“And then he hit you with that horrible news out of nowhere,” Lila muttered, still sounding stunned.
“Out of nowhere,” Eleanor repeated. “What I can’t understand is why he chose such a romantic restaurant. I mean, if you’re going to dump your wife of twenty years, you can do it any old place.”
“Um, I might have a clue about that,” Lila said sheepishly. “I actually made that booking. In my defense, I also thought it was a romantic dinner, although I didn’t know it was your twentieth anniversary, of all things! I thought he was just taking you out for a date night, since he’s been working so much recently… and even so, I gave him an earful about fobbing that task off on me.”
Eleanor felt a twisting mix of relief at having this one piece of the puzzle solved; happiness, at having a friend who would defend her, even if it meant telling off her boss; and shame, at knowing that Lila had had more clues, however small, than Eleanor did about the decline of her marriage.
“I’m so sorry,” Lila went on. “I should have said something.”
“It’s not your fault,” Eleanor reassured her friend. “Trust me. I came downstairs to find divorce papers on my kitchen table this morning, so there’s nothing you could have done, not if it had gotten this far.”
Lila sucked in a gasp. “Oh mygosh, that’shorrible.”
“That’s not even the worst of it,” Eleanor said. Despite the terrible situation, it felt good to get it off her chest. “Apparently, there’s somebody else.”
There was a long, awkward silence.
“Okay,” Lila said slowly, like she was coming to a realization even as she spoke. “I… I might be wrong, so don’t take this as absolute fact, but Brian has been spending a lot of time with Sarah Wallis, the new associate attorney recently. I heard some gossip, but I thought it was nothing. I couldn’t think Brian would ever do something like this.”
A distant part of Eleanor’s brain recognized that Lila sounded distressed, like she felt guilty. Eleanor should reassure her, she knew, but she couldn’t manage to get the words out, since she felt like she’d been punched in the gut. It was all she could do to breathe.
Eleanor had met Sarah Wallis at Brian’s company’s Christmas party the previous winter. The woman was young, barely thirty years old, and she’d just graduated from law school when she’d started at the tax law agency. Eleanor had seen that the younger woman was attentive to Brian, although she’d just attributed this to a young lawyer looking up to a more established lawyer for professional guidance. Now that felt silly. Should she have seen this coming? Eleanor had never wanted to be the kind of woman who was jealous of her husband’s time. She’d always seen that as socially regressive and a touch petty.
But when she thought of young, pretty Sarah, with her long, shiny hair and her exciting career in front of her…
Well, it made Eleanor feel like a fool.
“I have to go,” she gasped to Lila, hanging up the phone before the other woman could say anything else.
Sarah sat at her kitchen table for a long time, her eyes tracing the familiar wood grain. Her coffee grew cold as her mind drifted. How many times had she cleaned this table over the years? How many times had she chuckled over the spot where Jeremy had slipped with his protractor and taken out a little gouge…
Oh, no, she thought, sitting up straight in her chair. Jeremy. She had to call Jeremy, and she had to do it before Brian did. Given how Brian had handled the dinner on Friday, she couldn’t trust her soon-to-be ex-husband to deliver the news delicately.
She glanced at the clock and, after some quick mental calculations that made her reasonably certain he wouldn’t be in class, she dialed her son’s number.
“Hey, Mom,” Jeremy greeted when he answered after only a few rings. “What’s up?”
In the background of the call, she could hear the hustle and bustle of college life. She hadn’t enjoyed hearing about a major life change in public, so she thought maybe her son wouldn’t like it either.
“Hey, sweetie,” she said. “Is now a good time? I have something important to talk to you about. No, everyone is safe,” she added hastily when her son made a noise of alarm. “I just think it’s something worth discussing in private.”
Jeremy let out a worried sounding breath. “Okay,” he said. “Hang on one second.”
The background noises faded, and then Eleanor heard him quickly ask his roommate to have their room to himself for a minute. There was some shuffling, and then a clicking door, and then Jeremy was back.
“I’m here,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on before I start to freak out.”
“Don’t freak out,” she replied automatically, her maternal instincts kicking in. “I just wanted to let you know, to hear it from me. But your dad and I are splitting up.”
A small, selfish part of her wanted to tell her son the story the same way she’d told it to Lila, wanted to express how Brian had totally blindsided her, how he was having an emotional affair, at the very least, with another woman. But the more rational, kinder side of her remembered that Brian, for all his faults, would always be Jeremy’s father, and she didn’t want to cause any friction between them.
Jeremy was quiet for so long that Eleanor almost spoke up again. Just as she was about to, however, he said, “Wow. Okay. This is… well, I wouldn’t call it asurprisebut?—”
“You wouldn’t?” Eleanor asked, startled, before she could stop herself. Then she cringed, realizing she’d given herself away a bit. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Oh, Mom,” he said, sounding sympathetic. “It sounds like it surprised you, and that stinks, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re not supposed to be comfortingme,” she insisted with a watery chuckle.
