doesn’t fill silences with reassurances. She just lets me talk until I run out of words. It’s what I need right now.
“The part I can’t get past,” I say, wrapping both hands around my coffee, “is that she saw it and I didn’t. Whatever was on his face at that altar, whatever she spent six years noticing—I missed it. I was so busy hiding my own feelings that I never once considered he might be hiding his.”
“You think he was?”
