Confidential(17)

“He’s at the ER. With a client.”

“Oh.” She got it immediately. We’d known each other our whole lives. She knew what I’d feel before I felt it. “You have to remember, that’s work. You’re love.”

“I used to be work.”

“You know what this is? It’s the Other Woman Syndrome. Even after men leave their wives for the other woman, she always wonders. She thinks, If he did it once, he can do it again.”

“And don’t they? Do it again?”

“Not always.”

“But sometimes.”

“But not always,” she said firmly.

I nodded, trying to take it in. I would be the exception. Besides, I wasn’t the other woman. He hadn’t been with anyone when we got together for real; I hadn’t, either. Young and I had already split up before Michael and I even shared our first kiss. Sure, we had already admitted that we had feelings for each other before that, but feelings were not actions. Actions were what counted.

That was my problem. I was waiting for him to act, and I’d never been good at waiting.

Kate got it again. “Patience,” she counseled. “That’s your only move at this point.”

“It’s not the only move.”

“What are you going to do, push him until he pushes back or runs away?”

“Tell him how I feel. Tell him how much this hurts me.”

“Haven’t you done that already?”

Sadly, I had. He’d empathized and commiserated; we were still on his timetable.

But he was the one with everything to lose: his professional reputation, even his license if someone found out what’d been going on these past two years. He was incredibly dedicated to his work, which was why he was being so cautious. He wished we could be a regular couple, too. This was hard on him, too.

No one knew, and no one would find out until the time was right. It was between him, Kate, and me. Not that I’d mentioned Kate. Well, he was aware she was my cousin and we were close, but that was it. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

To get through this, I’d needed a confidante, and she was all the way across the country. If he’d told someone about me, I wouldn’t have any problem with it. Actually, I’d be flattered. Validated.

“Come visit,” I said. “Then you can report back to my parents, and you can be the first to meet Michael. Two birds, one stone.”

See? There was another move.





CHAPTER 13





LUCINDA


All week, I’d been throwing myself into work. Amazing how something so tedious could be so absorbing. Normally, I bemoaned the fact that proofreading and fact-checking used so little creative brainpower—so little brainpower, period. I mostly did the job on autopilot. But this week, I was giving it all I had. It was a real exercise in mindfulness: do only what you’re doing, completely. Dr. Baylor would be proud. I’d tell him in tonight’s session.

What I’d learned was that I really did, unequivocally, hate my job. I’d always assumed my dislike was related to my lack of commitment and my half presence, along with some nascent resentment, since I wished I could be doing my own writing or even true editing where I’d get to critique plot and character like I had in my undergraduate fiction workshops. I’d thought it was professional jealousy, because no one was getting paid to improve my writing (not that I was actually doing any, but jealousy was an irrational emotion) and because I would never have chosen to acquire these books, yet there I was, tasked with making their sentences smoother and their points clearer, with making them honest. But no, that wasn’t it. It was also the work itself. That was a depressing realization. Autopilot or not, though, I was still Verdant’s best proofreader.

For a small boutique publisher, the breadth of books was startling, while the quality was fairly uniform: Last week, it was a truly cringeworthy coffee table book on refugees (what kind of person would want to advertise their social conscience that way? No one with an actual social conscience); this week, it was a self-help book called The Art of Eating Disorders. I begged Christine to rename that one because it didn’t sound like it was about how art aids recovery from anorexia and bulimia but rather that you, too, could elevate your starving, bingeing, and purging to an art form.

Christine, predictably, maintained that no one would think that. I rarely voiced any strenuous objections, reserving it for the most egregious errors and miscalculations, ones where it would have felt sadistic toward the author not to speak up, and you might have thought that would give Christine pause. But no, she dug her heels in and defended, with a passion she’d never previously expressed toward the project.

What it meant was that I didn’t merely spend my days suggesting that authors move commas on their execrable manuscripts but that Christine decided nine out of ten times that the comma would stay where it was. I felt like Sisyphus but with a whole lot less dignity. At least Sisyphus was rolling a boulder; I was rolling thousands of pebbles, and most of them were raining back down on me.

But minutiae can be consuming, and this week, I was grateful for that.

Mom hadn’t called again. I hadn’t called her. Every time I pictured her slamming those pots and pans, so unlike herself, my stomach hurt. I’d done that to her.

Then I thought of how long it must have taken for her house to devolve to that state, and again, how unlike her that was. She used to take pride in her home, and in her marriage, and in herself. Her hair was gray, and that couldn’t have happened overnight, with Adam’s diagnosis. She’d gotten old, which was uncontrollable, but she didn’t care enough to hide it. That wasn’t her, either. Adam’s disclosure was devastating, but that house and that hair . . . they were preexisting conditions.