I did it anyway. I went to North Carolina, I wrote the story. I started working again, part-time, traveling once or twice a month. It ignited a spark in me that I knew I needed—IknewI couldn’t be a good person, a good mother, without first being good to myself—but now I wonder if it had ignited something in Ben, too. Something dangerous. I had made him a father when he never wanted to be one in the first place, and then I started leaving him alone with Mason for days at a time. It was as if all those small little acts of defiance had lit some kind of fuse, and we had been inching closer and closer toward the explosion without me even realizing.
“One night, I was in town visiting family,” he continues. “I decided to go into the city for a drink, so I walked into this bar and saw Ben sitting there by himself. It was late, a couple hours after he should have been done with work. I figured Allison was there with him, maybe in the bathroom or something, but just as I was walking over to say hi, another woman sat down next to him.”
I feel the heat crawl up my neck. I already know where this is going. All of those late nights together, nursing drinks for longer than necessary because neither one of us wanted to walk away. Waylon is looking at me now like he’s seeing me again for the very first time. Like he’s remembering the way I had sauntered back to that table, myfingers grazing Ben’s shoulders, touching the bare skin of his neck and pretending it was an accident. The way I would willfully ignore his left hand, the gold band he would always fidget with, spinning it around his finger, like if he wore it down enough, it might just dissolve. Disappear on its own.
“It was you.”
“Waylon, I’m sorry.” I push my hands into my neck, trying to cool it down, but the warmth from the coffee only makes it worse. I can feel my cheeks burning, physical proof of the shame I feel radiating out from my every pore. “I promise you, though, we didn’t do anything.Nothinghappened—”
“It’s not that,” he interrupts, waving his hand. “I watched you, though, for the entire night. I watched you interacting. And he treated you the exact same way he treated Allison—the way he touched your arm, the way he leaned over his beer when you were talking. I could tell he made you feel special, just like how he made her feel. It was like you were interchangeable to him. You evenlookedthe same.”
I glance across the café, trying to find something to fix my gaze on to keep myself from crying. I remember that picture I had seen on Waylon’s computer now—Ben and I, sitting close at that bar, caught on camera unaware.
I have never felt more naive, more foolish, than I do right now.
I remember thinking that we were different—Ben and I,wewere different fromthem—but that’s just not true. We were the same. Allison and I were the same to him. Interchangeable.
“There’s no way you could have known,” Waylon says now, reading my mind again. He reaches across the table and touches my hand. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is, though,” I say. “I knew he was married—”
“You were young,” he says. “You can’t help the way someone makes you feel. And he’s good, Isabelle. He makes everyone feel like that.”
“So, what happened next?” I ask, although I’m becoming increasingly confident that I don’t actually want to know. Waylon’s expressionconfirms it: the way his shoulders tense, his lower lip quivers before he bites it, hard. I watch as his eyes grow damp and distant, and he pulls his hand from mine, wiping them angrily, before returning his focus on me.
“She got pregnant,” he says at last. “And then a couple of weeks later, she died.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
I can still feel it: the stick of the tile against my thighs. The sweat on my fingertips as I gripped the toilet, and the vomit in my hair, tangling the strands together like gum. My back against the wall as I sat on the bathroom floor, alone, staring as those two pink lines appeared in my hand. They were faint enough to make me question it—I remember tilting my head, squinting, like it was some kind of mirage that might disappear with just the right angle—but I knew, in my gut, that they were there. That this was real.
And then that single, fleeting second of regret.
The truth was, nothing about our life had panned out the way I thought it would. Ben and I weren’t the same people we were when we’d met—at least, I wasn’t. Not anymore. Making a baby together had felt like a final attempt at making it work, a last-ditch effort to turn it all around, and while I know now how crazy that sounds, finding your life unraveling like that makes you feel pretty desperate to weave it into something beautiful and whole before it disappears altogether and leaves you with nothing.
After all, I had given up so much for him. Losing him, too, would have felt like losing everything.
But sitting there on the tile with that test in my hand made it truly sink in: the reality of what I had done. The reality offoreverwith Ben—of another human being tying us together for eternity. The possibility that it might not change things for the better—and in fact, it might make it all worse. Those were the thoughts racing through my mind during that single second, and I wonder now if that’s how Allison felt when she found out, too: trapped. Trapped in her house, in her marriage, and now, in her own body. That one, final thing that was snatched away from her and claimed by somebody else.
Or maybe she was elated. Maybe she thought it would be a fresh start. Maybe she pushed down the bad thoughts like another bout of nausea, swallowing their putrid taste and plastering on a smile. Hoping that their problems might finally be solved.
“Allison never would have overdosed pregnant,” Waylon says now, eyes quivering. “Sheneverwould have done that.”
“Are you sure she knew?” I ask. “Nobody at the office knew.”
“She knew. She told us. It was really early, but she was the most open person on the planet. She could never keep a secret.”
I remember her hand on my arm, her lips on my ear. The whip of the wind on that rooftop and the combination of all three making my skin crawl like something had burrowed beneath it.
“To be quite honest, this dress squeezes me in all the wrong places.”
I remember how she had been carrying a flute around the rooftop, but her breath smelled like mouthwash instead of champagne; how her fingers rested gently on her stomach, as if she wanted me to know. She wantedsomeoneto know.
“Waylon, I hate to say this…” I trail off, wondering how to word this delicately. “She was clearly struggling, maybe unable to think straight—”
“She wouldn’t have done it, Isabelle.”
I pinch my lips, nod, and think of my mother. I think of how she wouldn’t have done what she did, either. Not if somebody had been there to help. Not if somebody had listened. Nobody understandswhat it’s like to be locked inside the mind of a mother: the things you think that you aren’t supposed to; the beliefs that burrow themselves deep into your brain like a parasite, making you sick.