If You Only Knew(57)

And you know, that’s great. Look at my sister. Look at me. Look at my mom. No one has a great marriage. No one.

Okay, yes, yes, my aunt Angela does. And so does my best friend from grammar school. And my neighbors in the Village, they were fantastic together.

But still. You know what I mean. No one is happy except those three.

I’ll just adopt. Or, you know what? I’ll go to the sperm bank and take a picture of myself there and send it to Jimmy Grant with a note: Thanks for the great idea!

It may be time to get a dog.

There’s a knock on my door. I can see through the windows alongside the door that it’s Leo. “I’m not home,” I call.

“Oh. Okay.” A second later, the door opens. “I have a key,” he says apologetically. “I’m the super.”

My throat tightens. It’s not fair that he can be this way and not want to sleep with me and marry me and father my babies, and I know this is stupid, but these are the thoughts that run through my head. “Well, you suck as a super.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Take a class, why don’t you? It’s not rocket science.”

“I’m sorry about tonight, I mean.”

Damn. An apology. I’m back to my stupid crush. The juvenile hatred was easier.

Then he comes over to me and takes my hands, and my heart becomes gooey, warm caramel. “Jenny,” he says, “trust me when I say you don’t want to get involved with me. You’re great, but—”

“Oh, shut up,” I say, yanking my hands free. “I’d love to get involved with you. You’re the one who’s chicken.”

He smiles, that sad, beautiful, happy contradiction. “Trust me.”

“Why would I? I don’t even like you anymore.”

“Yes, you do. You have to. You’re my only friend.”

Then he kisses my forehead, and I feel the faint scrape of his five o’clock shadow, and I want to stab him in the heart and climb him like a tree at the same time.

And then he turns and goes out the front door, taking my dopey heart with him.

At 3:00 a.m., I decide to Google him.

I stalk Owen online. I’m not proud of it, but everyone needs a hobby, right? I’ve got Google alerts on both him and Ana-Sofia. I could dig around in Leo’s past and see why he says he has no friends.

And then, I decide against it. For one, those damn Google alerts bring me no joy when I read again about how selfless and perfect Owen and Ana-Sofia are. For two, they don’t exactly help the cause of me moving on.

And for three...for some reason, it feels as if Leo Killian deserves better.

Because I may be his only friend.

Rachel

I’m sleeping with Adam again. Sleeping with. Not having sex with. It got too exhausting, all that righteous anger, all that “I’m still sleeping in here, because of what you’ve done.” Laney has asked me what I’d like Adam to do to show me he’s sincere. Be sincere, was my answer. “Forgiveness is difficult,” she said, making me feel small-hearted and brittle. “You don’t have to trust Adam again, not right away, but it does mean you have to accept what’s happened and start to take steps away from the infidelity.”

So once again, the burden is on me. Planning the wedding, though it was a genuine joy, was on me. Once we figured out why we couldn’t get pregnant, the burden was on me, too, with those horrible shots that made me so hormonal I had to go into the bathroom at work and cry, and everyone knew and was so nice, which made me cry more. All Adam had to do was switch to wearing boxers and have more sex. The pregnancy—me again. I’m the one with a four-inch scar and a pooch of skin. The house decorating, painting, hiring people to overhaul the plumbing and electric...me. His mother’s birthday—also mine to remember. Holidays, vacations, weekend plans, all mine.

And while I would never call my girls a burden, the huge responsibility of raising them is 99 percent mine.

And now the future of our marriage is on me. I have to forgive him. I have to accept his apology. I have to get past this. That first night, I lay stiffly next to him. He gave me a meaningful basset-hound look and said, “Thank you, Rachel,” and it was all I could do not to flip him off. In that moment, I hated our bed. The bed in the guest room was unsullied and smaller, perfect for one.

But I have to take a step away from what happened. Otherwise, the fury will corrode me until I’m nothing.

I think about Emmanuelle instead, the hatred for her untainted by love. I picture my vengeance on her, pushing her down an escalator at the mall—I don’t know why, it just pops into my head—the red soles of her Christian Louboutin heels flashing over and over as she falls. I picture slapping her. I imagine her peering from behind a tree as the five of us picnic in the park, Adam so in love with me again that he can’t take his eyes off me, the girls giggling and singing, and Emmanuelle is filled with yearning and longing to have what I have. She’s choking on the knowledge that she was just a f*ck and I’m a wife, and tears stream from her eyes, her face ugly and smeared with drippy globs of mascara as she sees all that I am and have.

Sure. That could happen.

She’s still working at Triple B. That was another sucker punch to the stomach. Adam has absolutely no power over that, he says. “I guess you can tell Jared and see if he can fire her,” Adam told me. “He’s always been your friend, not mine.” Again, the burden is on me. And Adam knows I won’t tell Jared.