I hate her.
I hate her for being beautiful. I hate her for being so goddamn elegant even now. I hate her for the fact that she’s marriedto a man who was in line to becomekingand that still wasn’t enough for her. She needed Theo too.
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve never touched yourhusband.” She holds up a hand when my mouth opens to argue. “Not while he was your husband.”
“Peter told me you were having one of your lunches, Wendy. One of yourlonglunches.”
She pulls out a chair from the kitchen table and sinks into it. “This was your parents’ home? What middle-class taste they had.”
“Someone must have forgotten to mention that they’re dead,” I grit out.
She waves her hand at me. “Yes, yes, I know, but death doesn’t make you a saint. It also doesn’t bequeath good taste, clearly. So anyway, yes, we did meet for lunch, and if I’m to be completely honest, Iwouldhave slept with him if he’d been willing, but he was not.” Her mouth sags before she forces it into a tight smile. “You can imagine my disappointment.”
“You were together for six hours, at least. You really expect me to believe you spent the whole timetalking?”
She sighs. “Your continued cynicism is incredibly unattractive and illogical as well. What could I possibly gain by lying to you about all of it? And we were in no way alone. At any given point there were two lawyers and a publicist floating about.”
My head jerks up. “Why would you need lawyers and a publicist?”
“Theo should have told you all of this,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s Bryce. He’s been threatening to go public with my affair with Theo for months and now your friends at Baby Makes Three have talked him into it. We’ve been trying to get him into rehab, and it’s failed miserably.”
“Why wouldTheocare?” I demand. “Youwere the one who was cheating.”
For the first time since she entered the house, she looks a little less sure of herself. “Because of you,” she says, not meeting my eye. “He was worried it would embarrass you if the show actually aired, and he’s been doing his best to kill the story for only that reason ever since.” Her smile is tremulous. “It’s incredibly irritating.”
I don’t think Wendy’s a good enough actress to be lying to me, nor is there much of a reason for her to do so. It’s clear in every line of her face that she wants Theo…and he doesn’t want her back. Not enough, anyway. But that doesn’t mean he wants me either. Nor does it mean anything is solved. I still don’t see how I can forgive him for sleeping with her, under the circumstances.
“So how long did it go on for?” I ask, finally taking a seat.
“When we were in secondary school—”
“Jesus,” I whisper, burying my head in my hands. “This has gone on that long?”
“Not really. Let me finish. Anyhow, I could have had anyone I wanted back then, but not Theo. Which, I suppose, is how Bryce always felt about me. Theo was willing to sleep with me if he’d been drinking, but he never wanted more. We went in different directions after university, but when he ran into his problems last summer with the video and needed to lie low for a while, I suggested we could help each other. There’s something about a man you have to work to impress. He’s the only one who ever made me work.”
I have no idea how she thinks this is an improvement. It would seem she flew a very long way just to tell me they’re both assholes, which I’d sort of surmised on my own. “How could he have slept with a married woman after what happened to his brother?”
She examines her fingernails. I’d think she wasn’t bothered were it not for her slight wince at the question. “He didn’t,exactly. I told him I was leaving Malcolm, that we were just keeping it quiet until my son finished fall term. And Iwasplanning to leave, but my husband was…less aware of it than I’d implied. Then Malcolm got sick and made this public statement about it and called me his devoted wife, and Theo realized the truth.”
My jaw falls open. “So you thought you could just…lieto Theo about your marriage and get away with it?”
“It wasn’tentirelya lie…I really was going to leave after the holidays. Theo refused to sleep with me once he found out, and he’s still rather angry, as you can imagine.”
It explains his iciness toward her that night at the pub, the way he acted as if she was invisible when she spoke. But shouldn’t he have made sure she was separated? Shouldn’t he have questioned her need for discretion a little more? Maybe. I’m sure he’s been asking himself those same questions though.
“He should have told me,” I say staunchly.
She raises a brow. “You think you’d have handled it well, then, being told your spouse had been sleeping with a married woman and was being blackmailed by his old friend? You certainly aren’t handling it especially well right now.”
She’s entirely right—I’d have flipped out if Theo had told me all that—but I’m still tempted to kick her chair over.
“Sometimes the truth matters more than how someone will react to it. And that night at the bar…did everyone know it was fake? Did everyone know about the two of you?”
“Probably.” Her shrug is insouciant. “Bryce had told everyone about me and Theo at that point. Only a few of us knew your marriage was fake, though I imagine everyone suspected.”
I press my face to my hands. It’s humiliating, the way I tried so hard to act like his wife with half of them knowing the truth and all of them knowing about his relationship with Wendy.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and speak to him,” shecommands without sympathy. “He probably should have told you the truth instead of trying to make it go away, and yes, it was bad of him to let you sit there in the bar pretending it was real when we mostly knew it wasn’t. But I don’t think you were together then, yes? So he didn’t owe you answers.”
