CHAPTER TEN
They’d met during her first year of high school and almost immediately became a couple.
She was fourteen and a virgin. He was seventeen and had already had multiple partners. A classic bad boy with a hair-trigger temper, as quick with his fists as he was with his charm, he was the captain of the football team, the captain of the swim team, the captain of the basketball team. “The captain of fucking everything,” Chloe used to tease him, trying to sound less virginal. What better match for the captain of fucking everything than the prettiest girl in school? And not only pretty, but with the biggest breasts, the lushest lips, the bluest eyes. She was smart, too, although that seemed to matter less.
He started pressuring her to have sex almost immediately. “Men have needs,” he’d told her with all the swagger a fifteen-year-old boy could muster. “Come on, Chloe. You’re my girl. You can’t expect me to wait forever.”
She’d tried talking to her mother about it, but Jennifer Powadiuk could rarely be counted on for parental advice of any kind. Her second husband had just left her and she was drinking even more than usual. Chloe would often come home from school to find her passed out on the couch. “It’s called a power nap,” her mother would snap when Chloe raised the issue. “And don’t give me that look. You remind me of your father when you look at me like that. And you know what a prick he was.”
Actually, Chloe had no idea what kind of man her father was, as he’d disappeared from her life when she was barely three months old. She wasn’t even sure her mother’s first husband had been her biological father. She looked nothing like the photographs of him she’d found stuffed into a box at the back of her mother’s closet, and Chloe often suspected the reason he’d left was because he realized he’d been duped.
“What difference does it make?” her mother had demanded when questioned about it. “They’re all the same.” She’d poured herself another scotch. “They all leave eventually.”
Chloe couldn’t risk Matt leaving.
By the time Chloe’s fifteenth birthday rolled around, she was no longer a virgin. And Matt, all smiles, was still captain of fucking everything.
Of course, there were rumors, even then. Chloe heard the whispers in the halls—“I saw Matt making out with Shannon Philips on the Common.” “Krista says he has the biggest you-know-what she’s ever seen.” “Do you think Chloe knows about Eva? Should we tell her?”—but was determined to ignore them. The other girls were just jealous, she convinced herself. Matt loved her. He wasn’t going anywhere.
They moved in together after graduation and Chloe got a job at an upscale women’s clothing store on Newbury Street, courtesy of her mother’s third husband, who knew the owner, and she helped put Matt through college, intending to complete her own degree at some point in the future. That point never came. Matt, as restless and unfocused as ever, kept switching majors, then dropped out altogether, two credits short of graduating, when he decided he’d rather sell real estate.
“The market’s hot and so am I,” he’d told her with a laugh.
A joke—but not.
“Kidding on the square,” Paige’s mother would have said.
Chloe smiled at the thought of Paige’s mother. How often she’d wished she’d had a mother like Joan Hamilton—kind, warm, thoughtful. The kind of woman who put her daughter’s happiness ahead of her own, the kind of mother who was there when her daughter needed her.
She’d always found it puzzling that Paige had been more of a daddy’s girl. As much as Chloe had liked and admired Paige’s father, she’d always found him a bit overwhelming, his alpha-dog energy tending to suck up all the oxygen in the room. The kind of man you assumed would live forever. And then suddenly he was gone.
“They all leave eventually,”she heard her mother say.
She’d met Paige ten years earlier when Paige moved into the studio apartment across the hall from the one-bedroom apartment Chloe shared with Matt. They’d become fast friends, which was unusual for Chloe, who’d never really had any female friends. But she’d liked Paige immediately. Paige looked you in the eye when she talked to you. She seemed genuinely interested in what you had to say. Her attention didn’t automatically shift to Matt when he entered the room.
Maybe that was why Matt had never really taken to Paige. “I just don’t get what you see in her,” he’d say with a shrug, a refrain he’d returned to repeatedly over the past decade. “I mean, she’s okay. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with her. I just find her cousin Heather much more interesting.”
By “interesting,” of course, he meantinterested—in him.
Although she’d never confided her suspicions to Paige, Chloe had always suspected that something might have happened between Matt and Heather. Heather, it seemed, had a thing for other women’s men.
Chloe hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. She was on the pill. But then she forgot to take it for a few days, which threw her whole cycle out of whack. Or maybe she’d forgotten “accidentally on purpose,” as Matt always claimed. And so, she and Matt got married—asmall ceremony at City Hall, attended only by Paige and a handful of Matt’s coworkers. His parents were long divorced and living on opposite sides of the country. He wasn’t close with either of his brothers. Chloe’s mother had developed a sudden and intense passion for ballroom dancing, and was too busy practicing for an upcoming event in Florida to attend the wedding of her only child.
And then Chloe had suffered a miscarriage, and Matt was understandably upset and resentful. He’d called her names and thrown things. When she’d tried to reason with him, he’d slapped her so hard her ears rang for hours afterward. Of course, he’d apologized profusely, sworn it would never happen again. There followed a lot of late nights at the office, several disturbing hang-ups on the phone. The whispers started up again. Chloe pretended not to hear them. This was her fault, after all.
It took her nearly two years to get pregnant again. Then Josh was born, and Chloe gave up her job—she was now the store manager—to be the kind of stay-at-home mom her own mother had never been. Matt had been right about Boston’s hot real estate market and was doing very well. But Chloe was now totally dependent on her husband for money, and while he could be as generous as he was quick to anger, she’d always suspected that his generosity was tied directly to his infidelities. Still, suspicions weren’t proof.
But while Chloe may have been a fool where Matt was concerned, she wasn’t stupid. She opened her own bank account and began secretly socking money away. In the eight years of their marriage, she’d managed to save almost five thousand dollars. In case of an emergency, she told herself. If Matt ever ran into trouble, she’d be there to save the day.
After Sasha was born, Chloe and Matt moved to a house across the river in Cambridge, and a year later, Paige met Noah and moved into his downtown apartment. Chloe and Paige had remained best friends, although that friendship was sorely tested after Paige confided she’d seen Matt nibbling another woman’s neck on a night he was supposedly at the office “up to his ears in paperwork.”
“I just thought you should know,” Paige had told her, tearfully. “I’d wantyouto tellme.”
It turned out that nobody had to tell Paige anything. She’d come home to discover her cousin in bed with Noah, and packed her bags immediately. No dilly-dallying around for her. No second-guessing. No burying of her pride. No waiting around and hoping the affair would blow over. One strike and she was out.
And Heather was in.
Noah had replaced a diamond with a zircon.