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She dropped her head for a moment and then, surprisingly, looked up with a smile. “Thank you for telling me. I wish…I wish I was shocked and devastated.”
“You’re not?” Once again, I asked what was already obvious. Asking felt better, like I was giving her some ounce of control over these things she couldn’t stop.
“I’m not,” she confirmed. “I knew. Some part of me knew this was still going on.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to feel relieved, but that didn’t seem right.
“Wait,” I said. “Still going on? He’s done this before?”
“I suspected it,” she nodded. “It was a couple of years into our marriage, when he first started going out all the time like this. He was always hiding his phone, getting blown up with constant texts and calls. One night, I looked at his notifications while he was in the shower. There were these texts. The number was saved under Mike’s name, but I knew it wasn’t Mike. He wouldn’t say, ‘I can’t wait to see you’ with a kissy face emoji.”
I did the math on how long ago it was and considered how hard it must have been to stay with him, seeing his disloyalty blatantly thrown in her face. Chris wasn’t exactly subtle. Why did she put up with it?
“What did you do?” I asked instead, not wanting to judge her.
A mischievous grin spread across her lips. “I got revenge.”
“Revenge? I laughed. My brow furrowed. It wasn’t like Claire to do something like that. I was the vengeful one. She was the sweetheart. But then again, we were close enough to be sisters for a reason. “How?”
“I decided to give him a dose of his own medicine,” she explained. “I cheated on him too. I mean, I didn’t go all the way, of course. But I wanted to.”
“How did he react?”
“He didn’t know. Or if he did, he pretended not to. That was what I wanted. Not to confess to it and hurt him. I wanted the satisfaction of knowing I had secrets, too. I thought it’d make me feel better to lie to his face right back, the way he always does to me.”
“Did it?” I ventured to ask. “Make you feel better?”
“A little. At the time.” Her smile faded. “But I always knew that was just a band-aid. It wasn’t the healthiest decision, but I thought it’d buy us time. And it did. I wasn’t ready to let him go yet.”
“Was it worth it?”
She thought about it for a moment, then lit up with another smile. “It kind of was, to be honest. Being married is hard…especially when the sparks fade. And even more so when it’s not going well. It felt good to feel desired again, even if only for a brief moment. I missed that rush of being in the heat of the moment with someone.”
My heart broke even more for her. I was in the thick of feeling that way with Keith, and I didn’t want to imagine her living without it. Especially when she didn’t even have the emotional fulfillment of her relationship to fall back on as a consolation.
But despite how sad it sounded, it was good to see that gleam in her eyes again. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw it. A good dose of girl talk between us cured most things, at least for a little while, so I decided to lean into it.
“Okay, well, now you have to tell me everything,” I laughed. “It was obviously good. I can see it in the way you’re smiling.”
“Honestly, I think anyone would have been good. It didn’t even really matter who it was.”
“Maybe not to you, but it matters to me! Come on. You can’t just drop a bomb like that and not tell me who you were with! You know you’d never let me get away with something like that.”
She slumped and rolled her eyes. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“That’s the price you pay for being bad,” I teased.
“Fine,” she groaned. “But you have to promise me two things. One, that you’ll never tell another living soul. And two, that we’ll never talk about this again. Got it?”
“After a healthy amount of taunting, I will forget I knew anything,” I assured her, mocking a zipper across my lips before throwing away the key.
“Don’t be mad at me either. Because it was silly, and it meant nothing,” she added.
“Okay…,” I said slowly, growing more confused by the second.
“I got all dolled up that night after Chris left to go see ‘Mike’…” She tilted her head and lifted her brows. Neither of us was buying the whole ‘Mike’ facade, just like I wasn’t buying that Chris had to work so much all the time. Unless he was getting paid to sleep with that woman at the hotel, that alibi was complete bullshit.
“And you know, this is Silver Point,” she continued. “There’s only one bar around, and you already know everyone in town, but what was I supposed to do? I was being rebellious, but I still had work the next morning. I couldn’t drive two towns over just to find a bar with strangers. I went to Jake’s, looking really hot if I do say so myself.”
