Page 77 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

“How dare you stand out there making me look weak?”

“I was defending you!”

“You were humiliating me.” Jake releases her wrist with a little shove. Not enough to make her stumble. Just enough to make her understand he could have. “Those women don’t need to picture me howling over my wife like some abandoned dog.”

Kathy rubs at the place where his fingers were, mouth trembling. She looks smaller in here than she did outside. Older, too, under Jared and Brianna’s kitchen lights, all that makeup settling into the lines around her mouth.

For one second, the sight almost does what it’s supposed to do.

Almost.

Then he hears Emily’s little sympathetic gasp in his memory, and Brianna’s hand over her mouth. He imagines the story moving through the entire church ladies’ gossip circle by Sunday morning. Poor, sweet Jake. Such a good man. So heartbroken he cried over his wife.

His stomach turns hot.

“I didn’t raise you to be cruel to your mother,” Kathy says.

“No, you raised me to know better than to embarrass the family in public. Maybe try it.”

Her face changes. In the familiar way, where the hurt dries up and something sharper looks out from behind her hawk-like eyes.

“They understand it’s not you, baby,” she says, softer now. “Everybody understands.”

The wordeverybodysteadies him.

Everybody is useful. Everybody means witnesses and consensus. A world where Lennon can be wrong and Jake can still be the man who endured her.

“She’s sick,” he says. “She’s confused.”

“She’s a whore who fucked your brother.”

His jaw tightens.

The satisfaction of the word hits first. Then the humiliation of it. Then the image, which arrives no matter how hard he tries to keep it out: Lennon looking at August the way she used to look at him, like he hung the moon.

His hands curl at his sides.

Kathy sees it. Of course she does. She sees everything in him she can use.

“That is what she did, Jakey. That is what she chose. You need to wake up and see the truth.”

“She didn’t know who he was.” The defense comes out before he can stop it.

His mother laughs once, sharp and ugly. “Oh, please.”

“She didn’t,” he says, louder.

Because if Lennon knew, then everything shifts. If she knew August was his brother and did it anyway, then it becomes something too humiliating to hold in his mind. Not just betrayal and adultery.

It becomes a verdict on him: Lennon choosing the one person alive who had always been proof Jake was not enough.

No.

She didn’t know.

She couldn’t have known.

“She left you and went straight to him,” Kathy says. “Whether she knew his name or not doesn’t much matter, does it?”