Page 96 of Cruel Lies

Turns out humiliating your cheating husband in front of a bank full of financiers is excellent marketing. Who knew?

The filing against my company goes quiet. Ronan told me not to worry about it, and I trust him enough to do exactly that. I don't understand all of it, but I've stopped needing to, because for thefirst time in a very long time, there is someone else in my corner. Someone who has never once lied to me.

That's the part I keep circling back to, in the quiet in-between moments.

He's never lied to me.

There are things he won't tell me. I know that. I haven't forgotten it. I'm not stupid, and I'm not doing the thing I did with Todd, where I saw the ocean of red flags and told myself they were beige.

I see them. I'm keeping the receipts, same as always.

But there's an essential difference between a man who has secrets and a man who lies. Todd looked me in the eye and told me I was crazy while he stole my company out from under me.

Ronan looks me in the eye and tells me there are things he won't say, and then he doesn't say them; meanwhile, everything hedoessay turns out to be true.

I think I can live with that.

By Friday night, with the kids asleep and the house quiet and the whiteboard on the fridge blank and clean, I sit on my stoop and breathe in the evening air.

I feel like I'm standing at the edge of something.

It's finally,finallysolid ground beneath my feet. I built this ground myself, brick by brick, receipt by receipt, and there's a whole life on the other side of this that I can almost see, the way Hayden talks about that world at the bottom of the ocean. A whole world down there with no sun, and the animals don't need it.

I built a life that doesn't need Todd.Idid that.

I don't know exactly what the shape of the new life is yet. I know it has my kids in it, and my company, and this house with its stoop. I know it has mornings that start with four words on my phone that I've stopped pretending I don't wait for.

I look at my wrist. The little gold octopus charm catches the streetlight.

I laugh, quietly, to myself, in the dark.

Then I go inside, and I lock the door, and I go up to bed, past the chair in the corner I still haven't touched, and I sleep the way I slept the morning after the gala.

Slow.

Easy.

Like someone's watching over me.

26

RONAN

The orphanage sits on a secluded block in Brooklyn, tucked mostly out of sight. You wouldn't look twice at it. That's how I like it.

The only indication of what it is comes in the form of a small sign by the front door. It reads, in plain letters,THE ANNA HOUSE.

My mother's name.

Navi parks the car across the street and cuts the engine. We sit there a moment, both of us looking at the building through the windshield.

"You could put your name on it, you know," Navi suggests. "Big letters. Gold. AKOV. Let the whole world know what a generous man you are."

"The whole world can mind its own business."

"That's the spirit."

We get out. It's a warm morning, the kind that promises to turn hot by noon. A couple of kids are already out front, a boy and a girl, chasing each other around a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. They freeze when they see us. Two large men in dark clothes. I don't blame them.