It’s the fakest look of surprise I’ve ever seen. I feel even dumber now. I roll my eyes. “You already figured that out, didn’t you?”
She shrugs. “Maybe.”
“How long have you known?”
“I’ve had my suspicions since the day you adopted the kittens. There was just something about him. I’m good at reading people.”
I hate that she’s always right. “Why didn’t you tell me that you thought it might be him?”
“I didn’t want to make you paranoid if I turned out to be wrong,” she says.
“I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not. You just – well, I am surprised that you didn’t suspect it, but—”
“Jake had three siblings and a dad he saw every day. Luca was an only child and his dad abandoned him. How could I have known they were the same person?”
“How did it go when he told you? Were you mad?”
“Of course I was fucking mad,” I snap. “He’s been lying to me the whole time. He slept with me, allowing me to believe he was someone else. I don’t even know who he is now. How am I supposed to trust him after that?”
I see Patrick poking his head through the doorway behind Anne. He looks like he’s about to speak up, but I cut him off. “Not now, Facey. I’m talking to Anne.”
He mumbles something about his name, then turns around and leaves. Anne watches him go over her shoulder, then looks at me, her eyebrow raised. “Facey,” she repeats with a giggle. Then she gets serious again. “Maybe you should give Luca another chance. After all the years of mean letters you wrote to each other, he was probably just scared that you wouldn’t want to meet him.”
“Seriously? You’re taking his side?”
“Not completely. He’s an asshole for keeping the lie going for so long, and I definitely think he shouldn’t have slept with you until he came clean about who he was.”
“I don’t date liars,” I say. “And this is so much bigger than any stupid white lie any of my exes has ever told me.”
Anne twists her lips in a way that indicates she’s about to disagree with what I just said. I brace myself for it.
“In a way, I think little white lies are worse,” she says.
“Now you’re reaching. He lied about his entire identity. I hardly think that’s more forgivable than a white lie.”
“Let me explain,” she says. “I’m not talking about when a guy tells you that your ugly dress looks okay – although, screw anyone who lets me walk out of the house looking terrible. I’m talking about little white lies like telling your boss that you’re sick because you don’t feel like coming to work, or telling someone that your car broke down because you don’t want to hang out. One little lie here and there isn’t a big deal, but someone who tells a lot of little lies like that usually makes it a habit. I dated a pathological liar before. It started off with him making excuses to cancel our dates instead of just telling me he didn’t have enough money. It was always little things, where if I confronted him, I would sound paranoid, but it got to the point that he was lying so much that I felt like he was never telling the truth. And there was no reason for it either. He would tell me that he was helping his mother with something when in reality he was drinking with a friend. I wouldn’t have been mad if he had just told me what he was doing.”
“I dated a guy like that,” I say. “I couldn’t trust anything he said.”
“I don’t think that Luca is like our exes. He’s not a pathological liar. Have you felt like he was lying to you about anything other than his name?”
“How can I be sure? I feel like I don’t even know him.”
“You worked so hard to find him. And you had such a good connection with him. You told me so yourself. I really doubt that he was faking all of that. He was showing you the real him. So what if he didn’t tell you his real name? He was afraid that you would freak out. And guess what? He wasn’t wrong.”
“I wouldn’t have freaked out if he had come right out and told me who he was.”
“Are you sure? Imagine how you would have felt if he came up to you out of the blue before you ever met him and said that he was Luca and that he was the person you had been writing to all those years.”
“We’ll never know how I would have reacted because it didn’t happen that way. Instead, he lied to me and now I can’t trust him.”
“You lied to him too.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How did you explain our trips to San Diego and Georgia and Texas?”
