She waits for the logical follow--up question: Who else did you tell?
But he doesn’t ask it. She can picture him sitting there outside some hotel conference room, trying to process it all. If he weren’t there—-if they were together, alone, at home—-would he be so quiet? Or would he be ranting at her? Walking out on her?
“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you what happened, Jake. I was afraid to. I was afraid you’d think the wrong thing. I was afraid of losing you. But you have to believe me—-what I’ve just told you is the entire truth. I have nothing else to hide. Please believe me.”
Silence. And then: “How can I ever believe you again, when you kept something like this from me for all those years? How could you?”
“You were never around back when it first happened, and I—-”
“Because I was working to keep a roof over our heads, just like I’m doing right now,” he says over someone calling his name in the background, “so if you’re trying to blame this on me—-”
“I’m not. I’m blaming it on myself. It was one hundred percent my fault. But what you asked me was how I could have kept it from you, the answer is that it wasn’t very hard.”
She pauses.
Silence, interrupted after a few moments by “I’ll be right there, sorry,” but he isn’t talking to her.
“Jake, remember how it was back then? You were gone for days on end, and nights, too. When you were around, our time together and with the kids was either so hectic or so precious that I could never find the right moment. I knew we wouldn’t have had time to heal something that huge. Was that the right decision? No. I’d never make that decision now. But I was a different person back then. We both were.”
“I’ve never lied to you. Never. ”
She absorbs that. “If you had ever come right out and asked me if something like this had happened—-back then, or in the years since—-I wouldn’t have lied about it.”
“How would I know to even ask something like that?”
“You wouldn’t. I’m just saying—-”
“I get it. I have to go.”
She wants to protest, needs to keep talking until they’ve found resolution, until they’ve healed.
Well aware that it’s not going to happen right now, or today, or maybe even soon, she says only, “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you.”
“But you did.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, and I love you.” She waits for him to say it back.
He doesn’t. Not this time. She hears only a click as he disconnects the call.
From the Mundy’s Landing Tribune Archives
News
July 15, 1916
Sestercentennial Festivities to Resume
Memorabilia Chest Will Be Buried
The spate of inexplicable murders over recent weeks put a grisly halt to the merry celebration of our two--and--a--half--century--old village, which will recommence tomorrow.
“The tragic and mysterious deaths of three anonymous schoolgirls notwithstanding,” Mayor Cornelius Holmes said from his office in Village Hall, “we ought not ignore our first settlers, who courageously arrived in Mundy’s Landing 250 years ago and deserve, upon this momentous occasion, to be fêted in a grand manner befitting their tenacity.”
Gently reminded that the first settlers arrived a year prior, the mayor returned that the village has perennially recognized its official birth date as 1666.