Chapter 5: Number of Guests
I didn’t cry. I got dressed.
By noon I’d done four things.
I called our insurance agent and changed the beneficiary on my life insurance from Thomas Delaney to Kelsey Anne Delaney. I called the credit card company, reported the card in Tom’s wallet lost, and had it frozen. The beach house was still inside its free cancellation window, so I cancelled it, and the rental car with it. Full refund to me. And I called a family lawyer named Ruth Abernathy, who told me that money moved out of a joint account the night before a planned departure tends to look very bad in front of a judge.
The flight I left alone. It was his name on the ticket. Let him go.
That night, while he watched the Braves, I packed his suitcase for him. Not for fifteen days. For good. Every shirt, every pair of shoes, the gold bracelet he’d bought himself for his fiftieth. I rolled it to the front door and set it next to his carry-on.
“Fifteen days is fine, Tom,” I said. “Take as long as you want.”
He laughed. He thought it was the pills.
He left for the airport at seven the next morning, still laughing. I let him go without a word about Crystal. Without a word about the card.
At 9:40, Kelsey walked into my kitchen with two coffees and a face I recognized from when she was little and had broken something.
“Mom. I have to tell you something, and you’re going to be mad.”
At 5:00 a.m., before her shift, she’d sent Wade Haynes a message through the hardware store’s Facebook page. Tom’s flight number. The Tybee address. Every screenshot from the vault, including the one that said Wade thinks I’m at my sister’s in Jacksonville.
“You told me to leave it alone,” she said. “I couldn’t. He didn’t just lie to you. He lied to me for twenty years about who he was. I’m sorry I didn’t ask.”
I was angry. For about an hour, I truly was. It was my marriage. My humiliation. My call to make.
And then I thought: she made it because I couldn’t. Because for two years, I’d let her carry me. That’s not a child overstepping. That’s a daughter catching her mother before she hits the floor.
Tom landed in Savannah at 12:15 to forty-one missed calls.
Wade had forwarded everything to Crystal’s sisters, to Tom’s brothers, and to the prayer chain at First Baptist, which in a town of four thousand is faster than the evening news. By the time Tom reached the rental counter, his card was declined. By the time he got an Uber to Tybee, the beach house was locked and booked by a family from Macon. His mama wouldn’t open the green-shuttered door. He slept on his brother’s fishing boat.
He called me from the dock that night. I let it ring three times, and then I picked up.
“Mo. Baby. This is all a misunderstanding.”
“Tom,” I said. “In sickness and in health. I kept my half.”
I hung up. Then I blocked the number.
Ruth filed for divorce that Friday. The judge ordered the $9,000 returned within two weeks. Crystal left Wade in November and moved in with her sister in Jacksonville. For real this time.
On the twentieth, Kelsey sat beside me in the waiting room with the fish tank. When the doctor came out and said clear, my daughter cried so hard the receptionist brought her tissues.
In February, I opened my laptop at the kitchen table and booked a beach house on Hilton Head. Five nights. Ocean view. On my card.
Kelsey leaned over my shoulder to read the confirmation.
Number of guests: 2.
“Just us,” she said.
“Just us,” I said, and hit print.
