Page 67 of Clever Little Thing

The seat of my chair feels gritty. “Go on.”

Emmy pulls her cardigan around herself and stares into her wine. “It was right when everything was coming apart with Nick, and I was in free fall. I know that’s no excuse.”

Carefully, I stand up and brush the seat of my chair off. I sit back down and keep my voice steady. “You and Pete?”

Emmy presses her fingers to her lips for a moment and then says, “Pete kissed me. I mean, we kissed.”

It’s remarkable how I feel nothing at all. It’s less pain than a splinter in my thumb. “When?”

“Right after we took the girls to Coral Reef.”

When I ran into Emmy that day, her damp hair had that gentle wave. She wore that striped dress like an ice lolly. “You kissed him at my house,” I say slowly. “With the girls there. I can’t believe it.”

Emmy squirms. “They were playing. We were in the bathroom upstairs.”

The Unicorn Froot Loops box is open, and the cereal will get soft and damp if left like that. I roll down the top of the plastic bag and close the box.

“I’m a horrible person,” Emmy says. “I know that. I’m not going to make excuses.”

“Why are you telling me? You could have just kept quiet.”

“You deserve to know. I was going to tell you earlier, but I wantedto give Pete a chance to do it. I told him if he didn’t tell you by Christmas, then I would.”

I’m still trying to process this. “The bathroom where you kissed—was it the master bathroom? The one off our bedroom? Or Stella’s bathroom?”

Emmy closes her eyes. “It was your bathroom.” I take a big gulp of wine. How did it happen—Did he push her against the door? Did he lift her up onto the sink and kiss her while she wrapped her legs around him? In the same place where I lean when I’m taking my contacts out?

Maybe doing it in our home is part of the thrill. Grinding against another woman in the very place where I stand with my electric toothbrush, letting another woman’s bare thighs rest on the place where I cut up fruit for our child. Seeing how thin he can make the membrane between his regular life and his forbidden one.

The room lurches suddenly. That camping trip, the one where I suspected him of leaving me. I long ago accepted that was hormonal paranoia. But I only had Pete’s word that he’d been gone for forty-five minutes. I’d left my phone in the car and had no way of keeping track of time. He could have been gone for much longer.

I remember now that when I nuzzled his neck in the morning, his hair smelled of burned toast, even though we hadn’t lit a campfire the night before. And I ran into a young woman at the trailhead. I haven’t given her a single thought since, yet somehow, I can recall her perfectly now, as if my brain had stored her image away, knowing this moment would come. She had a scrubbed face and dishwater-blond hair in a ponytail and was a little on the chunky side, clad in plaid pajama bottoms and a UC Santa Cruz T-shirt. Ididn’t ask her how her night had been, but she volunteered that she’d gone to bed “super early” the night before, and I thought, Why is she telling me this? “I got up super early too,” she said. “I saw the sun rise. The sunrise was inspirational.”

Then Pete came huffing out of the woods carrying a cooler, the tent, and the sleeping bags, and the two of us quickly became absorbed in theTetrispuzzle of how to get all our camping stuff back into the Prius. He didn’t even acknowledge her. But there was the smell of someone else’s campfire in his hair.

Why do I remember her so clearly? I must have suspected on some level, but also, on another level, I really and truly had no inkling. Both things are true.

I squeeze my wineglass, which I’ve emptied without noticing. I was pregnant with Stella then. Pete has been cheating on me for her whole life. Does she know? She’s so intuitive, so sensitive. She too might know and not know at the same time. Perhaps living with that contradiction was too much for her. When I read about possession, I learned about “soul wounds,” which make it easier for a spirit to enter you. Pete’s treachery could have made Stella more vulnerable to possession.

“You’re going to break that,” Emmy says, peeling my fingers away from the wineglass. My hand throbs, and I think the wound is bleeding again. “Try to breathe, sweetie.” She pats my hand over the bandage. “What happened there anyway?”

“Long story.”

“I’ll get you a glass of water,” Emmy says.

“It all seems so obvious now,” I tell her. He took his phone everywhere. He went out for bike rides at night. Took all these worktrips, even on the weekend. But he was so devoted—the foot rubs, theté de California—it never occurred to me not to trust him. The only time I wavered for a moment was on Christmas Day, when Kia seemed to know too much about our life together.

“I’m really sorry,” Emmy says. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

She did a bad thing, but her apology was good. I tell her, “Coparenting with Nick for the rest of your life is probably punishment enough.”

Emmy laughs. “I’m not happy that Pete is a shit too, but at the same time, it’s nice not to be the only one in the trenches. Look, I want to help you. What can I do?”

Nothing, I think, which is why it’s so easy to ask that question, why that question is worthless. But then I think, Wait a minute. I canask. For once, I can ask. Blanka thought she couldn’t ask, because I wouldn’t help her. But I would have helped her. So maybe Emmy will help me. “Actually,” I say, “I need to borrow a change of clothes, and maybe something to sleep in too, because I need to stay the night.”

“Stay as long as you need,” Emmy says. “Nick’s got the kids for the rest of the holidays.”

“Any chance you still have your breast pump?”

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