Daisy’s eyes glistened. “Jonathan doesn’t want his mom to know yet, so he’s been really careful, because I think he wants to make it seem like Amberly was someone he met after we split up. But I know she’s living in that house with him.”
“Amberly?” Nora asked. “Is she a shih tzu? Aninfant?”
“Not canine. And she’s twenty-five.” Daisy blinked her tears back, her tone hard and bitter now. “Which makes sense, you know, since the last time Jonathan was happy, we were twenty-five. So I guess he had to find a twenty-five-year-old who didn’t have stretch marks from bearing his children in order to be happy again.” Daisy looked down at her hands. “He murdered our life. We had this really good life, and he just walked in one day and ... blew it up. For himself. Nothing I said made any difference to him. I told him I didn’t want it. I told him I wanted to work on it, that I didn’t care he slept with someone else.”
Nora’s stomach twisted. “How can you not care about that?”
“Because I just wanted him to stop ... saying those things. I just wanted it to go back to how it was. Before he said that. Before I knew it’s ...”
“It really is like having your life murdered,” Soraya said, her tone soft. “No warning and no way to defend yourself, and when you know, you can’t go back andnotknow.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine it.”
It was a stupid thing to say. Who wanted to hear that their life was so shitty you couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were living? Nora knew better than that. It was the kind of thing people used to say to her when she’d been a kid living in foster care.
I can’t imagine not having a family!
Good for you.
“I just mean,” she tried again, “I don’t want to be dismissive of what a big deal that is.”
“It’s fine.” Daisy took a deep breath. “So, how are you and Ben?”
The question Nora had dreaded didn’t seem so dreadful now.
“Fine,” she said, not sure why she wasn’t being totally honest.
But it was different from all this. It wasn’t church-bathroom dick pics and affairs with twenty-five-year-olds. He just needed a little bit of space. He was just finding himself.
Ben’s decisions had been more unilateral than she would have liked, but he hadn’t told her he’d had ten years of unhappiness, and he hadn’t left her for another woman.It was different.
“Fine?” Daisy pressed.
“Yes. Just ... fine. I mean, you know how things are. They move in waves. Marriage is complicated. But you know, we’ve only been married for five years. There’s just not ...” They were both looking at her like they could see through her. “I mean ... we are a little bit separated right now.”
“You’reseparated,” Daisy said.
“But you’refine,” Soraya added.
“He needed some space.”
“Oh, space?” Daisy said. “That always means they’re sleeping with someone else.”
She didn’t have to spread her bitterness over to Nora.
“He’s not.” She did her best to affect a neutral expression. “What happened to you guys is terrible, and I’m really sorry about it. What happened to Alexandra isawful. I hate that everything unraveled for her when Christopher cheated, but it’s not the same. He needs to go be by himself and deal with some things. I love him, and he’s going to ... find himself.”
“When did helosehimself?” Soraya asked. Yet again, Nora couldn’t tell if she was being funny or tragically sincere.
“I just think . . .”
Suddenly sheheardherself. Sitting there at this table with two other women whose marriages had come unglued, having come from the hospital room of a woman who had gone through a heinous separation.
She did sound naive. She did sound silly.
But they didn’t know Ben. Ben was fun and funny, and there was a reason he’d been voted Hemlock’s Favorite Dentist three years in a row. He wasn’t like a regular dentist; he was a cool dentist.
He had a twenty-sided die tattooed on his arm, and he liked to tell jokes with kids, and ... and ...
