“Okay, okay. It’s for the kids. But let me hold twenty bucks for bingo. I’m feeling lucky.”
I laughed as I pushed my mom out the door. I had so many questions and conflicting feelings about what had happened with Steven, but I felt a lot better. Not because of the money. I hated what he did, but the gift and the supplemental insurance policy announced his feelings loud and clear. My husband loved me—flaws and all. And that is the memory that I would choose to cherish.
44
Felise
YOU CAN’T CONTINUE THIS WEB of lies. My older sister’s words continued to ring in my ears as I watched Greg walk up the path to our house. I’d been watching out for him since he answered my call and agreed to come over.
I said a silent prayer asking God to give me strength to not back out at the last minute.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door before he had a chance to unlock it. I stepped aside and motioned for him to come in.
“Hey,” he dryly replied, walking in. “Where’s Liz?”
“She’s at her friend’s house. I felt like we should talk alone.”
He hadn’t been home in a week. He’d been holed up in a hotel, and I felt like he was sinking into a depression. It was time for this madness to end. It was time for me to tell the truth.
“I don’t know what there’s left for us to talk about.” Greg sighed heavily.
“Now that things have calmed down, I want to tell you everything.”
He had a look on his face like he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it, so I motioned for him to sit down in the living room. “Please. Have a seat.” He did, apprehensively, never taking his eyes off me.
I took a deep breath. God give me strength. “I asked you here because I wanted to tell you why I took the money,” I began. “The real reason.”
“I’m listening.”
Don’t do it—now Fran’s voice was ringing through my head. I shook it away and continued talking. “I was being blackmailed.”
I expected him to balk, drop his mouth in confusion, even call me a liar, but instead he only said, “By whom and for what?”
“By Sabrina Fulton. My old college roommate.”
“Why would Sabrina be blackmailing you?”
I took another deep breath, and a lie slid to the edge of my tongue. But I’d done enough lying. I wanted to come clean. I needed to come clean if I wanted to save my marriage. Because one lie had spawned another, and the string of them was slowly killing me. My gut told me that the truth was going to eventually come out. I couldn’t risk Greg opening his email one day and finding the video. I knew my husband. If our marriage could be salvaged at all, the truth had to come from me.
“There is no one else. I’m not having an affair. I swear.” Could what Steven and I did even be classified as an affair? I shook away that thought. I needed to focus. “I want to be very clear about that.”
He was studying me, trying to detect any lies. “Okay, if you’re not having an affair, then what’s been up with you?” he asked. “What did you do to allow someone to blackmail you?”
I thought about telling him that I did meet Steven and I did go up to his room, but that we didn’t do anything. However, Greg knew that I didn’t come home that night. That story would only infuriate him even more because of how implausible it sounded. He wouldn’t believe anything but the truth. So I simply said, “The night of our anniversary, I was very upset and I went to the Four Seasons to go to the bar. I sat there and drowned my sorrows.” I could tell Greg was waiting with bated breath. “Well, I bumped into someone while I was there.”
“Who?”
I had to dig deep inside my soul to utter my next words. “Steven.”
“Paula’s Steven?”
I nodded, and his brow furrowed as if he was thinking. “Wait, that’s the night he died. Did you . . . Were you? . . . You spent the night with him?”
I nodded as my eyes filled with tears.
“Are you kidding me?” he yelled, jumping up from his seat. “You had sex with Steven?”
Again, silence on my end. There were no words to justify my indiscretion, so I remained quiet.
“Paula is your best friend. Steven is . . . He’s like family!”
“I know. I didn’t mean for it . . . I mean, it just happened,” I stammered.
“You don’t just happen to fall into bed with your best friend’s husband!” he screamed.
My shoulders trembled as the waterworks began. “Neither one of us intended for it to happen. We’d had too much to drink, and one thing led to another.” I decided to leave out the information about all the unresolved feelings because my husband could handle only so much.