I feel a fresh rise of fury that she would dare tell me about my husband. Someone she’s known for a measly three months as opposed to our seven years together. But instead of pointing this out, I say, “Exceptional men don’t cheat on their wives. They don’t have affairs. They don’t put a cheap thrill ahead of their children.”
As I say the words, the paradox of the situation crystallizes in my head. If she was a cheap thrill, then Nick isn’t worth fighting for. But if she is a person of quality for whom he had genuine feelings, then what? Where does that leave me?
“I don’t think that’s what he did,” she says, but I can tell she is wondering, questioning what they had.
“Did he tell you he loved you?” I fire back at her, realizing that this is why I am here. This is the linchpin for me, everything turning on this one singular fact. He slept with her; he clearly had feelings for her; and I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that he was—maybe still is—in love with her. But if he told her he loved her, or if he told her he didn’t love me, we are finished forever.
I hold my breath, waiting, exhaling as she shakes her head, slowly, emphatically.
“No,” she says. “He didn’t feel the same. He doesn’t love me. He never did. He loves you.”
My head spins as I replay the words, searching for the truth in them. I want to believe her. I desperately want to believe her. And maybe, maybe I actually do.
“I’m sorry, Tessa,” she continues, her voice cracking, anguish and sharne all over her face. “I’m sorry for what I did. To you. To your children. Even to my own child. It was wrong—and I’m . . . I’m so sorry.”
I take a deep breath, imagining her with Nick, her eyes closed, holding him, telling him she loves him. Yet as much as I want to blame her and hate her, I don’t—and can’t. Instead, I feel pity for her. Maybe it’s because she is a single mother. Maybe it’s because her son was hurt. Maybe it’s because she’s in love with someone she can’t have. My husband.
Whatever the case, I look into her eyes and say the thing I never dreamed I’d say in this moment.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and as I watch her accept my gratitude with the slightest of nods, then gather her belongings and stand to leave, I am shocked to realize that I actually mean it.
44
Valerie
Time heals all wounds. She knows this better than most. Yet she still feels surprised by it now, marveling that the mere passage of days can feel like gradual magic. She is not yet over him, but she no longer misses him in an acute, painful way, and she has made peace with what happened between them, even if she doesn’t fully understand it. She thinks about what she told Nick’s wife—that he never loved her—and wonders if this is true, part of her still clinging to the belief that what they shared was real.
But as more time passes, this hope dwindles and she begins to see their relationship merely as an impossible fantasy, an illusion born from need and longing. And she decides that just because two people believe in something, however intensely, doesn’t make it real.
And then there is the matter of Tessa, the woman she envies and pities, fears and respects all at once. She replays their conversation a hundred times, even repeating it to Jason, before she can fully grasp what transpired in the back of the bookstore on that bitterly cold January evening. Nick’s wife had thanked her. She had listened to another woman confess to falling in love with her husband, making love to her husband, and yet she actually thanked her, seemingly accepting her apology, or at least not rejecting it. The whole scenario was so unlikely, so far-fetched, that it began to almost make sense, just as it began to seem perfectly logical that Charlie would come to love Summer, a girl who had once tormented him on the playground.
It was about grace, she decides, something that has been missing from her own life. Whether she was born with a shortfall of it or lost it along the way, Valerie can’t be sure. But she wants it now. She wants to be the kind of person who can bestow unearned kindness on another, replace bitterness with empathy, forgive only for the sake of forgiving.
She wants this so desperately that she does the very thing she once vowed she’d never do. She makes a phone call—and she makes it from the waiting room at the hospital while Charlie is in his second hour of surgery with his new surgeon. She listens to the phone ring, her throat constricting as she hears the apprehensive hello on the other line.
“Is this Romy?” she asks, her heart pounding.
The woman replies yes, and Valerie feels herself hesitate, thinking of the night of the accident and what she is still sure was Romy’s negligence; then Charlie’s last surgery when Romy barged, uninvited, into this very room; then the afternoon in the school parking lot when Romy spotted her with Nick.
Despite these images, she stays on course, saying, “This is Valerie Anderson.”
“Oh! Hello. How are you? How is Charlie?” Romy asks, a gentleness in her voice that was either missing in prior exchanges or that Valerie had simply overlooked.
“He’s doing well. He’s in surgery now,” she says.