Daughters of the Lake(21)

“When I found out for sure that he was cheating, I wasn’t exactly the picture of dignified grace.” Kate grimaced. “I’m still sort of embarrassed by what I did.”

“You never did tell me exactly what went down,” Simon said, leaning in. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Everyone from work met at the Tavern to celebrate my birthday,” Kate began. “After a few rounds of drinks, Valerie got up to use the ladies’ room. She didn’t look at Kevin at all. But a few moments later, he excused himself and followed her. That set off my radar. It was the same sort of move we’d pull in front of our friends from work. So I followed.”

Simon whistled and shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“I did. I found them together in the hallway near the restrooms. I got there just in time to see my husband running his finger quickly down Valerie’s arm as the two passed each other in the hall. Just a slight touch. To most people, it would mean nothing. But that touch was our secret way of saying ‘I love you’ when other people were around. And there he was, touching another woman in exactly the same way.”

“Oh, honey,” Simon said. “What happened then?”

“I confronted him. I asked him, ‘What did you just do?’ and he just stammered. Stammered! Valerie slunk off back to the table. But Kevin suddenly became much calmer than the situation warranted. He asked me what I thought I saw. He accused me of having too much to drink and making things up. That really sent a chill through me. I knew what I saw. I knew exactly what that gesture meant. And that’s when I marched back to the table and threw a drink in her face.”

“You didn’t!” Simon hooted. “That’s so Alexis Carrington in Dynasty of you.”

Kate put her head down on the table, her shoulders shaking with laughter. “I threw popcorn, too!”

“God, no. Not the popcorn.”

Kate remembered wheeling around and stalking back to the table, Kevin at her heels, pleading, “Kate, don’t make a scene. Let’s just talk about this . . .”

But it was no use. The gall of him, putting his affair on display at her birthday party. Flirting with this woman in public while their friends gathered to celebrate her birthday. Something snapped inside of Kate at the thought of it, and when she reached the table, she did something she never dreamed she’d do. As she threw her drink into Valerie’s face, she shouted, “That’s for five years of marriage that you just destroyed.”

Everyone at the table was stunned into silence. Nobody said a word.

Kate had felt as though she was observing the scene, not really participating in it. She watched herself grab a half-eaten bowl of popcorn on the table and fling its contents onto Valerie’s lap, hissing, “And that’s for being so stupid as to think I wouldn’t see what was going on between you and my husband.”

Next, Kate had watched her own hand grab the drink of the person sitting next to her, saying as an aside, “Sorry, Bob, the next one’s on me,” as she threw it at Kevin, shouting, “and that’s for having an affair with this skanky tramp in front of all of our friends.”

Kate stormed out of the Tavern then, crying tears of bitter resentment. Kevin ran after her.

“Kate! Let’s talk about this!” he called across the rain-soaked parking lot. But Kate simply opened the car door and climbed inside.

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” she shouted as she drove away.

When she got home, she packed a few suitcases and Alaska’s favorite toys, piled the dog into the car, and the two of them drove across town to her parents’ house. It had felt to Kate as though she was operating on autopilot, moving through the events with a will that wasn’t her own. It was so wrong, all of it—how could Kevin have had an affair? How could she be making up the bed in her old bedroom at her parents’ house? How could her marriage be falling apart? Was everything she thought she knew about her life with her husband a lie?

A few days later, she called Stan to resign her position at the newspaper. He did not accept it.

“Listen, Kate, I need you,” he said. “Why don’t you take a few weeks off to think things through? Maybe you two can work it all out.”

Kate didn’t know it then, but Kevin had come into the office that Monday morning, hung his head, and told Stan—and the entire staff at the Monday meeting—that Kate had been having emotional problems since having a miscarriage. It was a convenient lie.

He’d sighed deeply and shaken his head. “You all know she accused me of having an affair, which is obviously false. But I can sympathize with her, can’t you all?” His eyes had traveled to everyone sitting silently around the table. “She’s still grieving for our lost baby. She’s not herself; you all can see that, can’t you?”

Nods and murmurs from around the table.

“I know the scene looked pretty crazy, but it’s not her fault. Please just understand that she’s going through a really rough time and, maybe, pray for her? For us?”

Amid tears and hugs, they all said they would, and they left the meeting pitying the steadfast and loving husband and his “grieving, if not totally sane” wife. Valerie resigned her position in light of all the fuss. Stan was sorry, if relieved, to see her go.

Nobody, of course, knew about the scene that had taken place between Valerie and Kevin after the incident at the Tavern. He had just denied their relationship in front of all their friends, and Valerie was stunned. It had been the most intimate, deep relationship of her life, even though they’d had only a few months together. Kevin knew everything about her—she had told him all her deepest feelings, secrets, and fears—and the attention that he had lavished on her was intoxicating. Like Kate, Valerie did not know that it was the very act of that revelation, the intimacy of getting to know another person’s soul, that Kevin loved. Not her, per se.