The Unhoneymooners(77)

“Mama, when we’re sad, we eat,” Natalia says, following me with a plate of food as I adjust the placement of two wineglasses on a table.

“I know,” I tell her. “But I swear, I can’t eat anymore.”

“You’re starting to look like a bobble-headed Selena Gomez.” She pinches my waist. “I don’t like it.”

The family knows Ethan broke up with me, and that Ami and I are “arguing” (although there’s nothing active about it; I called her a few times after our big blow-up, and two weeks later she has yet to return any of my calls). In the past ten days, I’ve been bombarded with well-meaning texts and my fridge is completely packed with food that Mom brings daily from Tío Omar, Ximena, Natalia, Cami, Miguel, Tío Hugo, Stephanie, Tina—almost as if they’ve made a Feed Olive calendar. My family feeds people; it’s what they do. Apparently my missing Sunday dinner for two weeks in a row—because of work—has gotten the entire family on high alert, and it’s driving them all crazy not knowing what’s going on. I can’t blame them; if Jules, or Natalia, or Diego went into hiding, I’d be out of my mind worried. But it isn’t my story to share; I wouldn’t know how to tell them what is happening, and according to Tío Hugo, who came by yesterday to “Um, get a business card for an insurance agent from David,” Ami won’t talk about it, either.

“I saw Ami yesterday,” Natalia says now, and then pauses long enough for me to stop fussing with the table settings and look up at her.

“How is she?” I can’t help the tight lean to my words. I miss my sister so much, and it’s wrecking me that she isn’t speaking to me. It’s like missing a limb. Every day I get so close to caving, to saying, ‘You’re probably right, Dane didn’t do anything wrong,” but the words just won’t come out, even when I test the lie out in front of the mirror. It sticks in my throat, and I get hot and tight all over and feel like I’m going to cry. Nothing all that terrible even happened to me—other than losing my job, my sister, and my boyfriend in a twenty-four-hour period—but I still feel a kind of burning anger toward Dane, as if he slapped me with his own hand.

Natalia shrugs and picks a piece of lint off my collar. “She seemed stressed. She was asking me about someone named Trinity.”

“Trinity?” I repeat, digging around in my thoughts to figure out why the name sounds familiar.

“Apparently Dane had a few texts from her, and Ami saw them on his phone.”

I cover my mouth. “Like sexy texts?” I am both devastated and hopeful if this is true: I want Ami to believe me, but I’d rather be wrong about all of it than have her go through that pain.

“I guess she just asked if he wanted to hang out, and Dane was like ‘Nah, I’m busy’ but Ami was pissed that he was texting a woman at all.”

“Oh my God, I think Trinity was the girl with the mango butt tattoo.”

Natalia grins. “I think I read that book.”

This makes me laugh, and the sensation is like clearing away cobwebs from a dark corner of a room. “Ethan mentioned someone named Trinity. She—”

I stop. I haven’t told anyone in my family about what Ethan told me. I could try to blow Dane’s entire cover story if I wanted, but what good would that do? I don’t have any proof that he was seeing other women before he married Ami. I don’t have any proof that he propositioned me in the bar. I just have my reputation as a pessimist, and I don’t want my entire family looking at me the way Ethan did when he registered that even my twin sister thinks I’m making this all up.

“She what?” Natalia presses when I’ve fallen quiet.

“Never mind.”

“Okay,” she says, fired up now, “what is going on? You and your sister are being so weird lately, and—”

I shake my head, feeling the tears pressing in from the back of my eyes. I can’t do this before my shift. “I can’t, Nat. I just need you to be there for Ami, okay?”

She nods without hesitation.

“I don’t know who Trinity is,” I say, and take a deep breath, “but I don’t trust Dane at all anymore.”

? ? ?

AFTER MIDNIGHT, I DRAG MY bag from my locker in the back room and sling it over my shoulder. I don’t even bother to look at my phone. Ami isn’t texting, Ethan isn’t calling, and there’s nothing I can say in reply to the forty other messages on my screen every time I look.

But halfway to my car, it chimes. It’s a brief flurry of bells and rotors and change falling: the sound of a jackpot. Ami’s text tone.

It’s ten below outside, and I’m in a black skirt and thin white button-down, but I stop where I am anyway and pull my phone from my bag. Ami has sent me a screencap of Dane’s text list, and there are the usual suspects—Ami and Ethan and some of Dane’s friends—but there are also names like Cassie and Trinity and Julia. Ami’s text says,

Is this what you were talking about?

I don’t know how to answer. Of course my gut tells me that those are all women Dane has slept with, but how would I know? They could be work colleagues. I bite my lip, typing with frigid fingers.

I have no idea who they are.

I don’t have a list of names. If I did, I would have shown it to you.