“What was that?” he asks. His brow furrows, and I can see concern mounting.
A brittle smile pulls at my mouth. “Nothing important.” I gesture at my clothes. “I’m going to go change. I seem to have gotten some murdered potato all over myself.”
I can hearthe peals of laughter from the open window. The party is in full swing by the time I decide I’ve hidden as long as I can. Everyone is already seated around the table when I go outside.
Griffin pushes my chair back without a word. He knew I wouldn’t hide out the entire night. I thought about it, but in the end, I decided I didn’t want Liam to think he still got to me. Then I got pissed off at myself, knowing that some part of me would probably always be impacted by the years I spent with him. It’s bad enough that I blew up at him last week. There’s a petty part of me that wants him to think he was nothing to me, like I was nothing to him.
There is no way on this planet I could possibly love my husband more. He’s the light in my world that was previously darkness. I realize I didn’t know what love was until he came into my life and shook it up. But even with him being my gravity, Liam can still make me spin out.
Like I told Griffin, there aren’t any lingering feelings. Well, except for anger, irritation, and sometimes an occasional familial fondness. No positive emotion, though will ever override the bad when it comes to us. It’s like he etched pain onto my bones, and now it’ll always be a part of me.
Griffin studies me with an intensity that used to unnerve me. Still does sometimes, if I’m being honest. His forehead is creased, and the corner of his mouth is turned down. You’dthink there were thought bubbles over my head giving away the direction of my thoughts.
I try to force a smile, but it feels more like a grimace. I’m a shit liar. I can’t even fake emotions I’m not feeling. It’s a wonder Liam didn’t catch on to how miserable I was when we were married. Although that would have forced him to care about something more than his next high and getting his dick wet. I hope for Claudia’s sake that at least the second one has changed.
Everyone else is giving me space. There’s the usual polite conversation, but no one is being their usual nosy selves and pushing me to spill my deepest secrets. Family dinner actually proceeds just as it has for the last few months, only without Claudia and the kids. We’re all pretending everything is normal.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. We are all pretending. We seem to do a lot of that. Most of all, me.
I pretended for years that it didn’t hurt that Hattie left me alone after my parents died.
I pretended that it didn’t hurt that Griffin rejected me every holiday Liam and I spent with him. Just because I know why now doesn’t take the sting from the memories.
Mostly, I pretended I wasn’t drowning when I was married to Liam. I had no one, and yet I put on a show for the world.
The clang of dishes snaps me back to the present. Platters full of ribs, steak, and burgers are passed around. There’s an energetic game of chase happening around the table with my twins and Bess’s son, Jack, chasing each other with squirt guns. Bess and Hattie are preoccupied with Harlow’s belly since she’s likely less than a week away from having the baby. The guys, of course, are starting a pool on whether it will be a boy or a girl. Basically, it’s loud.
Then it’s like the weather changes. The air feels heavier, and dark clouds have rolled in. The kids stop running, hands fall offof Harlow’s belly, and Charlie stops speaking mid-sentence. The only sound is a choked gasp coming from Liam.
“Claud?” he asks in a loud whisper, as if he’s afraid speaking louder will scare her off.
“Hey, Liam,” she says in a soft voice. “The kids wanted to see you.”
He nods. I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing as if he’s struggling to swallow. He holds his arms open, and Natalie runs straight into them. They cling to each other.
It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. Not because I miss him, or regret that he and I aren’t parents together. It’s that she’s now the same age her bio mom and I were when we became best friends. The older she gets, the more she looks exactly like Audrey.
Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate her guts, but there’s a part of me that misses her too. The part that remembers what it was like to lie on my bedroom floor, my walls covered with posters of pop stars I’d be embarrassed to admit ever liking now, and gossip about the latest drama at our middle school. I guess maybe it’s not her so much as the time she occupies in my life, but even all the bad can’t erase the fact that there were good years in there.
Sure, eventually she grew jealous of me, and it led her to hate me. Maybe that was always the way it was going to be between us, or maybe Liam was the catalyst for yet another bad event in my life.
I’ve gotten better at looking at Natalie and not seeing the betrayal of the two most important people to me, but I’m not perfect at it. Now, that is one emotion I am good at hiding. So good, I manage to hide it from myself most of the time. It helps that Claudia looks similar enough to Natalie that I am able to pretend she’s also biologically her mom, as she is in every other sense.
I have to turn and look away. Luckily, everyone is focused on watching the family reunion taking place at the end of the table that they don’t notice my little internal freak out. For once, even Griffin isn’t watching me.
I’m grateful, because I’m not sure what emotion my face is betraying, mostly because I’m not sure how to feel. I don’t want others analyzing what I’m even struggling to understand.
Without saying a word, I get up from the table without ever having put any food on my plate. I can’t do this right now.
It takes several minutes before someone comes up to find me. I have been expecting Bess or Griffin, but I’m pleased when Harlow pokes her head in the door.
“It got really weird down there. I don’t need to have been a witness to everything that’s happened over the years to understand why that was so uncomfortable,” she says as she comes in and sits on the bench at the foot of my bed.
She rubs her swollen belly and winces. I know that look well. That baby might not even wait a week.
“How are you doing?” I ask her.
“I’m ready to be done. I came up here to ask how you are doing. I honestly don’t know how you’ve done it all these years,” she says.
