The absolute worst-sounding porn dialogue continued to come through the phone speaker. “Examine meeeee.”
“I’m dead.” Nora put her hands over her face. “I’m dead, and this is hell. You were right all along, Soraya, I was hell bound and this is it.”
There were moans and grunts, and Soraya scrambled for the phone to end the call like she was performing a lifesaving procedure.
“Thank you.” Nora’s breathing was sharp and short. “Thank you. I knew ... I knew it. Because Sam showed me his Instagram tonight, but this ... Heass-dialedme while he was having sex with her.”
The digital age made it so much easier for men to cheat, but also so much harder, and they just ... did it anyway. Flinging their penises around cyberspace.
Nora wiped her hand over her cheeks and looked surprised that her hand came away dry. She wasn’t crying. She just looked defeated. “You know, I used to make fun of him for how careless he is. He butt-dials, he leaves receipts for presents lying around. He’s just not sneaky. He’s sloppy. It’s insulting. He ... he didn’t even bother to make sure his phone wasn’t in his pocket so this couldn’t happen.”
“Well, if he looks at his phone after he’s done, he’ll know there was an outgoing call,” Daisy pointed out.
Nora huffed. “I mean, that would again require observation.Thought.He ... he only thinks about himself. Theyallonly think about themselves.”
The defeat began to turn to anger, Soraya could see it, while her own anger turned quivery in her stomach, her hands shaking.
Soraya gestured around them, absurdity guiding the moment. “Welcome to my home.”
Then she burst into tears.
None of them spoke for a few minutes while Soraya gathered herself—great, gulping sobs interspersed with laughing. Nora was the one who’d just gotten the horrible confirmation her husband was justlike Jonathan and David. That she was in the same place as Daisy and Soraya, so why was Soraya having a breakdown?
After thirty-five years ofcounting it all joy, she just couldn’t do it anymore. Apparently this came for everyone. This churning, black hole of cynicism.
She moved back to her spot against the wall and slid down, holding the cards in her hands as she pulled her knees up to her chest and sat there staring at the deck.
Daisy and Nora just stood there, looking at poor Soraya.
“I’m not crazy.” Soraya wiped the tears off her cheeks that hadn’t been on Nora’s.
“I might be,” said Nora. “Or homicidal. I did a love spell just a few hours ago, and now I find out that he’scheating on me.”
“Maybe magic isn’t real.” Daisy adjusted her glasses.
“It’s not about the magic.” Nora slapped her hands against her thighs and turned in a slow circle, anger radiating off her in a palpable wave. “It’s about what I believed. It’s about me defending him to all of you. You knew. You knew, didn’t you? That I was being delusional.”
It was Soraya and Daisy’s turn to exchange glances.
“I wouldn’t say that Iknew.” Daisy adjusted her glasses again, this time clearly due to discomfort and not out of any need.
“You did.” Nora’s tone was almost accusing, and Soraya could see that if they weren’t careful, they were going to catch some of the shrapnel from Nora’s outrage.
“Nobody can tell you anything about your husband before you realize it,” Soraya pointed out. “At least, nobody would’ve been able to tell me something bad about David. I wouldn’t have believed them. Honestly, that text earlier with him telling me to get out of the house. Nothing has quite driven home the point of exactly who he is like that. But you can’t know that before the moment is right for you to know it. Now you know it, and I’m really sorry that you had to know it that way.”
“It’s not any different than what you went through.” Nora put her hand over her mouth, holding back a laugh. “I really thought I might be the only woman on earth whose husband was having a real existential crisis that wasn’t actually about sleeping with a younger, hotter woman.”
“She’s younger,” Soraya emphasized. “That doesn’t make her hotter.”
“Thousands of years of patriarchy would disagree.”
“Hexthe patriarchy.” Soraya was hoping to make Nora laugh with the totally out-of-character comment, but she meant it a little more than she’d realized.
“I regret not putting the karma spell on Jonathan. Tonight, I ... I might’ve cursed him. But I want to make another ... another spell, and I want to put it in his truck. I want ... I don’t want him to get away with this. What if he was lying to me the whole time?”
That same fear echoed inside Soraya. She could see that it was a new fear for Nora.
“He tricked me.” Nora was incandescent. “He made it sound like it had nothing to do with ... with sex, with me. But it is about sex. He’s off having sex with some woman who wants to do dentist role-play. It has nothing to do with finding himself. It has to do with losing his dick inside of another woman.”
