“You and Mrs. Riley were friends.”
“Of course. We were all friends,” she says the word friends sarcastically, like that wasn’t what they were at all.
“What happened, mother?”
“A text message.”
“A text?”
She nods.
“Marcia spilled her tea and your father set his phone down. He rushed to her to help her clean it up. Together, they stepped into the other room to get some towels, and your father’s phone buzzed. I looked at it.”
She shook her head.
“I never had before, you know. He was always so private with his phone and never let anyone even get close to it. I don’t know why I chose that time to look at it. I guessed at the password. Lucky me: it was your birthday. I read the text.”
“Mother, what did it say?”
Suddenly, I’m sitting on edge, and my entire body feels cold.
She looks up at me, and her eyes are hollow.
“It was a message from Mr. Riley,” she says. “And suffice it to say, he and your father were a lot more than just friends.” She shakes her head as though she still can’t believe it after all of this time.
The realization that my father was having an affair hits me like a punch to the gut, and I sit back against the settee.
So that’s why Riley went to jail for my dad.
That’s why he took the fall.
They weren’t just friends.
They were lovers, and Riley couldn’t bear to see his partner suffering.
It also explains his suicide so shortly after my own father’s death. He couldn’t bear to live without him, I suppose.
“What did you do when you found out, Mom?” I ask.
“I put the phone down and I pretended I hadn’t seen anything. After that, your father left. He told me he was going to a poker game, but the text message had told me everything I needed to know. He was meeting his lover while their two wives were having tea.” She shakes her head. “We were such idiots, Marcia and I. We should have seen it.”
I’ve never been married.
I’ve never been in that place where I had to judge whether my partner was being honest or not, so I don’t know if I’d be able to tell, but something tells me that my mother truly regrets the fact that she couldn’t tell.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say, but she’s not listening.
“We already knew about the embezzling. We weren’t complete dolts. We just kept quiet because it benefited us, but having our husbands run off together?” She shook her head. “That simply wouldn’t do. What would people say, Gavin? What would they think?”
“Wait,” I have to be misunderstanding this. She can’t be saying what I think she is. “You turned him in?”
All of these years, I’ve wondered how my father managed to get caught. How did he manage to get arrested? He was so careful, so meticulous. Together, he and Riley had carefully guarded their secrets from everyone.
“I had no choice,” she says coldly.
“Mother, there’s always a choice.”
“He was going to leave me for a man.” She looks away from me, but she doesn’t so much as shed a tear. “It would have destroyed me. It would have destroyed us.”