“What’s not accurate?” I asked.
“That none of it was real,” she said from her lounge chair. She held a hand up to block out the sun. “I know you, and I know when you’re faking it. Like the first time he came to school.You were shocked when he kissed you. Could not have been less convincing.”
“I wasnotshocked.” I barely recognized my voice. It was rough and slow, like I’d been choking on pebbles all day. Though I wasn’t even sure what day it was. Or the last time I’d slept. And these cherries were just about the only solid food I’d consumed in—hours? Days? Couldn’t be sure. Flying overnight was the worst.
“But then it changed,” she said. “It happened so fast and it was so strong that I convinced myself you weren’t faking it that day, but now I know I was right all along.”
“You always are, sweetheart.”
She swatted my arm. “What I’m trying to say is that whatever you two started out doing isn’t what you ended up doing.”
“Except he manipulated me for months and missed every opportunity to tell me what was really up,” I mumbled around my straw. “So, he did exactly what he started out to do.”
Grace was quiet for several minutes while I struggled to spear my cherries with the straw. It was harder than it sounded. Ben stopped by with a bunch of takeout menus, pointing out his favorites with the use of his splinted finger.
When her fiancé left to order the food, Grace said, “I don’t think it’s a secret that I was jealous of your relationship with him.”
“I just thought you didn’t like him.” I’d never understood why, but Grace was prickly in that way. She didn’t like a lot of people and her reasoning wasn’t something I’d describe as logical. Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. Until recently, there wasn’t much overlap between Ryan and Grace in my life.
“I didn’t go to college knowing how to have more than one close friend,” she said. “For a long time, I worried that it would be me or Ryan. I didn’t see how it could be both.”
I rolled my head against the cushion to stare at her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
“Because it’s shameful even for a villain,” she said with a cackle. “You always described him as your best friend and that made me jealous. But I got to know Ryan over the years and I realized—slowly, since villains never come to their realizations lightly—that I didn’t have to be jealous because he might’ve been your best friend at one time but that wasn’t who he was meant to be to you for all time.”
“It sounds to me like you’re on his side right now.” Another slurp. “I don’t think I like that.”
“No one works as hard as Hades, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m gonna tell you things you don’t want to hear.” She folded her legs in front of her. “But I’m always on your side. Nothing will change that.”
I linked my fingers together and let myself sink into the chair. After a minute, I asked, “Is it okay if I stay here for a few days?”
“Baby, you can stay as long as you want. But our spare room is full of wedding stuff, so I’m going to need to clear a path first.” She pointed to the phone on the table between us, still dark. “Do you want me to turn this thing on? I can manage your correspondence if you’d like. You know I’m an excellent secretary.”
I didn’t want to deal with anything waiting for me there. Not this weekend, not after the wedding announcement. And my dad and Danielle. God, I hadn’t even started unpacking all of that. I shook my head. “Not yet.”
“Does he know where you are?”
“No,” I said evenly, “and I’d like to keep it that way. It’s only fair that I get to keep a few things to myself since he kept the true motive behind our marriage secret.”
“You’re not going to give him a chance to grovel?”
I glanced at her. “Would you?”
She seemed to consider this for a moment as she tapped a finger to her lip. “If it was me and I’d fake-married my best friend from high school to get back at my ex? If that husband did everything in his power to make my life comfortable and happy, even giving my semi-half-sister a place to live and helping her find a job? If he came to parties with me where he was mobbed by his fans for hours? And put on an unbelievable field day just so I didn’t have to worry about it? If I’d developed some very serious pants-feelings for him along the way? If he handed my dickhead ex the verbal beatdown of the century and did it in front of enough people that the beatdown turns into a thing of legends? Then yeah, I would give him a chance to explain his enormous error in judgment and expect one hell of a grovel. I’d probably hold out for a trip to Paris and some grapefruit-sized earrings and maybe a beagle too.”
“A beagle?”
“Yeah, one of my neighbors growing up had a beagle named Martha Washington and that girl would hunt anything that came into her yard. Quite the body count she put up.” Grace shrugged. “I always wanted a cute dog with the heart of a savage. Ask him to buy you a beagle.”
I went back to spearing the cherries as I realized Grace would take him back. Grace, the cutthroat villain that she was, the one who wouldn’t evenspeakto Ben until he worked through some of his personal issues, would take back the husband who’d engineered our whole relationship. I couldn’t believe it. “How is it you’re more forgiving than I am?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I want to barbecue his balls.”
“But you also want him to grovel and buy me a dog.”
She tipped up her sunglasses and stared at me for a moment. “You might not believe this, but relationships don’t have to end when someone makes a mistake. Ben and I are constantlyfiguring out how to peacefully coexist. We both make mistakes all the time. Some of them are important and we have to work through them. Others are ridiculous. We had a big, stupid fight right before our couples’ shower over—and I can’t overstate how stupid this is—him keeping ceiling fans on when he leaves a room. I hate it, he loves it, and it turned into a symbol of all the other adjustments we’d made since moving in together. Then he went and beat up your ex and broke his finger, and I decided there was no point in getting pissed about ceiling fans. It’s a choice.”
I stared into my cup rather than meeting her gaze. I knew what she was saying. That I’d lived through one divorce after another. That most of those divorces were ugly—and the fights still raged on all these years later. That my mother hammered iron spikes into my heart about cheating, lying men. That I’d been cheated on and lied to so much that I was a tragedy in multiple parts.
