The Guest Room(58)

“It’s supposed to be a week from Saturday.”

“But right now it’s still on.”

“Yes. But if I were Nicole—that’s his fiancée—I’d break it off.”

“Yeah,” Kerri-Ann said. “I would, too.”

“And yet if you were me, you wouldn’t leave Richard?”

“You two have a life together. You’ve got a daughter. But this Nicole? She still has time to get out.”

“That suggests the only reason I’m not getting out is inertia and Melissa.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant you know Richard. Whatever happened, it was a mistake.”

“We think.”

“And it only happened because it was a batshit crazy bachelor party and he was drunk.”

“Again, we think.”

“Yes. I guess,” Kerri-Ann admitted. “You think…”

Kristin took a sip of her coffee, cold now, and then sighed. When she looked back at Kerri-Ann, the other teacher was already smiling and waving at yet another group of boys.

…

Nicole considered all of the ways she could inform Philip that she was breaking off the wedding. They ranged from going to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights and telling him face-to-face, to sending him a text. A text would manage to be both cowardly and cruel, and it would invariably prove epic: it would, knowing Philip, almost certainly go viral. And why shouldn’t it? She imagined the words on the screen of her phone:

After what you did on Friday, I just can’t marry you. I’m sorry.



Or it could be a long text that crossed some t’s and dotted some i’s.

After what you did on Friday, I just can’t marry you. I’m sorry. I don’t trust you and I don’t see a future where I can trust you. I’ve called the caterer and the church and the people who were bringing the tents to my parents’ house. I’ll send you a check for what you paid toward the deposit. I’ll give you back the ring. I don’t want it. Please don’t call me. I’ll call you when I’m ready.



But even a text that long still conveyed only a tiny fraction of what she wanted to say—which suggested the need for an e-mail. Besides, he would call her, even if she asked him not to. Of course, he would call her after an e-mail, as well. He would call her if she mailed him a handwritten letter, enclosing the ring in the envelope. Philip was nothing if not persistent. It was, perhaps, why she had first fallen in love with him. He was funny; he was playful; he was—at least at the beginning—attentive.

All of which suggested she would have to see him in person, because he was going to have to try for the last word. But she feared that if she went to his apartment, that last word might lead to her backing down. Alone in his living room or bedroom, he would convince her to change her mind. And she did not want to change her mind. It wasn’t only that she didn’t trust him; she no longer believed that she loved him.

So instead she wrote him a text that said she wanted to have breakfast with him Thursday morning at a place on Montague Street they both liked, and tweaked it over and over on her phone. If she did see him on Thursday morning, it would be the first time in a week—since before he had had sex with that prostitute.

Can you have breakfast with me tomorrow at 7:30 at Evergreen? We need to talk. Please don’t call me. But text me if you can and I will be there.



After reading her final draft a third time, she pressed “send.” She realized that she felt horrible for the girls who had been brought to the party and she felt terrible for the families of the dead men; but, yes, she also felt something very close to despair about the way she had fallen out of love with Philip. She couldn’t build a life together with him that began on the bodies of two dead men and the fact he had f*cked a prostitute. She just…couldn’t.

She took the engagement ring he had given her off her finger, but then put it back on. She decided that she wanted to take it off in front of him in the restaurant. The ring was a symbol: maybe—just maybe—it would hurt him as much as he had hurt her if she removed the ring from her finger before his very eyes.

…

Melissa was not exactly scared of the Internet, but she knew that there was a world beyond the sites she visited often—sites for school, sites for music and movies, sites about Brownie badges and fashion and hair—that was not meant for a nine-year-old girl. In some cases, it was just a keystroke away. One letter off. An accidental dash.

Not quite a year ago, one morning when her dad was upstairs getting dressed and her mom was packing her lunch for school, she had been using the computer in the family room to visit the Girl Scouts website because she had a question about a Brownie badge. She had typed in one of the words incorrectly and wound up on a site so disturbing that she had yelled for her parents reflexively. Even before they had dropped what they were doing and rushed into the family room, she had closed the screen. What she had seen (or, now, what she thought she had seen), was monstrous and grotesque. She felt…ashamed. Her parents had found the site in the computer’s history and deleted it, and told her that she had done nothing wrong. They said she had done exactly the right thing telling them about it. Then they had lectured her (yet again) about the need to be careful on the Internet, and reiterated the house rules, which they admitted she had indeed been obeying when she had inadvertently strayed onto that site.