“We won’t!” Abagail and Emily chime in unison.
“I love you.” After planting a kiss on each of their heads, I let go.
“Love you too,” Emily calls as they run from our front porch and hurry across the street.
A heaviness fills my chest at the thought of what I have to tell them as I watch them bound up our neighbor’s drive without a care in the world.
When my neighbor Morgan opens her front door and lets the girls inside, I wave.
“Thank you!” I call.
“No problem.” She returns my wave.
I wait until she closes her door to go back inside. As the door clicks shut, I sink against the entryway wall and check to see if Matt replied to my last text.Of course he hasn’t,I think after unlocking my screen. I thrust the phone into my jeans pocket, chiding myself for getting my hopes up.The girls and I are the last thing on his mind right now.
I move into my living room and contemplate opening a bottle of wine as I sag onto the couch. A knock sounds on the door. One of the girls must’ve forgotten something.
The knock sounds again after I stand. When I open the front door, Beth envelops me in a hug. Her heels make us nearly the same height.
“You okay?” she asks, pulling away.
My throat constricts as the events from the last seventy-two hours ricochet through my mind. Thank God Beth is here.
“Sorry—stupid question.” The top half of Beth’s dark hair is pinned back, revealing the razor-thin scar on her right temple. “Of course you’re not.”
She shuts the door behind her, then lifts a red wine bottle by the neck. “When I saw your text, I thought we might need this.”
As she moves past me, I see my makeup smeared on the shoulder of her trench coat. When we get to the living room that looks out to a street lined with homes that appear almost exactly like mine, only different colors, she gestures to the couch.
“You sit,” she says. “I’ll get the glasses.”
Her heels clack against the hardwood as I slump onto the suede sofa. When Beth returns holding two generously poured glasses of wine, I’m staring at the professionally taken family photograph on the wall, knowing I’ll need to take it down and replace it with one of just me and the girls.
“Thanks,” I say, tearing my eyes from the five-year-old photo taken when I was ten pounds lighter and Matt and I were still in love. Or at least I thought so. The girls were only four, standing between us wearing matching white dresses.
Bitterness rises to the back of my throat when I take a sip of wine, thinking how Matt left without telling them, leaving me to do the explaining.
Beth sinks into the cushions beside me. “Where are the twins?”
“Having a sleepover at the neighbor’s. I haven’t told them yet.”
Beth extends her arm over the back of the couch, tucking her ankle under her knee as she turns to face me. “So, hemoved inwith her?”
I nod. “He’s going to. Matt got an apartment in Renton, and she’s moving from Colorado so they can live together.”
Beth wrinkles her nose. “Wow. And she’s what? Twenty-six?”
I drop my gaze to my glass, annoyed that Beth is making me repeat the detail she already knows. “Twenty-three.”
“Yikes.” Beth winces, bringing her glass to her lips. “And this is the same woman Matt posted a photo with at his conference in Denver? The one you were worried he might’ve slept with?”
She’s hardly a woman,I think.She’s barely an adult.“Yep.”
“I thought you asked him about her, and he admitted they’d had a few drinks at the bar. But that he’d apologized and said it was nothing,” Beth says after taking a drink.
“Yeah, that’s what he said.” I run my finger around the rim of my glass, remembering that sickening moment when I found out. A moment I know I’ll never forget. “I found an Instagram DM from her on Matt’s phone about a month ago—along with a topless selfie—and confronted him about it. Once I got over the shock, I was livid.” I point to the doorway at the start of the hall. “I made him sleep in the guest room ever since. He insisted he was telling the truth that they’d only had drinks together in Denver but that she’d reached out to him online after he got home.” Matt also told me that they shared a connection he hasn’t felt with me in years, but it hurts too much to say it. “He promised to stop messaging her.” I frown, meeting Beth’s eyes. A warm flush of shame rises to my cheeks for being so stupid to think he was telling the truth. “But apparently, he didn’t.”
“You didn’t even tell me,” Beth says.
