Wish You Were Gone(87)
“Are you sure about this? If the cops come, you’re the one who’s getting arrested and Mom is gonna freak.”
Hunter looked up at her, his face half in shadow. “The way I figure it, we’re going down anyway. Might as well go down in a blaze of glory.”
LIZZIE
“I can’t believe this! You’re my best friend! I can’t believe you’ve been lying to me all this time!” Emma shouted. “How? How did you…? It doesn’t even make any sense. The kids were in grade school when you moved here. How did you—?”
Emma went on like this for a few minutes, pacing and ranting, and Lizzie thought it best to just let her. If she tried to explain, if she tried to talk over her in this moment of shock, nothing would register.
But then the rain started to come down—fat, cold drops so vicious they stung—and Lizzie managed to tug her friend into the foyer by the arm, dragging her suitcase back in along with them.
Now they were in the kitchen, and Lizzie had somehow managed to put together two steaming mugs of tea. Emma sat at the table, sideways in a chair, completely drained of energy. Lizzie placed a mug on the table near her friend and sat.
“Are you okay?” she asked Emma.
Emma flinched and said nothing. She’d gone semi-catatonic.
So, here they were. The day Lizzie had been dreading for the last ten years had finally come. She could still remember the first time she’d met Emma, behind the school at second-grade pickup. By then she’d done enough googling of James Walsh to know what her name was, what she looked like, and that she had a daughter as well as the son who had been born just weeks before her own child. Lizzie had come to Oakmont Day prepared to hate Emma Walsh. For all her lovely smiles in the photos she’d found online, she’d assumed Emma would be a spoiled bitch, a woman who knew her vaunted place and lorded it over everyone else. She’d driven by their house, she’d looked up the price of the luxury SUV Emma drove, she knew they’d gone to Turks & Caicos and Disney World and Italy in the last year.
Emma Walsh had a charmed life. She had the life Lizzie should have had. And she hated her for it.
And then, Emma introduced herself. She welcomed Lizzie and asked her all sorts of questions about herself and about Willow. She gasped over the address of the house Lizzie had purchased, saying it was one of her favorites in town and that if she’d had her choice she would have lived in an old Victorian or cottage and not the modern monstrosity her husband had chosen.
Ungrateful, Lizzie had thought. But then in the next second, no. Because Emma was so free of guile. She was so genuine. It was clear she was only a woman who disagreed with her husband’s preferred architecture style. A woman whose husband was a cheater and who was clearly, blissfully, ignorant of that fact.
When Emma had invited Willow over for a playdate, Lizzie had accepted. Yes, she wanted to see the inside of that house, but more than that, she wanted to know this woman. Wanted to know what Emma was that she, Lizzie, was not. The friendships that had blossomed that day over animal crackers and apple juice, and coffee and lady fingers, were a surprise. And now, ten years later, she was on the verge of losing it all.
“I guess I should start at the beginning.”
Emma looked at her, expression blank.
“I was just out of college, a design assistant at a big firm in New York, commuting in from my parents’ house.” Lizzie cupped her hands around her mug, but it did nothing to warm her. “Basically, I ran for fabric swatches and coffee and whatever else anyone needed, but it was an exciting job. We got to decorate the penthouse apartments of some pretty fabulous people, but my boss wanted to get into corporate and was constantly networking and schmoozing. Then, one day, she came back to the office with a huge announcement—she’d gotten us our first corporate gig—the new offices of Garrison and Walsh.
“I met James on my second day there,” Lizzie continued. “He was so handsome and larger than life—”
Emma glanced away and Lizzie’s mouth snapped shut. This wasn’t a time to wax poetic. She sipped her tea and it scalded her tongue, but also gave her the jolt she needed to keep going.
“We flirted some,” she said in a more clinical tone. “I was flattered. He was clearly powerful. And he didn’t wear a wedding ring. I thought he liked me. I thought that maybe…”
Outside, the wind whistled and threw a smattering of raindrops against the windows like a hail of bullets.
“Anyway, we slept together.” Lizzie averted her eyes. “A… few times. And then I got pregnant.”
She didn’t bother telling Emma how it ended. How that awful woman JJ had walked in on them having sex in his office and threatened to report James to Darnell and HR. What had ever come of that, Lizzie had no idea, but she assumed, now, that James had somehow paid JJ off or fired her and covered up whatever complaints she made. The woman was clearly bitter about the whole thing. But after that, James had never called Lizzie again and never responded to her attempts to contact him.
“Hunter is a month older than Willow,” Emma said, her voice quiet. “So when he was sleeping with you, he already knew—” She paused, took a quick breath. “He already knew I was having a baby.”
Lizzie wished she could summon James Walsh back from the dead and strangle him for doing this to the both of them—for causing Emma this much pain over and over again. But maybe this would be the end of it. Maybe, if she could just get this story out, they could deal with the fallout and Emma could begin to heal. She took a breath for courage.