Beside me, Selena stiffened. She wasn’t ready to acquiesce that easily. “She shouldn’t have—”
“Selena, I already knew.”
My sister and I both went perfectly still. “You—” My eyes shot back and forth between my parents and found the same slightly uncomfortable but determined expression on both their faces. “No,” I said. “How could you—”
“No, no,” Mom said, her hand once again locking onto mine. “Not about Brandon, about the affair.”
Selena’s hand jerked free of Mom’s, the first real flash of anger lighting her eyes. “You wouldn’t have stayed. I know you wouldn’t have.”
Our parents exchanged another look.
“This isn’t something we ever intended to talk about with you,” Dad said, flushing bright red around his neck. “When—”
“Let me,” Mom said. She released my hand—I’d stopped trying to free it by then due to sheer shock—and placed it atop Dad’s forearm. Even when she began addressing me and Selena, I couldn’t look away from her hand on his arm. She knew he cheated, yet she was touching him.
“After you were born, Selena, we had a really hard time. Really, really hard. I was taking time off from school and your dad had blown out his shoulder and was having to work twice as hard while going to school himself after losing his scholarship. We never saw each other, and we had no money. We were living in this tiny apartment hours away from my family, and I was still so young.” She looked at Dad. “We both were. I started to think we’d made a mistake, and that it would be better for all of us if we separated, so I took Selena and moved back home for a while. And that’s when I started talking to a lawyer.”
Mom’s hand slid off Dad’s arm, and I knew she didn’t want to be touching him for what she said next.
“I told your dad that I wanted a divorce. We’d gotten married too young and we weren’t ready.” Her eyes lifted to Dad’s. “I think maybe we were both relieved to hear one of us say it.”
Dad’s response was immediate. “No, I wasn’t. We were young and it was hard, but you know I never wanted out.”
“That didn’t stop you from wanting someone else.” Three heads turned, not in my direction but Selena’s. I’d been thinking something similar, but Selena had been the one to say it out loud.
“I don’t have an excuse. I did have an affair. It was very brief, and it nearly cost me my marriage and my family. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret it.” Beside him, Mom’s attempt at stoicism was weak at best. “I thought I’d lost everything and I was working with someone who was also in a struggling marriage, and I made the worst decision of my life. I knew it was wrong from the beginning—we both did. And we both wanted desperately to reconcile with our spouses. I quit that job and told your mom everything. That was the last time I saw Maggie—Brandon’s mother. She never told me about him. I don’t even know if she would have. By then I was too grateful that my wife was willing to give me a second chance to be a better husband and father.”
“It wasn’t just his second chance—it was mine, ours. No, I didn’t have an affair,” she said to Selena when her eyes flashed. “But I abandoned my husband.” Her voice grew thicker. “I walked out on him when things got tough, and I took his baby girl with me. I don’t know that I could have forgiven him that, but he did. I won’t lie to you and say that forgiving him was easy any more than it was easy for him to forgive me, but we worked through it.”
I couldn’t remember a time in my life when my parents weren’t the most disgustingly in-love people on the planet, so hearing them talk about how close they’d come to getting a divorce made me feel sick.
“We were still broke most of the time and living in a tiny apartment,” Mom went on. “But we found a marriage counselor at a church nearby, and I started taking online courses in computer coding. Things got better—not overnight, but they did. Over the next few years, they got more than better.” She looked at Dad, her eyes shiny, nodding a few times before saying, “I did forgive him, but hearing there was a child—” She shut her eyes. Dad lifted his arm as if to wrap it around her but left it hovering just shy of touching her, like he wasn’t sure if he could offer comfort over something like this. Mom’s eyes opened again. “I can’t describe what that was like, learning that he had a son out there, the product of the most painful thing to ever happen to us.”
Dad lowered his arm to his side.
“All that hurt came right back to the surface and I had to—I wanted to have some time to deal with it on my own. Knowing that another woman bore my husband’s child while we were married…” She paused. The rest of us could only sit there and wait and feel sick over the fact that she had to say something like that. “I forgave him for the affair, and this doesn’t change that, since neither of us knew about Brandon before last week, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. And I can’t not feel devastated and angry all over again. I am, and I do, just like it happened yesterday.” She turned to Dad, laying her hand on his cheek. “And at the same time, I’m grieving with you for missing his whole life.” She started to cry, shaking her head like she couldn’t understand her own emotions.
Dad didn’t hesitate to take her in his arms then, and she went to him.
I struggled, watching them embrace, still feeling emotional pulls in opposite directions. Beside me, Selena’s posture went rigid.
“So is that it? Whoops, Dad had a kid, let’s all get over it?” Selena wasn’t pulling any punches. Our parents let go of each other.
“Selena, no,” Mom said, her voice thicker than usual, her accent growing more prominent. “No one is just getting over this. We’re all going to have to hurt and grieve in our own way. We’ll help each other, and we’ll get help together, okay?” Her eyes moved to include me. Before she could say anything else, Dad was talking.
“I’m sorry,” he said to me and Selena. “I didn’t just hurt my wife—I hurt both of you. I wasn’t any kind of man back then, and I want better for you than your mom got in me.” His eyes moved slowly to my face. “I’m sorry and I hope someday you’ll be able to forgive me.”
My eyes stung looking at him. I wanted that too, but it wasn’t as easy to feel. I didn’t know if I could ever get back there. Mom must have seen some of the conflict I was feeling, because she addressed me and Selena straight on.
“You’re not little kids anymore. I can’t tell you to hug and make up. You understand what’s going on here and we’re not going to hide the reality of this situation from you. What we are doing is telling you that your Dad and I are staying together. As much as all this hurts right now, it happened twenty years ago. Dad and I have worked hard at our marriage and loving each other these past decades and we’re not—” she stole a quick glance at Dad “—I’m not going to discount that. The truth is, we’re neither of us the same selfish and immature people we were when we first got married. Back then, I was too in love with myself to love anyone else the way I should have. I wanted to quit, so I did, and it was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“I should have gone after you,” Dad said, gazing at her. “I was a coward and a fool, and I will regret every second that we were apart until the day I die.”
The regret clawing though Dad’s voice brought goose bumps to my skin. And it was more than his words and hers; it was the way they looked at each other when they said them. It was so naked that I had to look away. But the second I did, my gaze fell on Selena and the tears swimming in her eyes. They were for our parents, for the scene before us and the love no one in that room could deny, but I felt them for someone else too.
Whatever equilibrium I’d regained watching my parents recommit themselves to each other and our family lurched away. There was one other big question that hadn’t been answered.
“Mom,” I said, slowing after that because I needed to pick my words very carefully. “What about Brandon?”
