Kristan Higgins - If You Only Knew

If she saw me now, she’d home in on me like a missile. And unlike Jenny, I can’t hide anything.

My face in the mirror is nearly unrecognizable. I look terrified. I can’t lose Adam. I can’t. I love him so, so much. There has to be a mistake.

After my father died, I couldn’t look in the mirror, because the heartbreak was written over my face so clearly.

I look the same now. Eyes too wide. Skin too white.

They’re still talking; Mom doesn’t want to leave, wants to talk about Owen’s new baby and hear again how Jenny had to deliver her.

“Look, Mom, you’re right,” my sister says. “I’m incredibly depressed, I have a migraine—”

“I’ve never had a migraine. I never even get headaches.”

“—and just want to be alone so I can wallow. Maybe we can have lunch this week. Come by the shop, okay? It’s really cute.”

“Yes, but it’s hardly Manhattan, is it? I hope you won’t go bankrupt. You should’ve moved to Hedgefield. You could live with me until you get on your feet, and we—”

“Okay, Mom, thanks! Bye.” The door closes, and another minute passes. “It’s safe,” Jenny calls.

My college roommate was from Los Angeles, and she described being in an earthquake. If you can’t trust the ground to stay still, she’d said, the entire world seems wrong.

I feel that way now.

“What can I do?” Jenny asks as I come out on my fearful legs.

“I don’t know.”

I have to believe that Adam was not the intended recipient of that hideous, disgusting picture. How do gynecologists do it all day, look between the legs of their patients and not just…just throw up?

My sister takes my hand. Even though she’s younger, she’s always been more certain.

I take a deep breath. I’m a mother. I’m not a weakling, and I have to be logical and smart. I have three children with this man. I can’t just react. “I have to talk to him, I guess.”

“Want me to babysit, and you guys can go somewhere? Or I can take the girls out. They can even stay over here tonight. I’d love that.”

“I don’t know. I just… I don’t know.”

My sister nods, then takes a slow breath. “I hate to ask this,” she says, “but are there any other…red flags?”

Anything that would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was cheating, she means.

“I don’t think so. He’s been tired lately. But people get tired. He’s been working on this really complicated case, and… Well. He’s been tired.”

It’s just that tired never meant too tired before.

She doesn’t say anything. Is she pitying me? Disagreeing? Agreeing?

Adam’s a corporate attorney. He knows things that save his clients millions of dollars each year. He’s great at his job, was made partner at the firm, second in seniority only to Jared Brewster, who grew up down the street from us and used to sit on the bus with me. And since Jared’s grandfather founded the firm, I’d say Adam is doing even better, maybe. He’s important. He works a lot, it’s true.

Maybe his lover is a client.

His lover. My stomach heaves at the word. I’ve always hated that word. It’s too intimate, too romantic, too smarmy. I don’t want my husband to have a lover. I’ve never even thought of myself as his lover. I was his girlfriend, then his fiancée, then his wife.

“There’s a lot to lose here,” I whisper.

“Yes.” Jenny squeezes my hand, and I hate that I need a hand squeeze. I’m usually the giver of the hand squeezes…well, in the past year or so, anyway.

It’s now past 7:30 p.m., so the girls are almost certainly in bed and sound asleep.

I guess I have to go home.

For the first time in my life, that thought fills me with dread.

* * *

I SLIP IN the house like a shadow and go right upstairs when I get home. Opening the door to the girls’ bedroom, I feel a rush of love so strong that it momentarily crushes all the horrible worming thoughts that have twisted through my mind for the past twenty-four hours.

This room is pure. I know exactly who I am in this room.

My little girls are asleep; Charlotte is snoring slightly, Grace is sucking her thumb, Rose is sleeping upside down, her feet on the pillows. I kiss Grace first, then Charlotte, then turn Rosebud right-side-up and kiss her, too. I whisper “Mommy loves you” to each of them, breathing in their sweet and salty smell.

Here, in this room, I know everything that really matters. I was born to be a mommy. These girls are my life.

Some of the sticky fear slips away.

I go downstairs, through the living room and into the den, where Adam is talking on the phone. “I feel the same way,” he murmurs, then catches sight of me and jumps.

Guilty.

“Hi,” I say.

“Eric, my beautiful wife just came home,” he says, smiling. Not guilty? “Can we talk on Monday? Great. Thanks. You bet.” He clicks off the phone and stands up. “Hi, babe! I didn’t hear you come in. Want a glass of wine? I made the girls mac and cheese, but I could make you an omelet or something.”

Of course he made the mac and cheese.

And yet, these are not the words of a cheating husband.

“I’ll have some wine,” I say. We go into the kitchen, he pours me a glass of white, and I take a sip. The kitchen is sloppy; granted, I’m almost obsessive about neatness, but the pot from the girls’ unnutritious dinner is sitting in the sink, the powdery cheese sauce hardening, and mail is strewn over the counter, which hasn’t been wiped down.

Usually I’m just grateful that Adam doesn’t view spending the afternoon with his children as a heroic feat, like some fathers do. But it would be nice if he just once cleaned up the way I do a thousand times a day.

“How’s the new place?” he asks, grabbing a beer from the fridge. “Is Jenny happy with it?”

“It’s great,” I answer. My heart pumps too hard, and I picture a big ugly hand around it, squeezing ruthlessly, forcing the blood to gush through my veins. Arteries. Whatever. “It’s really charming.” What are we talking about? Oh, yes. My sister’s place.

He waits for more. He likes my sister.

I wonder if he finds her attractive.

God, where did that come from?

“Adam, I need to talk to you about something.”

“Sure, babe.” He waits, his dark eyes expectant. I love his brown eyes. Mine are boring blue; Jenny got our father’s dark, dark eyes, almost black. But Adam’s are light brown, whiskey-colored and special.

“Um…how were the girls today?” I ask, suddenly dreading what I’m about to say next.

“They were great. Well, Rose was a maniac at the museum, and Grace’s shoe came untied, and you know how she hates that, and I had to take all three of them into the ladies’ room. Got a lot of dirty looks from some women, but really, what am I supposed to do? Take them into the men’s room? No way.” He grins. “My babies aren’t going to see a man’s junk for forty more years.”

I smile. A tiny ray of relief seems to break through the clouds around my head, checking to see if it’s okay to stay.

This is not how a cheating husband talks. It had to have been a wrong number.

“So what did you want to talk about?” he asks.

I fold my hands, which still seem to have a tremor. “Well, um, yesterday, something happened.”

“What?”

Should I even show him? Maybe it would be better if I didn’t. Maybe—

“Rachel? Hello? What, honey?”

I showed Jenny, and I asked Leo, and he’s a stranger. I have to show my husband of the past nine years. He deserves to know.

I pull my phone from my bag and tap on the text so the disgusting picture fills the screen. Slide it across the counter to him.

Color rises from the collar of his polo shirt, up his neck, into his jaw and cheeks, a heavy, dark red.