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“I could ask you the same thing.” Heather’s voice was curt.
“What are you talking about? I’m at Dad’s. You weren’t at the house when I got home, so I came to borrow the drill for Matty’s shelves.” Danny put a finger in his free ear. The cell connection was terrible. “Where are you?”
“With my parents, in Connecticut. The boys are with me.”
“What are you talking about? At your parents’ cottage? Since when?” Danny slapped his palm against the island’s tile top. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his parents glance at each other. His mother crossed herself.
“I’m sick of it, Danny!” Heather shouted.
Anger and tears flooded her voice, and a lance of pain hit him because he knew he was the reason for both.
“Heather—”
“I’m not going to sit around and play the doting wife while you screw around with your old girlfriend. You never look at me anymore, you never touch me. I’m through, Danny.”
“Heather. HEATHER! I am not fooling around with anyone!” His conscience prickled as he said it.
“Don’t lie to me! I saw the selfie on your phone: you and Lauren in the park—”
Danny’s jaw dropped. She’d gone through his phone? For a split second, Danny was speechless.
“—And I know you were having dinner with her at Dom’s the night of that ball game. Rachel saw you and texted me. When I asked you about it when you got home, you lied to me. You said you had dinner with your father when you really had dinner with her.”
“We’ve been over this a hundred times already! Ididhave dinner with my dad.” He might not have lied about having dinner with his father, he had deliberately not mentioned seeing Lauren. That was a lie of omission, but it was a lie, nonetheless. Guilt gnawed at him, warring with the frustration and emptiness that had turned his marriage into a shell.
“How many other times have you been with her, Danny?”
“Stop!” he yelled. “I’mnotsleeping with her—we’re still married, in case you forgot.” Again, in his peripheral vision, Danny saw his mother cross herself. He turned his back so he couldn’t see her.
“In case I had forgotten?Really?I didn’t think you’d noticed. You certainly haven’t treated me like your wife in a long time.”
“I don’t want to do this on the phone,” Danny said. “When will you be home? We’ll talk about it then!”
“Now you want to talk? You’ve had plenty of chances up until now.”
“When?” Danny demanded.
Heather ignored his last question. “We’re not coming home. We’re spending the rest of the summer here with my parents. Maybe being in different states will help you get this out of your system and then—maybe—we can figure out if there’s anything left in this wreck of a marriage worth saving.”
The floor seemed to drop away from under Danny’s feet. Heather wasn’t coming home? She wasn’t bringing his boys home? The sour nausea that crawled up his throat and lingered for a split second was washed away by the wave of anger that crashed over him.
“What the fuck are you talking about? You’releavingme? No! You are not spending the rest of the summer with your parents. What about Lucas, Matty and Tommy? When am I supposed to see… Heather?Heather?” She’d hung up on him, Danny hit redial and got voice mail.
“Heather! Call me back!” Danny was furious. His wife’s parents owned a small vacation home near Hammonasset Beach in Connecticut. It was more than a two-hour drive away—and if the highway was backed up, the trip could take closer to four. If Heather stayed there for the rest of the summer, it would be nearly impossible for him to see his sons.
Danny stared at the phone in his hand. “I can’t believe this. She says she’s going to spend the summer with the boys at her parents’ beach cottage.”
“We gathered that,” Richie said.
“I haven’t done anything,” Danny said. “Nothing! And this is what I get?” He jammed his phone in his pocket.
“Nothing?” Deb said, her voice prim and heavy with disappointment. “When this one’s around, there’s always some kind of trouble going on.”
She flipped open the newspaper to the entertainment page. There was a photo of Lauren relaxing on a bench, talking with Stevie. Danny recognized the AC/DC shirt and realized it must have been taken the same day he and Lauren ran into Joey, and suddenly all his worries about cameras being everywhere flooded back… plus there was the damning selfie on his own phone.
Danny ground his teeth. He couldn’t claim total innocence—he hadn’t done “nothing,” as he’d so boldly exclaimed a moment before. Some people wouldn’t have an issue with what he and Lauren were doing. But plenty would, and his mother was firmly in that camp. As far as she was concerned, eventhinkingabout being with Lauren was tantamount to cheating. And if that was true, then Danny had been cheating for his whole marriage.
“I’mnotsleeping with her,” Danny said, his voice tight. He’d made mistakes—big ones. The time he’d spent with Lauren. The time he kissed her. As much as he wanted to deny it, it was indistinguishable from cheating. But he hadn’t crossed that last line; he hadn’t had sex with her despite how desperately he wanted to. He wanted that fact to matter somehow, but it didn’t. In all the lies he’d told, it was the one truth—and, rational or not, being presumed guilty of the one thing hehadn’tdone infuriated him. He grabbed his keys.
