I thought of my mother and how she had never had any doubt about who her parents were. And she was happy. And, though I knew it was wrong, I nodded all the same. “Okay.”
Then I started crying again. “Holden, this won’t work. I mean, I won’t be divorced for a year at the minimum, and I’m going to be pregnant and having this baby with you... Our families will absolutely die. What will people say? What will they think?”
“I don’t give a shit what people think,” he said. “We’ll move. I’m sick of Raleigh anyway.”
My heart was starting to warm to him, to realize that, for all his faults, this was a man that was capable of being a rock for me when I needed it most. That’s when I made the mistake of glancing down at the Love band adorning my left finger.
I had made a vow. I had promised to love Ben and cherish him and be faithful to him until the day I died. And he had broken that vow. And now, sitting in the tapestried den of my ex-fiancé, I was the one who felt broken. “Where will we move?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But we’ll just go. And our families will be pissed, but, wherever we go, the people there won’t know. We’ll just act like we’ve been married the whole time. And, when it’s legal, we can sneak off somewhere, just the two of us, and get it done.” He cleared his throat and looked down at my stomach. “Just the three of us, I mean.” He winked at me. “I think a little return trip to the BVIs might be nice.”
I thought of that trip with Holden, the night we got engaged, the joy I had felt at the Christmas-card-perfect life that I had won for myself. And how I had thrown it all away on a fling that hadn’t ever really loved me. The weight of all of my bad decisions suddenly felt like it was suffocating me. I had to get outside and get some fresh air. I started toward the door with Holden following behind me. “Where are you going? I think we have a few more details to iron out here.”
I shook my head. “I know, Holden. But I have so much to deal with between now and then. I just need to go.”
In the way I needed most, he said, “Okay. I’m here whenever.” He paused. “Do you want me to get a crib or something?”
I looked back at him, my hand on the car door already and said, “For right now, let’s just wait. Just don’t tell anyone.” I turned back and added, “Can you just wait a little longer for me?” I put my hand on my belly. “For us?”
He grinned like his horse had just won the Derby and said, “Oh, Ann, I’d wait for you forever.”
I sped out of the driveway and down the highway, angry at the uninvited tears crashing my party. As I drove, music blaring in the background, I sobbed for the person that I had pushed away the most: my husband. And for this baby that we had made out of so much love.
Somewhere along the two-hour drive from Raleigh to Salisbury, I composed myself, and I thought about my options. I had spent so long thinking that the only choice was to leave Ben, but what if that wasn’t it? What if I could stay? What if we could move away and go back to that simpler time where we first fell in love and we were both so happy? What about that option?
The pride surged in me, and I thought about Doug and Sally. I knew that I could never be that woman, that I could never live with a man when I knew that he had someone else filling his heart and his bed, knowing that I wasn’t enough for him. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to face Laura Anne forever, of her knowing that she had battered my ego and humiliated me, that she had taken from me everything I thought was real.
Having to go to Laura Anne’s house for the party she threw us, smile politely and thank her graciously, had been unthinkable enough, especially considering that I couldn’t drink. I would say it was one of the hardest nights of my life, but, in other ways, it wasone of the proudest too. I kept my composure, I didn’t kill either of them, and I made it through almost two hours before claiming a migraine—I don’t get migraines, but Laura Anne doesn’t know that—and having to go home. Ben had given me an odd look, but never said a word about my fake condition. In fact, in the car, he said, “Oh my gosh. You don’t think this headache could mean you’re pregnant, do you?”
I flat-out lied with a simple, “No.”
And I knew that night that I couldn’t bear the thought of being the woman that stayed and took that from a man, even one that she was convinced was the other half of her soul.
Worst of all, I couldn’t imagine the humiliation if Ben didn’t want me anymore. What if I gave him the option to rebuild what we had and he chose her anyway?
The hardest thing for me about the affair was that, though I was so seethingly angry with Ben, I still loved him so madly. He had been my entire life, every laugh, every heartbeat, every tear had been with him and for him. And, oddly, it didn’t seem like he loved me any less. When I saw him standing in the doorway of the pool house, waiting for my headlights to pull up, I broke down again. And it was Ben, as always, who pulled me onto his lap, stroked my hair and whispered, “Everybody needs a good cry every now and then, TL.”
And then I started crying even harder because I knew that I wasn’t his TL, at least not in the way I wanted to be. I knew our marriage was over, and he had no idea. The man who had changed everything about my life would be gone from it soon. It was as though everything I had put my faith in on this earth had fallen into a mythic hand that had closed and crumbled it all in one fell swoop.
I composed myself, picked my head up from Ben’s shoulder and looked at him.
“What’s the matter with my girl?” he asked, nuzzling my neck.
I looked into his eyes, and I knew it was the right moment. I needed to tell him something. About the baby. That I knew about the affair. But, instead, I said, “It’s just so hard to see Lovey like that.”
“I know, sweetheart. But she’s going to be fine. She has so much love around her, and, when you’re surrounded by love, what else do you really need?” He kissed me. “After I found your love, I haven’t needed another single thing.”
And that’s when it hit me. What if I had my facts wrong about Ben? What if Laura Anne zipped up in his golf bag that day hadn’t meant that he was cheating? What if it was something else entirely, something that the four of us would sit around a fire pit and have a good, long laugh about in the near future?
And there I was again, back to questioning everything, back to feeling like the axis of my life was tipping so far to the left that I was on the verge of falling off of the world. For a moment, I had hope. Maybe there was another explanation as to why Ben had to sneak Laura Anne out of the pool house. And maybe there was some other explanation to the whole blood-typing, birth certificate fiasco. Maybe it was nothing more than a mistake, a slip of the pen. Another explanation for anything, at this point, would be a very welcome change.
Lovey
One Big Secret
In life, you have to be prepared for the surprises, good and bad, and take them in stride with grace and humility. But I never saw it coming that day. I was lounging in the elevated nursing home bed, sipping a cup of coffee with impossibly fresh cream that Luella had procured from the farmers’ market, thinking that this nursing home gig wasn’t so bad after all. All of my meals were prepared, Dan was taken care of and, even though I was as ready to get out of here as a two-week overdue woman is to give birth, there was such a sense of safety in knowing that, in an emergency, a team could be assembled for Dan as quickly as I could push a button.
I had talked to each of my girls that morning and was thrilled that all five of them would be coming that weekend. The love they had for each other, that bond, it made me so happy. But, in the quiet moments, it made me a little bit sad too. Even after my sister Lib and her husband had come back home, when the war had ended, we’d never been close. Through all of those years of her living inCharlotte and me in Raleigh, only a few hours up the road, we had never seen each other more than once or twice a year, never grazed beyond the niceties of conversations about children and work, cooking and keeping the house. Sometimes I ached for that missed opportunity, wondered what kind of sister I could have had if either of us had made the effort.
