I went to Charlotte Douglas International Airport expecting to come home with my brother and a bag of barbecue sandwiches.
Chapter 2
On Monday morning, I stood in front of twenty-three third graders pretending multiplication required my full attention.
“Eight times seven is…”
I stopped.
A little boy named Noah raised his hand.
“Ms. Carter, you skipped number four.”
The class giggled.
I looked at the board.
Sure enough, I had.
“You caught me.”
Noah grinned.
“You always say mistakes are okay if you fix them.”
“That’s exactly what I say.”
I corrected the problem, but his words followed me through the day.
Mistakes could be fixed.
Lies were harder.
That evening Ryan took me to dinner.
He arrived in his BMW smelling like the cedar cologne I’d given him for Valentine’s Day.
“You look tired,” he said.
“Long day.”
“The kids?”
“They’re eight. They’re always something.”
He laughed and squeezed my hand.
For half a second, habit made me want to squeeze back.
I didn’t.
At the restaurant, Ryan talked about our wedding as if it were already a memory.
The flowers.
The honeymoon in Maui.
A house he’d found in Myers Park.
Then he smiled.
“I’ve been thinking about kids.”
I nearly choked on my water.
“What about them?”
“I think we should start sooner than we planned.”
A month earlier, those words would have made my heart race for a completely different reason.
Now I wondered whether a baby was simply another knot he wanted tied before his finances collapsed.
“You’d be an amazing mother,” he said.
I looked across the table.
“Would I?”
“You already spend your whole life taking care of children.”
There was so much affection in his voice that I almost hated him less.
That was the awful thing about betrayal.
A liar doesn’t necessarily become false in every memory.
Ryan had comforted me after hard school days. He had brought soup when I had the flu. He had spent Christmas morning assembling bicycles for a charity event because I asked him to.
Those things had happened.
So had the airport.
Love and dishonesty could occupy the same person.
That made leaving harder, not easier.
When he dropped me off, he leaned in for a kiss.
I turned my head.
His lips touched my cheek.
“You okay?”
“Just tired.”
“You’ve been strange since Daniel got back.”
“I missed my brother.”
Ryan studied me.
Then he smiled.
“Of course.”
The next afternoon, Melissa called.
“Emily! I feel like I haven’t talked to you in forever.”
I stared at her name on my phone.
“It’s been a few days.”
“That’s forever during wedding season.”
She laughed.
The same laugh I’d heard at the airport.
“I booked us a spa day Saturday. My treat.”
“You did?”
“You need it. No wedding planning. No stress. No men.”
I nearly dropped the phone.
“Sounds perfect.”
Saturday arrived bright and warm.
Melissa hugged me in the spa lobby.
She looked exactly like the woman I had loved for fifteen years.
We’d met during our sophomore year at UNC Charlotte. She’d slept on my couch after her divorce. I’d driven through an ice storm when her father had a heart attack.
During my dress fitting, she had cried harder than I did.
Now she sat beside me getting her nails painted pale pink and discussed centerpiece arrangements.
At lunch, her phone lit up.
I caught a glimpse of the screen.
Her wallpaper was a photograph from Hilton Head.
I recognized the beach because Ryan and I had vacationed there the previous summer.
Except in Melissa’s photograph, I had been cropped out.
Later, she stepped away to take a call.
Her handbag slipped from the chair.
A small white box fell onto the carpet.
I bent down.
The lid opened.
Inside was a silver luggage tag.
Engraved across it were three words:
Mrs. Melissa Mitchell.
Mitchell was Ryan’s last name.
My hands went numb.
“Oops.”
Melissa returned and quickly took the box.
“My cousin sent that.”
I looked directly at her.
“That’s sweet.”
She smiled.
She had no idea I’d read it.
In that moment, every remaining fantasy died.
There would be no explanation at the airport.
No drunken mistake.
No affair she regretted.
Melissa had already practiced becoming Ryan’s wife.
That evening, Daniel drove me to a diner outside Gastonia.
A man in his sixties waited in a corner booth.
“Emily, this is Frank Donnelly.”
The name was familiar.
Ryan’s former business partner.
Frank looked older than his photographs.
“I’m sorry,” he said before I sat down. “I should’ve spoken sooner.”
“About what?”
“Ryan.”
Frank wrapped both hands around his coffee.
“He wasn’t always like this. That’s important for me to say.”
I hadn’t expected anyone to defend him.
Frank continued.
“He’d get into trouble on one project and convince himself the next project would fix it. So he’d borrow. Move money around. Promise impossible returns. Inflate numbers.”
“Why?”
“Because every shortcut was temporary in his mind.”
Frank sighed.
“Then temporary became his way of life.”
On Sunday, Ryan showed up unexpectedly with bagels.
“I thought we could spend the day together.”
I stepped aside.
While he poured orange juice, I went to the living room.
My phone was no longer on the end table where I’d left it.
It was on the couch.
Unlocked.
“Ryan.”
He appeared in the doorway.
“Yeah?”
“Were you looking through my phone?”
His expression changed.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Silence.
Then he sighed.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“No.”
“I’ve felt you pulling away.”
“So you searched my phone?”
“I got scared.”
He sounded so sincere I almost felt sorry for him.
Then I remembered he had been kissing Melissa while I waited for my brother.
“I need some space.”
He nodded.
“Okay.”
He left quietly.
Five minutes later, another car stopped across the street.
Melissa got out.
She climbed into Ryan’s passenger seat.
They drove away together.
I closed my curtains.
When Daniel arrived that evening, he took one look at my face.
“You saw them.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Not because it hurt.”
He put his keys down.
“Because you’re done doubting yourself.”
He looked me directly in the eye.
“Tomorrow, we’re bringing this into the open.”
I barely slept that night.
Not because I feared Ryan.
I feared myself.
I feared that when I saw him cornered, I might still want to protect the man I had loved.
