“Unfortunately,” I mutter.
“Right. I was looking at him and wondering to myself,Who does this guy think he is, walking around like he owns this place?” He shakes his head. “Who could’ve guessed that he actually owns the place?”
Despite myself, I cough out a small laugh. “Yeah, who could’ve guessed.” As the car speeds down the road, I briefly squeeze my eyes shut. “You must think I’m a total bitch. Talking to my own dad like that.”
“I’m sure you have your reasons,” he says.
When I open my eyes, I’m surprised to find that Ares looks sincere. It unlocks something inside me. Loosens my lips. “Sometimes I want to forgive him. I really do. But then I’llfeel so guilty for eventhinkingabout forgiving him, like I’m betraying my mom or something. I just feel shitty either way.”
“Did he... ,” Ares says carefully. “I don’t want to assume, but he—”
“He cheated, yeah. Found out just last semester,” I say, and realize as I do that he’s the first person I’ve told about it since Alice, and that had been half an accident, since Alice had already found out on her own. I’m meant to be keeping the divorce a secret, but maybe I had more to drink than I recall, or maybe there’s something strangely addicting about holding Ares’s full attention for once, the way he’s watching me, like he really cares what I say next, because I can’t seem to shut up.
“And obviously, before that, he did everything he could to hide the evidence of the whole affair and make up all these lies, but you know what? The funny thing is he didn’t even need to go into all the trouble, because my mom was doing all the lying for him. She lied to herself better than he ever could.” I lean my heavy head back against the leather, woozy and mildly nauseous.
“If he returned home late, she’d accept the vaguest explanation that he’d been held up at a meeting. If he was drunk off his face for the third time in a week, she’d simply excuse it as him doing whatever he needed to bond with clients, and she’d say, ‘Look how hard your dad’s working to make money—he doesn’t even like drinking that much.’ She assumed that all his friends were guys and he never corrected her. She ignored the lipstick stains on his shirt and believed him when he said that the perfume on his skin was actually the new air diffuser at the office. She said nothing when he supposedly had to travelto Hangzhou on a business trip again,even if he’d just gotten back from there....”
In my head, I can see myself like someone on a TV screen, sitting down with my mom to deliver the news.
“I know it hurts to hear,” I’d told her softly, reaching for her bony hand, covering the eighteen-carat diamond ring that had been featured in multiple women’s magazines, widely shared and salivated over on the internet. My mom loved finding opportunities to show it off, using her left hand to grab things even though she was right-handed, or fluttering her fingers when she was giving love advice to her friends. But now all I could feel were the cold, sharp edges of the jewel digging into my palm. “I’m so, so sorry, Mom. But you have to—”
Her face had twisted, and she’d yanked her hand away from me, her eyes blazing. “Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”
“If he really loved you, he would never—”
“Hedoeslove me.” She’d said it with such vehemence I almost lurched back. “He does, he does, he does—” And then her voice cracked, and she made a horrible, choked sound, like she’d been fatally wounded.
I was terrified. This was the same woman who wouldn’t let herself laugh too hard at a joke because it would give her wrinkles. The woman who had found a poisonous spider on her shirt while filming a variety show in Australia, and still managed to keep her cool, knowing the cameras were on her. “Mom,” I tried to say. “Mom, it’s okay. We don’t need him. You’ve got me—”
“I wish you’d never told me,” she sobbed. “Why did you have totellme? I could’ve... It could’ve worked out—I could’ve been happy and kept loving him....”
“Why would you want that?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“You don’t understand,” she said, rocking back and forth. “You don’t.”
And that was when it hit me.
You could have everything. You could be a literal supermodel with perfect proportions and lips that are always glossy. You could be sweet and generous and the kind of girl who bakes banana bread on weekends and smiles at babies in prams. You could be talented and clever and patient and wise and you could offer up all that you have without complaint. You could bring the entire world to the table and you might not even ask him to bring anything, not even leftovers, only that he sit down at the same table and stay, but he would still break your heart.
“That’s really fucked up,” Ares says.
I blink at him. He’s not offering condolences or solutions or advice. He’s not watching me with sympathy. But for some reason, hearing the words stated outright like that makes the ache in my chest more bearable. Like finallyreceiving a diagnosis for a pain that’s been eating away at you for years, even if there is no immediate cure. Having someone say, yes, itisfucked up, you’re allowed to be sad about it.
“I’ll survive,” I tell him, and in this moment, I feel so hopelessly, disgustingly tender toward him that I rest my head against his shoulder. For the remainder of the car ride, neither of us moves.
After Ares drops me off outside the uninhabited house and leaves, I call my driver to take me back to where I should actually be.
My own home is empty too. I stand there in the living roomfor a few minutes, feeling the sadness burn holes in my stomach, listening to the clock tick, the only sound in the silence. It was never this silent before.
When my father still lived with us, he made his presence known. He was almost always on the phone, either finalizing the agenda for a very important meeting or hosting a very important meeting or debriefing someone after the very important meeting. Like many of his CEO and CFO friends, he didn’t believe in the concept of business hours. After all, what was the point of work-life balance when your workwasyour life?
You could hear the voices of his employees straining to hide their resentment toward him for making them wake up at six to go over their marketing campaign a third time. “That’s such a great idea, Cao Zong,”they’d chorus.“Yes, we’ll run the numbers. No, we haven’t heard from Huang Zong yet—”
And you could hear my father talking over them, his voice ringing with urgency and echoing throughout the house, because apparently running a business meant that everything was urgent. “Huang Zong makes a good point, but if you had any business sense, you would understand... Do you understand? It’s complicated.... We can’t overcomplicate it....” Sometimes I was convinced he wasn’t even speaking in full sentences, just throwing out random words that were meant to sound serious:Thursdays, fifty-five thousand, the annual meeting, twenty percent, from a long-term perspective, manufacturing, the market, the next financial quarter, index...
He’d been doing this for so long that I could have written out his speeches for him by the time I was thirteen. I knewall his techniques. He liked to reference a recent online trend to make it seem like he was still young and up-to-date (even though he relied on me to explain it to him the night before), and whenever he felt his audience’s attention slipping, he liked to throw in an anecdote or two about me. That time I burned my finger on the curling iron became a long-winded, somewhat confusing segue into how the consumer experience mattered above all else.
I used to complain, half jokingly, about it to my mom.
