Chapter 5: Morning, Beautiful
Here was Brooke.
Brooke from my Thursday book club. Brooke who lived four houses down, who brought lemon bars to Caleb’s birthday party, who’d hugged me at the farmers market two weeks earlier and said, “You work so hard, Laur. Ethan’s so lucky.”
He’d been seeing her on the weeks he told me he was on reserve and might get called in any minute. The weeks he was “at the airport hotel” so he could make an early report time.
He was eleven minutes from our house.
I didn’t scream. I think he was waiting for it. Maya, on the phone, said very quietly, “Oh, Lauren,” and I said, “It’s okay,” and it wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to fall apart in front of him.
“You need to leave,” I said. “Tonight.”
“Laur, it’s my house too—”
“Then talk to Diane Ortiz about it. She’s expecting your call.” I slid her business card across the table. “Take your flight bag. You’re good at packing.”
He took it. He stood in the doorway for a while, in his perfect uniform, like he was waiting for a cue that wasn’t coming. Then he left.
After the door closed, I sat at the table with the phone still glowing between my hands. Neither of us hung up for a long time.
“Are you okay?” Maya asked finally.
“No,” I said. “But I think I’m going to be. Which is a weird thing to feel twenty minutes after your marriage ends.”
“Not weird,” she said. “That’s what it feels like when you stop carrying something.”
I filed for divorce the following Wednesday. California is a no-fault state, Diane explained, so the four women didn’t matter legally, but the folder mattered a great deal when Ethan’s lawyer suggested he deserved primary custody “given his stable schedule.” Diane read Jess’s timeline out loud in the mediation room, the part about the grave he’d said he visited. Ethan’s lawyer asked for a short recess. We agreed on a custody schedule that afternoon.
Brooke moved to her sister’s in Reno in December. The book club still meets. We’re reading thrillers now.
Telling Caleb was the hardest part. I told him his dad and I weren’t going to live together anymore, and that it wasn’t his fault, and that we both loved him. He asked if he could get a puppy now. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the kitchen floor, and he laughed because I was laughing, and in February we brought home a golden retriever named Waffles.
Ethan is not allergic.
My mother still thinks Maya should have stayed out of it. “That girl blew up your family,” she said at Thanksgiving, passing the stuffing.
“No, Mom,” I said. “He blew it up. She just sent me the photos.”
I don’t think anyone in a situation like Maya’s is obligated to tell. She didn’t owe me anything. She’d been lied to too. But she made a choice that cost her something, for a stranger, because she believed I deserved the truth more than I deserved to be comfortable. I think about that a lot.
Jess and Maya and I have a group chat now. Jess named it The Widow’s Club. Maya sends us pictures of her dog. Jess sends us memes from second graders. Once a month or so, one of them texts me at some terrible hour, and I’m already up anyway.
Last week, at 5:12 in the morning, I was elbow-deep in brioche dough when my phone lit up against the flour bin.
A 720 number. Denver.
Morning, beautiful, Maya wrote. Flying into Sacramento in March for a conference. Coffee at your bakery?
I wiped my hands on my apron, which never works.
It’s on the house, I wrote back.
