Page 61 of My Wife

Of course. Clay let the cat out of the bag on that one. I thought that he was the only one who knew that I drowned my mother in Halo Lake. He was the one who saw me do it, and who used it to get everything he wanted out of me. But somehow Summer knew; how else could she blackmail Tommy into having an affair with her? And Tommy… that meant he knew, too.

He’s never said. I guess, following Clay’s lead in that, too, he refused to bring it up because I’ve spent the last years deluding myself into believing that my mother’s death was an unfortunate accident, not the result of a narcissitic, impulsive teenage girl feeling the sting of rejection for the first time.

My mother made it very clear that, now that I was almost eighteen, I was no longer the most important person in her life. She was choosing Rick over me. She wasrejectingme.

She had to die.

Seventeen-year-old Cyn thought that was a fairly simple assessment. My mom didn’t love me. My mom didn’t deserve to live.

And I killed her.

It wasn’t premeditated. Everything else that led up to her actual death was true. My mom didn’t return to the cabin, but that was because she was walking by the lake, trying to find the words to tell me that she was moving Rick into our house after graduation, and that she expected me to move out and start a life of my own.

I wasn’t even eighteen and she wanted me gone.

Is it any wonder that I snapped and pushed her into the lake? That when she struggled to get up, yelling at me for getting her wet, I just wanted her fucking mouth to shut up?

She couldn’t yell at me under the water. And once she was dead, she couldn’t love Rick anymore. She couldn’t choose him over me.

What if these two decided to choose each other? They haven’t yet. They both want me to choose them… but what if that changes? For seventeen years, my mom chose me until she didn’t.

I’ve already lost five years with one man, then five with the other. I was a widow at twenty-two. I’m twenty-seven now. I don’t want to start over again.

“We’re not swimming, Tommy,” I say needlessly, considering Clay and I have moved away from the lake, joining him near the edge of the trees. “But we’re having a long overdue chat.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I don’t want to miss that.”

No. He really doesn’t.

“You both know a lot about me, huh? You’d have to to predict my reactions over the years… to manipulate me into getting what you both want. Well, I think there’s something you forgot during all of that. Know what it is?”

Clay’s watching Tommy out of the corner of his eye. His hand hasn’t left the handle of his knife.

In his hand, Tommy’s holding his folded switchblade. Interesting. Maybe theydoknow everything about me…

Justin case, I give them a little hint. “I’m an only child,” I tell them. “You now whatthatmeans?” I wait a beat, then shrug. “I don’t share.”

“Cyn—”

“You love me,” I say to Tommy.

“I would’ve waited forever for you,” he swears. “Five years. Ten. However long it took for you to give me a second chance, I would’ve waited.”

I know.

Turning to Clay, I remind him, “You said you can’t exist without me.”

Clay sets his jaw. His boyish features turn sharp, a deadly edge to the man I mourned for five years. He’s older now, but that danger that was always there, even as a teenager… whether it’s the memory I have of the blood splattered all over his fa e from earlier tonight or the handle of the knife sticking out of the sheath he pulled back on before he left the cabin, he’s absolutelymurderous.

His voice drops. “You are my wife. You are my everything.”

If I was his everything, he wouldn’t have left me. If Tommy cared that much about me, he wouldn’t have fucked Summer to earn her silence once we were together. He’d have killed her, made it seem like an accident, made her go away.

One man left me.

One man cheated.

I’m a hypocritical bitch. I cheated first, and even when a part of me inexplicably sensed that Clay couldn’t be dead, that hehadto be alive, I allowed myself to walk away from my vows, starting up a new life with Tommy.

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