It landed wrong.
Everyone went still. Jen stopped mid-bite. Lori looked up.
"I'm fine. I'm joking." Carrie's smile fell flat. "Really. I'm fine."
But she wasn't. And they all knew it.
They'd shared some of this at the beach yesterday. The affairs, the divorce, the engagement. Headlines. But sitting here now, leaning in over the noise of the crowded room, headlines weren't enough.
It started with Carrie, because she'd been the one to crack first, and once she did there was no point pretending everything was fine.
"You know Richard left," she said. "But I didn't tell you all of it. He left for Diana. His business partner." Carrie's fingers traced the stem of her wine glass, not drinking, just holding. "Except I was his business partner first. My idea, originally. Back when we were young and broke and didn't know anything about anything."
Carrie had done the books. Found the first clients. Built the whole thing alongside him until the girls came and someone had to be home. Richard promised it was temporary. That she'd come back once they were in school. But temporary stretched into years, and by the time she was ready to return, there was no room for her anymore.
"Then Diana came on five years ago. Smart. Capable." She looked down at her wine. "Younger. She'd been a client first, one Richard landed three years before she joined the company. I used to joke that she was his favorite, always laughing at his jokes, always requesting him specifically. Then he offered her the partnership that should have been mine."
Carrie tucked a strand of curly red hair behind her ear.
"She used to text him on weekends. Work stuff, supposedly. He'd be on his phone at Ava's soccer games, at dinner, in bed. I asked him about it once, and he said I was being paranoid. That Diana was like a little sister to him." She laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. "I found out later they'd been sleeping together for two years. Two years. While I was making her a Christmas gift basket. While she was coming to our Fourth of July barbecue and telling me how lucky Richard was to have me."
"The worst part?" She closed her eyes briefly. "I threw him a surprise party for his forty-fifth birthday last spring. Invited everyone from the office. Diana stood in my kitchen, drank my wine, handed him a gift she'd clearly spent too much time picking out. Six weeks later, he moved out."
The table went quiet.
"The divorce isn't even final yet. His lawyers keep delaying, finding reasons to push back the court date. Meanwhile I'm living off savings, waiting for a settlement that his attorney is trying to gut. He wants to argue that the business was his, that my contribution was minimal." Her voice hardened. "Twenty years of minimal contribution."
"You'll get what you're owed," Meredith said.
"Maybe. My lawyer says we have a strong case. But strong cases take time, and time costs money, and I've got about three months of savings left before I have to make some very hard decisions."
She hadn't told Brittany or Ava. Hadn't found a way to say it without making everything worse than it already was.
"I keep thinking I'll figure it out before I have to say anything," she said. "But I'm running out of time."
Lori put a hand on her shoulder. Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"At least you knew why," Lori said finally. "I spent a year thinking it was my fault."
The words hit hard. Lori had told them about the engagement, about Tessa. But not this.
Lori drained the rest of her wine and set the glass down with a thud. "Kevin said he needed to 'work on himself.' That's how he put it, back when things started to go wrong. Work on himself."
She'd believed him. Why wouldn't she? He was her husband.
"He started coming home later. Said he was doing extra sessions. Then he started criticizing everything—the way I cooked, the way I parented, the fact that I didn't have hobbies outside the house." She ran a finger around the rim of her empty glass. "He told me I was too negative. That I didn't support his growth. That I was holding him back from becoming the person he was meant to be."
Jen made a sound of disgust.
"I went to therapy," Lori said. "Tried to figure out what I was doing wrong. How to be less negative. How to support his journey, or whatever he called it." A bitter laugh escaped her. "Meanwhile, Tessa was posting workout videos on Instagram. And if you looked carefully—which I did, later, after I knew—Kevin was in the background of at least a dozen of them. Stretching. Spotting her. Once, his hand on her lower back."
"Before the divorce was even final?" Olivia asked.
"Before he even asked for one. Those videos were from when we were still trying. When I was reading self-help books and making his favorite dinners and wondering why nothing I did was ever enough."
She reached for the bottle and refilled her glass.
"I didn't know about her. Not until after the papers were signed, after the house was sold, after I'd spent a year thinking maybe the divorce was my fault." She took a breath. "Then I saw a photo on Kevin's Instagram. Him and Tessa on some hiking trail, her hand on his chest, both of them glowing. The caption said Two years with this one."
