She isn’t.
We both know she isn’t.
“These things happen,” she continues, as if she had always predicted such a demise of my marriage. “You were in a difficult position, and you did the right thing by her, and now?—“
“Mother.”
“I’m just saying that no one can fault you. These situations are hard on everyone, and you behaved with honor.”
Honor. The Bennett word for what covers a multitude of sins as long as you hold your social posture while committing them.
I don’t want to talk to my mother about Lucy. I don’t know why I told her. I shouldn’t have. Telling her feels final. I have tainted my marriage, or what’s left of it.
“Mother, I have to go.”
“Of course. And, Fox”—she clears her throat—“I ran into Reina last week. At the Horton’s benefit. She looked wonderful. I think she’d love to see you. Maybe I’ll invite her Sunday, just as a friendly?—“
Is she fucking kidding me?“No.”
“Archibald—“
“I will walk out of your house never to return if you pull such a stunt.”
“I’m only saying?—“
“I know what you’re saying.” I press the heel of my hand to my eye. “Goodnight.”
I hang up and set the phone down on the dining table.
I look at the fig tree in the dark.
Water it every other day until the heat breaks.
I know now that I have done this wrong.
I have done this so profoundly and irreversibly wrong that I cannot yet see the edges of it. I am still in the middle of understanding how wrong, like a man standing inside an architectural space who cannot know its scale until he steps outside.
I am cornered…again.
Different walls. Same trap.
Except this time, the thing I’m cornered away from is not a consequence—it’s Lucy.
6
CRASH, BANG, BANG
LUCY
Icry for what feels like three days straight in Dina’s apartment above the diner. She lets me.
I don’t tell my family because they’d be heartbroken for me. They know I love Fox. I also don’t tell them because Milo is very likely to go to Germantown and get into a physical altercation with Fox.
I put my things away in Dina’s second bedroom, but I stay on her couch, wrapped in a quilt her grandmother made thirty years ago, around the time her family was escaping from Iran.
I know this couch. It has held me before.
After my first real heartbreak at nineteen.
