Page 16 of Our Secret Summer

“I met Angie a few months after my divorce from Joe. She was newly divorced as well and we bonded over that, at first. Then, it turned into something more.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes and no. It was complicated.” Dylan let her head fall back as the memories rushed over her. “It was certainly not straightforward. Even though I probably wasn’t ready for something new yet, I felt myself falling for her, but… it was different for her. More like friendship with benefits than amorous. That’s the word she used when she broke up with me.Amorous.I think I was more of an experiment to her, a welcome distraction after the devastation of her divorce—from a man. We had an on-and-off thing for about eight months or so, but it wasn’t to be.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” Raffo’s voice exuded genuine warmth.

“That’s okay. Some things are not meant to work out.” Dylan briefly closed her eyes, picturing Angie. She was much less inclined to Google her than Alex. “After that, I took a longamorousbreak to properly process my divorce.”

“Are you still friends with Connor’s dad?”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, I guess you could call us friends. At least, we’ve found a way to be amicable again. It took some time but, in the end, neither one of us wanted to be at war with the other parent of our child. Connor and his dad are very close. Joe invested a lot in the gallery.” Dylan knew she was lucky. Even though the divorce had been harrowing—it had been difficult distancing herself from her twenty-five-year marriage—and the aftermath pretty brutal, it had ended fairly well. “At least once a month, the three of us go out to dinner. Sometimes the four of us, depending if Joe has a girlfriend or not. He usually doesn’t. He really embraced the bachelor lifestyle after we split up. It makes me wonder sometimes.”

“And no more women after Angie?” Raffo steered the conversation away from Joe.

“I was single for a few years, enjoying being alone again, doing whatever the fuck I wanted when I wanted. I’ve had a few relationships since, but none of them lasted very long—all of them with men.” The last one, Dylan pondered, with the man who’d made her aware of the digital coin she had too heavily—and wrongly—invested in.

“I met your ex-husband a couple of times at the gallery. He struck me as a really nice guy,” Raffo said.

“Joe’s a good guy. And a great dad.”

“Neither one of you batted an eyelid when Connor brought home his first boyfriend,” Raffo mused. “He’s told me the story many times.”

“It just made complete and utter sense to me that, one day, he would bring a boy home. Then he did. It was great. I was so happy for him.” Inadvertently, Dylan stretched out her hand to Raffo. “I’m sorry it wasn’t like that for you.”

Raffo stared at Dylan’s outstretched hand with an unreadable expression. Dylan withdrew it quickly, the gesture hanging awkwardly between them in the firelight.

Raffo inhaled sharply, then slowly let out the breath. “Thank you for sharing all of that with me.” She turned her head more toward Dylan. “Are you too tired for the story of the most ridiculous-slash-painful lesbian break-up of the year?”

“I’m absolutely wide awake for that,” Dylan said.

CHAPTER 13

“Mia started floating the idea of an open relationship about a year ago. In her defense, suddenly, non-monogamy was everywhere. Newspapers, socials, documentaries. Some of our friends were trying it. The zeitgeist was just totally right for it.” Raffo wished her glass of champagne would magically refill itself. “I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea and I resisted for a long time. Maybe because, somehow, I knew it wasn’t so much an open relationship she wanted. But that’s all hindsight, so I don’t really know.” Raffo scoffed, but it came out as a weird snort. “I’m giving away the punch line to the most dreadful joke ever already, but long story short, Mia left me for the first woman she hooked up with when we opened up our relationship. It was love at first sight, apparently. Her name’s Ophelia and she looks like a Scandinavian beach volleyball player. You know the type? Like she couldn’t be more the opposite of me.” The relative calm of the past few days crumbled as Raffo’s sadness surged to the surface, raw and familiar.

“The way I see it, for some reason, because it’s actually really unlike her, Mia didn’t have the guts to simply break up with me. She needed the ruse of an open relationship and she convinced me it was what we needed in our lives and… Argh, the whole thing just makes me so angry.” Raffo ignored the itching behind her eyes. “For all I know, she’d already met this Ophelia, but no one has been able to confirm that. Which doesn’t mean that she couldn’t have kept it a secret from everyone. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know. Either way, our break-up was not amicable in the least.” Raffo rubbed at her eyes, trying to hold back the first tear—she knew from experience that once she started to cry, it might be difficult to stop.

“If Mia didn’t love me anymore, yes, that would have still hurt like hell, but there are definitely far more honorable ways to break up with the person you’ve been with for ten years than to stage an open relationship.” Connor, who was friends with Mia too, had tried to convince Raffo that she was perhaps too paranoid about how things had gone down, and that Mia wasn’t that calculated, but Raffo didn’t believe him. She only believed what her own gut told her.

“That’s not a very funny punch line,” Dylan said.

“I know. My contributions to our conversation tonight have been really gloomy. Thank god for your two affairs with the ladies.” Raffo had very much enjoyed observing Dylan as she talked about Alex and Angie.

“That must have been very painful, Raffo. Break-ups always are.”

“Connor’s been so great. He put me up in his guest room, took care of me, rubbed my back while I cried and cried.” Raffo took a deep breath, hoping it would stave off the tears, but they were dangling from her lashes already. “It’s a whole mess back home. I have to find a new place to live. We have to sell our house. But I can’t talk to her right now. I just can’t. The sight of her just… makes me want to cry,” Raffo said, as the tears started spilling.

“Oh, Raffo.” Dylan was out of her chair in an instant, and crouched beside her. Her warm hand found Raffo’s back, her thumb tracing gentle circles against the nape of her neck. “Come here.” Dylan pulled her close and then Raffo was crying on Connor’s mother’s shoulder as well, after having already shed so many tears on her son’s shoulder. This family had caught more of her tears already than her own ever would.

Dylan’s hand moved to her hair. Raffo tried to steel herself somehow, tried to stop this endless, stupid flood of tears, but it seemed impossible. Because she still loved Mia, had loved her for so long, had loved their life together—and now it was all just gone.

So she cried on Dylan’s shoulder for a while longer, not caring who she was with. Her tears didn’t care, either way, they just streamed and streamed, until all moisture seemed to have flowed from Raffo’s body and she had nothing left to push through her tear ducts.

“I’m sorry. I’m really not a crybaby,” she whispered into Dylan’s wet hair. Yeah right. Although it was true. Raffo had barely cried since her mother had died, because nothing had ever come close to being that devastating again. Until this. She breathed in deeply and, reluctantly, pushed herself away from the comfort of Dylan’s body. “It’s like she broke something in me and now I can’t seem to stop crying.”

“She hurt you.” Dylan’s voice was a little unsteady as well. “Of course, it makes you cry.”

Raffo was exhausted and she fell back into her chair.

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