“I want to know.” She leaned forward. “Truly,Nate, it will help to talk about it. I told you about wanting to have a baby. I’ve never told anybody else that, except Derek.”
He tipped his head to the side as if thinking about that. “Nobody?”
She moved her head side to side. “Not even Cameron.”
He gnawed on his bottom lip. “Well, I’ve never told anybody this, either.”
Something tightly coiled inside her softened. “I won’t tell anyone else.”
“Yeah.” He paused, studied the glass of Coke in front of him, took a deep breath. “After Lauren died, I went through her stuff. I found her journal. She wrote in it all the time, but it was personal. I probably shouldn’t have read it, but I wanted to connect with her one last time…to know her thoughts and feelings. That must sound crazy.”
“No. Not at all.” She ached for how he must have felt. “I think it would feel like talking to her…one last time.”
Their eyes met and held. “Yeah. That’s it. Anyway, I started reading the most recent stuff. About…well, stuff. Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “She’d been having an affair.”
Oh. Dear. God. Krissa stared at him, mouth open. “Oh, Nate. Are you sure? That can’t be.”
“Unless her journal was fiction, I’m sure.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea. She never mentioned a name. She called him ‘my lover’.” Krissa heard the disgust in the rough tone of his voice. “She wrote about what they did.” His voice deepened even more. “Where they went. What they talked about. How guilty she felt, but yet she couldn’t stop seeing him. It started when I was away in Thailand for two months.”
Krissa remembered that trip. She’d wondered at the time how Nate could leave his wife for that long, but believed their marriage was strong enough to handle a couple of months. After all, many couples spent much longer periods of time apart. “That’s awful.”
He lifted a big shoulder, turned the glass of Coke between his hands. “It was shitty, yeah. Here she’d just died and I was all broken up inside about that, and then I found out she’d been cheating on me. Our whole life for months before she died was a lie.”
Krissa closed her eyes against the pain she felt for Nate. She knew the agony of wondering if her husband had cheated, and even though he hadn’t, she could imagine how painful it would be. “It must be even worse that she’s dead. You can’t even ask her about it…why she did it.”
“Yeah.” He was silent. She sensed there was more but she didn’t press this time.
“Derek doesn’t know about that?”
“No. And please don’t tell him. I’m a big enough loser with my eye problems right now.”
“But he’s your friend. You could talk to him about it…”
“Maybe some day. He’s got enough problems.”
“Oh, Nate.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “I know how pathetic I am, but I don’t like the world pitying me.”
“It’s not like that. Iamsorry…sorry that you had to go through that. That you’re still going through it. But I don’t think you’re pathetic. Not at all.” She tried a smile. “I think you’re an amazing, strong man, Nate.”
He snorted, turned away again.
The waiter arrived with their lunches.
They talked about other things while they ate, but Krissa couldn’t get her mind off the fact that Lauren had cheated on Nate. It was shocking. Hurtful. And Nate was right—it did change her feelings about Lauren, all the sweet memories she had of her friend. She and Lauren hadn’t been best friends or anything, but because Nate and Derek were such good friends, they’d spent a lot of time together. She’d thought she knew Lauren, and learning this about her madeherfeel betrayed too. God. It must be a thousand times worse for Nate.
Nate accompanied her to the grocery store, and they discussed choices of steaks for grilling that night, what size of shrimp to buy, what kind of mushrooms would complement the steaks. “I want shiitake mushrooms,” she decided, but when they looked in the produce department there were none. She asked the produce manager.
“Sorry, ma’am, we’re out right now. Should get some in tomorrow.”
Krissa pouted briefly. “We’ll stop at another store on the way home.” She loved good food, loved to cook and especially loved to feed people, so debating shiitake versus oyster mushrooms was so much fun she could almost forget the mess her life was in.
“Are you going to marinate the steaks?” Nate pushed the cart for her down an aisle.
