I'm Fine and Neither Are You(52)

“There are multiple painkillers listed here,” I said to Matt.

His eyes met mine. “I know.”

“Where was she getting them all? Was she buying them off the dark web or something?”

He looked away again. When he finally addressed me, there was a bitter edge to his voice. “You’d be surprised. She was seeing a couple different doctors, and apparently no one checked to see if anyone else was giving her the same thing. I mean, why would they? She was in pain, or at least she had been at one point. And she looked so . . . normal. I probably wouldn’t have even found out the extent of it if one of the pharmacies hadn’t called me on accident to confirm a prescription I knew she’d had filled the week before. I started looking for signs and suddenly it all added up.”

“Then you knew it was serious.”

He pressed his lids shut for several seconds. “In retrospect? Sure. But she said she was tapering off. She said she was getting better.”

“And you believed her.”

“Yes and no. We had been fighting about it the week before she died.”

But he left town anyway, Jenny whispered in my ear.

Matt sighed and looked off in the distance. “The thing is, Penny, Jenny loved the idea of me. I checked off all the boxes for her perfect husband—she even told me that on our second date. But I don’t know that the reality of me ever met her needs, which is probably why we had a hard time being together for more than an hour or two at a time without fighting. After a while I started to say yes every time I had a chance to be on the road because it seemed like it was easier on both of us. Still, I wouldn’t have been gone all the time if I had known how bad it was.” His eyes found mine again. “She flushed a bottle of pills in front of me and vowed it was over. I really thought she was getting better.”

“Damn it,” I muttered.

“I know it’s a lot.”

“It is, but I wanted answers. Except the one thing this report doesn’t answer,” I said, poking my finger at the paper, “is why Jenny would hide this from me.”

He sighed, then said, “I don’t know what to tell you, except that as my therapist keeps reminding me, addiction makes liars out of people.”

Maybe. But didn’t their lies quickly come to light? My mother’s sister, Jo, had drunk herself into the grave, while a man I had dated briefly in college couldn’t function without a steady stream of various drugs pumping through his veins. One of my old editors had let bourbon destroy his marriage and annihilate his relationship with his children before finally getting sober. The editor had seemed like a jolly, high-functioning drunk. Even so, in every case, I had known the person had been struggling. How had I missed it with Jenny?

“They don’t start that way and they don’t mean to do harm, but the need takes over,” said Matt. “It was important to Jenny that you thought she was fine. She didn’t want to hurt you.”

Hurt me! Had I really seemed so fragile? Damn it, if only life came with a rewind button. I would do it all so very differently.

He stood. “I’ve got to get in the shower and get cleaned up.”

I frowned. “I thought you were working from home today.”

“Just for the morning. Our CEO is already having a conniption about how much I’ve been out of the office this summer.”

“Really? After all you’ve been through?”

“Yeah, well, there’s not much I can do about it,” he said.

Sure there is, said a voice, and for once I couldn’t say for certain whether it was my own or Jenny’s.

My underarms were damp and my forehead was growing clammy. But I had to say something.

“Cecily’s lonely,” I said. “She told me herself last week.”

He stared at me. “You know, Penny, I’m beginning to feel like you think I’m a shitty parent.”

If by shitty he meant the kind of parent who wasn’t making the best decisions for his daughter, then yes. But that wasn’t the point. “It’s not about what I think,” I told him. “I love Cecily, and if I know she needs something, then I have an obligation to speak up.”

He crossed his arms. “I’m her father . I know what she needs better than anyone else.”

“I respect that. I’m not trying to cross any boundaries. I’m just passing on what I’ve observed.”

“Fine,” he said.

I stood from the sofa. “Thank you for having me over and sharing the report with me.”

“No problem,” he said stiffly.

“By the way, I’m done with the last post for Jenny’s site,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“The one you asked me to write?”

“Oh. Right.” He had already started for the stairs. “Let’s talk about that some other time.” But his voice told me that we wouldn’t be talking about anything anytime soon.



I got into my car, drove a few blocks from the Sweets’ house, and pulled over to put my head against the steering wheel and sob. The last thing I wanted was to be on bad terms with Matt. What if our already tenuous relationship was destroyed? What if he took Cecily and moved across the country and I never saw her again? Was this the price of honesty? Because if so, it wasn’t worth it.