“True. So?”
“So.” It’s been a month. I’m back at work, in body and mind at least. Being the District Attorney’s Special Victims Bureau Chief for the Bronx gives me plenty to keep me busy, but my heart is still broken. I won’t say that out loud though. I refuse. Josh doesn’t deserve it. Whenever I can, I leave the city. Friends don’t know what to do with me and I don’t know how to react to them.
I don’t want to just sit in my apartment alone, so I go upstate in the car that Josh taught me how to drive after I kept complaining about how annoying it is to close the ninety-minute distance between myself and my sister and her husband’s apple farm. I thought my sister was crazy for leaving Manhattan behind, but after her life was almost taken away thanks to an honest-to-god hit attempt in her own apartment, I can see why things were never the same.
It doesn’t hurt that she found a hunky farmer to love the hell out of her. I’ve never seen my sister so happy. She leans against the counter and gives in to her urge to coo at her baby girl for a few moments before her smile fades and she fixes her gaze on me.
“Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m just pissed.”
“And you have every right to be.”
“Pattie keeps texting me. She invited me to lunch tomorrow with her and Meredith. I get it, she lost her son but—”
“He was cheating on you.”
I rap my knuckles, hard, on the kitchen table. “Am I dumb?”
“What? No!”
I bite my lip and hold Iona a little closer. I’m so tired of crying. “You know how they met?”
“Did you find out?”
“Yeah. I talked to the detectives again. Ugh, I think they know I had nothing to do with this.”
“Clearly they don’t know you, ’cause if you found out Josh was cheating on you before all of this—”
“I would have killed him myself.”
“Look, it’s two different things. It’s two different, horrible things. You lost someone you love. Okay, three things. You lost someone you love. You found out something horrible about that person in the process and now you don’t get a chance to confront him about it. It’s painful and it’s unfair as hell.”
“Four things. His family somehow wants me to be over it so I can emotionally support them through their grief.” Almost on cue, my phone chimes in my purse. “Can you grab that for me?”
Liz grabs it, immediately shaking her head. “It’s Kelsey.”
“See?”
“You want me to text her back?”
“No. I feel like—I feel like they knew.”
“That he was cheating?”
“No. I feel like they knew he was kind of shitty and they liked me so much they didn’t tell me or tell him to get it together. Like when his buddy John just came out and said he’d told him to do right by me, it’s like, you know. You know what someone you’ve known their whole life is like. You know what they are capable of.”
“Maybe they thought he’d changed.”
“But that feels so unfair to me.”
“It is.”
“Right? I should have been given the chance to make the decision. I feel robbed. I said yes to someone I thought was faithful. Actually, let me back it up. Faithfulness never crossed my mind. That’s how duped I feel. I never for one second even considered that Josh cheating on me was in the wheel of possibility. I’m sitting here, not processing the fact that he’s gone. I’m just not. Can I be honest and say that?”
“Of course you can. Brook, you remember what it was like to lose Mom and Dad.”
“Yeah.” That cruel, specific pain blooms in my chest again. Almost twenty years and it still hurts like hell. “Am I a bitch if I tell these people to leave me alone?”
