Page 91 of Where There's Smoke

I cocked my head. “What?”

“Nothing.” Ranya smiled the way Simone always did when she wanted me to think everything was okay. “Why?”

“You tell me.”

She turned away. Bracelets and keys jingled as she spun her key ring on her finger. “We’ll talk in the car. Let’s get out of here.”

We let Anthony know we’d meet him at the rally, and headed out to the parking lot. Ranya drove, since she was a terrible backseat driver whenever I did, and I sipped my coffee in the passenger seat.

She’d barely pulled out onto the highway when I said, “So what was that look you gave me at the hotel?”

“What look? I’m always giving you looks.”

“You know what I mean.”

Ranya tapped her thumbs on the steering wheel. “Are you sure Simone is okay with what’s going on with you and Anthony?”

“I’m not even sure,” I said. “She says she is, insists she is, but…” Sighing, I rested my elbow below the window and rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Let’s just say I’m getting a lot of mixed signals.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem okay with it.”

“I can’t imagine she is. I can’t imagine she’s okay with any of it. I also know her, and if she thinks I’m adjusting my life—especially if I stop seeing Anthony—for her benefit after she’s already insisted I have her blessing, it’ll put her over the edge. One thing she does not like is people handling her with kid gloves.”

“So it’s a catch-22,” Ranya said. “Keep doing what you’re doing, it’ll drive her crazy. Change to what you think she really wants, it’ll drive her even crazier.”

“Basically.”

She was silent for a long moment, her brow furrowed with something unspoken. I was just about to ask what was on her mind when she said, “Mind if I ask something personal?”

“Go ahead.”

“Hypothetically, if you were straight”—she glanced at me—“do you think you and Simone would have lasted?”

The question hit me in the gut. “What…what do you mean?”

“I mean, even before you were planning on getting a divorce, you seemed stressed over your marriage.”

I shrugged, as much to appear flippant as to loosen some of the tension knotting my shoulders. “Being closeted will do that to you.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always bent over backward to make Simone happy, and you’ve always second-guessed your every move because you know her well enough to know she doesn’t process things normally. I guess I always wondered if you’d eventually get tired of that.”

“It’s tiring, yes,” I said. “I won’t deny that. But I made a vow to her, and I meant it. I thought I did, anyway, but I knew from the get-go that she handles things differently. I went into this knowing that, and I’d no sooner leave her over a mental illness than I would leave if she had cancer or something.” I pushed out a breath. “God, I feel like enough of a jackass for leaving her in the first place.”

“I don’t think she blames you,” Ranya said softly. “I certainly don’t. If you’re gay, well, you’re gay.”

I stared out the windshield but said nothing.

“Honestly,” Ranya said, “I can’t even imagine how you made it this long.”

“Pretending to be straight, you mean?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you know when you married her?”

“I knew I was more attracted to men than women, but I loved her, and I thought…” I trailed off and finally shook my head. “I don’t know. I thought I could do this. Fast-forward a few years and get past some denial and I realize I was only into women as much as I needed to be to keep up that image of being straight. And I couldn’t keep faking it anymore.”

“I can’t even imagine.”

“But damn it, I could have saved her a lot of heartache if I’d gotten it together sooner. Even a year or two ago.”

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