The Good Widow(31)

“So annoying,” I mutter. “How can anyone be that excited about sea turtles? I mean, it was cool, but c’mon.”

“Well, aren’t we surly?” Nick laughs as we walk inside the lobby. “How dare people have fun while on vacation in Maui!”

“I know. I’m being a bitch.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just upset. But for what it’s worth, Adam said they weren’t wearing rings—that they’d just laughed and nodded when he called them newlyweds. And I think we can both agree that guy’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, so his understanding of the situation is probably way off. They probably agreed with what he said so they didn’t bring attention to themselves. It doesn’t mean he actually wanted to marry her, Jacks,” Nick says. Then before I can respond, he adds, “Or that she wanted to marry him.” His clenched jaw betrays him—the feeling of denial he’s obviously trying to bury coming to the surface.

“Maybe,” I say, more to appease him than anything else. I imagine James touching Dylan the way you do when it’s new. When your hands are like magnets—drawn to each other in a way you can’t control. I imagine her flushed cheeks, the glow that must have radiated off Dylan as she basked in his adoration. The way they were acting had made Adam assume they’d just exchanged vows, that there was no way they’d been tainted yet by the real life and problems that eventually wear away the shiny veneer of marriage.

“Want to drink away our sorrows?” Nick finally breaks our silence and looks out to the pool. Happy hour is in full effect, and the buzz from the conversations of the barflies carries over to us as we walk near the pool.

I shake my head. “I’m mentally exhausted. Consuming alcohol would be the worst thing I could do right now. I need to call it a night.”

Nick checks his phone. “It’s only four o’clock.”

I shrug. “It’s seven in California. And I think I’m just ready for this day to be over.”

Nick looks at me for another beat, no doubt realizing I’m not going to change my mind. “So I’ll see you bright and early again tomorrow—six a.m. sharp, right?” he says.

I nod and turn toward the elevator, feeling his eyes on my back as I walk away.

I immediately change into my pajamas when I get inside my room and flop down on the bed. But my mind refuses to let sleep take over—I keep thinking about the way Adam had described James and Dylan. Finally, after tossing and turning for an hour, I call Beth and fill her in.

“That bastard!” The old Beth comes out, guns blazing, and we both laugh. That’s Beth’s favorite word. Everyone has been called it at some point, including her husband and even her nine-year-old son. Probably me too, when I jumped on a plane and came here. And now James.

“I’ve missed you,” I say as the tears fall.

“I’ve been here the whole time, hon. And I’d be lying right next to you if you’d just let me come help.”

“No, I mean the old you. The one who wasn’t afraid to say what she’s thinking—even if it’s calling her son a bastard.”

Beth chuckles. “Remember, we promised never to speak of that again.”

“He deserved it.” I smile, thinking of how he’d taken her phone and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of jewels for some godforsaken app on his iPad.

“He really did, didn’t he? Well, I’m glad you like bitchy, inappropriate Beth. The goody-goody one was killing me.” She pauses. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. That word, I shouldn’t have used it.”

“It’s okay. You’d be surprised how often we say died or killed in our everyday vocabulary. Believe me, I notice every single one now. I’ve even caught myself doing it.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have said it, and I’m sorry.”

“Seriously, don’t be. I love you. And I need you. The one thing I’ve learned is that no one is doing me any favors by coloring the truth.”

“Everyone just wants to protect you from any more pain. You’d do the same thing for me.”

“Do you think I deserved this? Like it’s some sort of karmic payback for not being a good enough wife?”

“God, Jacks! How can you say that? That because you didn’t greet him at the door in a kimono holding a martini, you deserve this? Marriage is fucking hard. We all make mistakes, and a lot of them. But that doesn’t mean bad things should happen to us as a result.”

“What if I didn’t disclose everything to him before we got married? If there were things I held back? Would that change your mind?” I had never told Beth what I withheld from James. I knew she’d insist I tell him, that she’d tell me what I know now—that a secret like that could break a marriage in half.

“Jacks, none of us tell the person we’re going to marry everything. We all have secrets.”

“Even you?” Beth tells her husband everything. She once asked him to take tweezers and pick an ingrown hair out of her ass, and he did it. (Apparently this is a thing?) I cringed when she told me—I had never even peed with the bathroom door open in front of James.

“Yeah, there are things Mark doesn’t need to know. But you know them all! Because you have to love me no matter what.” She laughs.