The Good Liar(14)

FM: Not for guests. Not electronic ones. They were still using a paper system. That got lost, obviously. And you’ve heard about the cameras, right? Totally unreliable.

TJ: Are you suggesting that someone might make a false claim in order to get compensation?

FM: Don’t look so shocked. That sort of stuff happens all the time.

TJ: So the Identification Protocol . . .

FM: Requires irrefutable evidence that their family member actually died there that day in order for them to get compensation.

TJ: And I understand that your own . . . um, your biological mother’s family’s claim was refused?

FM: That’s right.

TJ: How did that happen?

FM: I can’t make special exceptions. We can’t, I mean.

TJ: Sure. But there’s some irony there, that the rule could affect your family in particular. You, even, I suppose.

FM: Yeah, but that claim is under review. You never know what might turn up.





Chapter 7


Here We Go Loop-de-Loop


Cecily

This is how I found out I was a fool.

Six months before Tom died, as I was running around trying to make everything perfect for our upcoming wedding anniversary extravaganza weekend away! (I thought in exclamation marks back then, more often than I’d like to admit), I received a text from Tom that said: I can’t stop thinking about last night.

Nothing so unusual in that. In fact, he’d texted me something similar a few years before, after we’d had a particularly steamy evening when both the kids were out with friends and we’d had a few glasses of wine and ended up having sex on the kitchen counter. I’d texted an emoticon back to that one (probably a smiley face, knowing me at the time), and we’d engaged in mild sexting for about an hour until it petered out.

But not this time, because this time—as far as I knew up until that moment—Tom was supposed to have been on the flip side of an all-nighter at work to get the bugs out of the product they were about to launch so we could leave for the weekend. He was supposed to be surrounded by bad pizza and sour coffee and people in need of showers, not something he couldn’t stop thinking about. Not someone.

I knew the text was bad news the minute I read it. Stomach-churning, gut-twisting bad. And then my phone chimed again. Ding! Ding!

I got the texts while I was in Victoria’s Secret. That’s right. I was actually in the middle of buying sexy lingerie for that fucker when I received the announcement that my husband had slept with another woman. Because that’s what it was, what it meant. There wasn’t any other way to read it. Or maybe there would’ve been if he hadn’t followed it up with: I love how you suck my cock.

A classy guy, my husband. Also generally very careful, but I guess he was so taken away with his memories of the night before, the world-class cock-sucking he’d received, that he’d tapped the wrong text thread—was her name similar to mine or were we the only two people he texted with? One of a million questions leaping through my mind—and sent the message to me instead of whoever he intended it for.

When I received the alert for the second text, I tried to look away. But in my innocent life as it existed then, I’d enabled the floating preview bar on my phone so I could see the first lines of whatever anyone sent me. I had nothing to hide, you see, nothing to fear. I couldn’t avoid the words as they appeared on the screen that was grasped in my shaking hand, warm to the touch. I read them and felt frozen to the floor, my other hand still stuck in the 50-percent-off silk underwear bin I’d been riffling through to find my size.

My mind was whirling as fast as my gut. I had no idea how to react. Should I write back or allow him to sit and wonder why the cock-sucking genius was letting him twist in the wind without a response until he figured out who he’d actually texted? Should I simply pretend the whole thing never happened?

I admit; I kind of wished I could do the last one. My finger actually swiped to delete the texts, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want that filth on my phone, but I couldn’t put it in the trash and pretend I’d never read it, either.

Oh, Tom, you stupid asshole.

Why couldn’t you have been more careful?



“So,” my therapist, Linda, says. “You made it through the memorial.”

We’re in her office, the place I’ve been coming to once a week for nine months. A friend of a friend suggested her without my having to ask for a referral. When your husband dies suddenly, it’s assumed you’ll need some kind of mental health assistance to recover.

“I did.”

“I saw you on TV.”

I pull a face. “Maybe now it will stop.”

“Perhaps.”

Linda’s a pragmatist, and she doesn’t believe in feeding me false hope. Better to accept the things I cannot change and all that, like an addict, even though I’m the substance being consumed.

“You were feeling anxious about the interview with Teo. How did it go?”

“Okay, I think.”

“I’m going to need more than that.”

I pull my feet under me on the couch; Linda’s across from me on a matching one. One of the things I like about Linda, she doesn’t believe in creating distinctions between us. Our sessions are often like highly effective conversations with my girlfriends, sans alcohol. I don’t know what I expected therapy to be; I only know that when I got out of the car before my first session, I started crying, and the first thing I said to her was, “I don’t want this to be a lifetime relationship.” She’d agreed, and we’d gone on from there.