Sweet Nothing(44)

“Elle.” Luke nudges me into an empty classroom.

“What are you doing?” I hiss. “Luke—”

“Please.” I can hear the hairline cracks in his voice. “Five minutes in the cafeteria, or at the restaurant, or on fucking Mars. Wherever you want.” As pissed as I am, I hate seeing him this way. I hate feeling this way, myself. Like I’m drowning, and pride is keeping me from swimming for dry land.

“Give me a reason, Luke.” I want him to give me a damn good reason, something to justify what I need. I need to say yes. All morning, I’ve been hanging on to the tiniest thread of hope that there’s some acceptable explanation for what I saw yesterday. Even though deep down, I know it’s impossible.

Our daughter, she’d said.

“Listen.” Luke takes a deep breath. “Haven’t you ever had something happen in your life, and it looks one way from the outside, but you know that if only people could step into your life for a second, if they could see things the way you do—”

“Okay. Shut up. Okay.” My throat closes over my words.

I’m not hungry, so we drive in silence to the beach. I kick off my heels and Luke unlaces his work shoes and we leave them on Betty’s backseat. We walk north. Luke has to power walk to keep up with me. Which he deserves.

“You have four minutes and fifty-nine seconds,” I tell him.

“Okay. So, Ashley was the woman you met yesterday.”

“Oh, you mean your wife?” My tone is casual, but slices deep. The tone my mother uses when she wants to do real damage. No. I will not be her. I pick up the pace, sand squeaking beneath my indignant step. “Yeah. I met your wife.” I can’t stop. The memory of yesterday afternoon comes flooding back, filling me with shock and humiliation all over again.

“My what? Ashley’s not my—would you hold up a second? Can we sit, please?” he yells after me.

“Fine.” I drop to the sand without looking at him. “Four minutes and forty seconds.”

Luke settles onto his knees directly in front of me. “Listen to me. Ashley’s not my wife. I want to tell you about what you saw yesterday, but I need to know that you’re actually listening. We’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re busy trying to think of ways to hurt me. Got it?”

Silently, I concede. My mother would never give in like this. I am not her.

“Okay. So again, Ashley’s not my wife. She’s a woman I met in college, almost six years ago now. We met in a bar, on the anniversary of my parents’ death.” Luke looks just over my shoulder, toward the ocean. “And I was just so… fucked up that night, and I remember sitting at the bar next to her doing shot after shot after shot, and it’s like, I couldn’t get the images of the accident out of my head, you know?” He rakes his hands through his hair like he’s trying to claw out the memory. “And all I wanted to do was forget.”

“Yeah.” I know what it’s like to have your memory stuck on a torturous loop. To need relief in whatever form it comes.

“I couldn’t forget, though. And if I couldn’t forget, all I wanted that night was a little comfort. And so I did something I’d never done before.” His breath is raspy, thin. Scared. “I had a one-night stand.”

“Oh,” I whisper. I have no idea what else to say. “Okay.”

“I hated myself,” he says, so sharply it almost scares me. “I mean, to be that irresponsible? I never thought I would be that guy.”

“Wait. But she wears a ring. I saw it.”

“It’s not a wedding band. She says she likes the way it looks, but I think she mostly does it for show. I think she hopes that we’ll be together someday, which will never happen. I’ve told her how I feel. I’ve never given her a reason to believe that I’ll change my mind. And that’s all I can do.”

I blink, wondering what I’m supposed to feel. Relieved that he’s not actually married? When he hid a child from me? My mind is whirring in a million different directions. I hate him for lying, when I’ve lied myself. And I feel for anyone who carries around this kind of secret shame.

“We’d never met before that night, and we didn’t have contact after,” he continues. “Until she called several months later to tell me she was having a baby.”

“I can’t even imagine.” I’m still angry, but my desire to wound him has fallen away. Neither of us needs any more pain. “You were just a kid.”

“Not an excuse.” He shakes his head, casting his eyes to the sand. “It’s weird to think about it now. I remember feeling so panicked at the time. Knowing I was definitely not ready to be a father. And yet, you just sort of adapt to your new reality.” He closes his eyes and I see the hint of a smile. “After we hung up, I remember pacing back and forth in front of those stained glass windows at my place. Pacing for hours. And then, I just stopped. And I said out loud, ‘Okay. I’m gonna do this the best I know how’.”