She barely looks at me, turning her eyes instead toward her son. “Aiden?” she asks, and in her furrowed brow I see the only relic of his face in her, the only way they look even alittle related.
“Mom,if you could—”
“Don’t be telling me you kept her a secret from your own mother too,” says Lorraine, laughing. “When he called us and said he’d be bringing a fiancée, wecould hardly—”
Mrs. O’Leary’s eyes snap back to mine, and I feel myself flush all the way to my hairline, feel my stomach drop to my feet when she shifts them down my arm, to my left hand, and her mouth purses and twists in what must be shock—though not, I hope, recognition. I can’t imagine how she’d feel if I’m wearing a ring of hers, or of a memberof her family.
Aiden clears his throat. “I need to explain something,” he says, and what’s awful is that everyone’s sort of gathered around now, or at least they’ve come closer. Tom and Sheree have taken a seat at a nearby table, and I can tell they’re pretending not to watch, pretending to concentrate on Little Tommy pushing a toy train across the wood floors. Val’s not even bothering with such etiquette—she’s looking at us like somethinggood is coming.
“You’re with this person?” Mrs. O’Leary says, and that’s all I need to know about where this is going to end.This person.I almost want to laugh at having been so reduced, so fully categorized into nothingness. Mrs. O’Leary’s voice, after all, is only the audible expression of what I’d thought about myself for so long, back when I was so stuck—that Ididnothing,wasnothing. “Do you know who she is?”
“Wait, who is she?” says Lorraine, and Mrs. O’Leary briefly looks to Aiden again, a pause where she must realize that there’s something here Aiden has not told anyone, some complexity that she can’t account for.
He opens his mouth to speak, but I interrupt him. “I’m an attorney who worked on the settlement case for Aaron.” Sharp, like I’m putting a knife through this whole thing, slicing myself off from everyone else in this room. It’s a bit of wishful thinking, doing it this way—to hope I could be extricated so easily from the community we’ve built over the last five weeks, no matter what brought us all here.
Aiden looks over at me, his face a mask of shock. Today has been so difficult for him already. I can see, behind his eyes, how overwhelmed he is, how painful it is to see his mother, and to have to tell her this, this inevitable truth about what I’m doing here. It’s like his circuit boardis overloaded.
“Is—is that how you met?” says Paul, tentative and confused, and this is fuckingmiserable; one of us has to end this, to let everyone in this room know the wrong we’ve done, and at least give them some clarity.
“I asked Zoe to be here with me,” Aiden says, before I can open my mouth to do it for the both of us. “She came to see me several weeks ago to—” He stops, clears his throat again, looks over at me. He doesn’t want to say what I came to see him for—to apologize—and I don’t know if he’s doing that out of kindness, out of respect for my privacy, or because he doesn’t think his mother will believe it. He begins again. “She came to see me, and I—saw an opportunity.”
He shifts as soon as he’s said it, moves his weight to a different side of his body, a physical effort to figure out how to do this, or redo it. Me, I’m still frozen, maybe even more so now, because of course what he’s said is true—Iwasan opportunity, guilt-ridden and willing to do whatever he’d asked of me, and, whether I realized it then or not, curious about him. Eager to know him.
But it still tears my heartright in half.
“An opportunity forwhat?” Mrs. O’Leary says, her firstflash of anger.
“Several weeks ago?” repeats Lorraine, looking back and forth between us, and I can see what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to find a way to make it possible that Aiden and I have not lied, that we’re somehow really, truly engaged after a matter ofseveral weeks.
Slowly, so I don’t draw attention to myself, I bring my hands together. I slide Aiden’s ring off my hand and for a few seconds I hold it tightly in my fist, feeling it press into my palm.
And then Aiden tells the truth.
* * * *
Here are the three strokes of luck I have that afternoon, after Aiden tells his mother, and Paul and Lorraine, and everyone else, that our engagement wasjust for show:
One, I have my phone with me, tucked into the back pocket of my jeans.
Two, in the chaos following, which includes Hammond coming downstairs with all three very excited, very rowdy girls, Aiden doesn’t notice right away when I slip out the lodge’s front door.
Three, Aiden doesn’t notice, but Sheree does, and she offers to drive me anywhere I want to go. She takes me to the little bakery in Coleville, the one where Aiden bought me a hot chocolate. She stays with me while I call Greer, then she insists on giving me five dollars so I can get myself something to drink while I wait. Before she goes, she asks if I want to pray with her. I say no thanks but she still hugs me goodbye, as if she hasn’t just found out about me, about the lie I’ve been telling her and everyone else from the second we all stepped on that campground. I give her the ring I’d stashed in my pocket, and she agrees to make sureAiden gets it.
If there’s a fourth stroke of luck, it may be that I don’t cry until I’m in Greer’s car, but I like to think of that coming not from luck, but from a lot of hard-earned practice.
“You want to sit for a while?” she asks, and Ishake my head.
“Just drive,” I manage, swiping at my face.
“You don’t have any things with you?”
“My fr—the woman who brought me here said she’d get my pack from Aiden.”
“Okay,” she says, and for the next ninety miles she drives, and waits. Greer is more comfortable with silence than anyone I know, and she knows I won’t talk untilthe tears stop.
So it’s a pretty quiet drive.
When I notice that we’ve pulled off an exit ramp toward Kit’s place, I stiffen in my seat. “Greer,” I say. “No.”
