Page 49 of Everyone Is Lying to You

“You told me you didn’t want to see her.”

“I did?”

“Over and over again.”

I had no idea if that was true, but it could have been. “Delete the messages,” I said. I was high on the pills and still gutted with shame. That was it. It was almost too easy to erase six years of friendship, but there was no going back. What I had done was inexcusable. I had invited her to come see me, made her spend her hard-earned money, and then I hid from her like a goddamncoward. I didn’t deserve her friendship. She was so much better off without me. That’s what I kept telling myself. And eventually I believed it.

Once I was healed, I spent most of my time in the bakery crafting my signature éclairs. I arrived there well before dawn almost every day.

I’d turn the music up as loud as I could bear and with practiced grace I combined eggs, flour, and butter, each ingredient an essential note. Whisked vigorously, the batter transformed into a silky sheen, and I could feel the heat of creation coursing through my veins. The anticipation of the finished product wrapped around me like a warm embrace, igniting a thrill deep within me. Once the choux pastry was perfectly piped onto the baking sheet, I slipped it into the oven. The gentle crackling and the rich, buttery scent were the only things that made me truly calm.

I filled each éclair with meticulous care, watching as the creamy custard oozed gently from the ends. The act of filling them was nearly sensual; my heart raced with the knowledge that I was creating pure joy. Baking was not merely a craft; it was my heartbeat, my passion, and the ultimate expression of love.

Baking healed me.

Gray apologized every day. He paid to fix my teeth. Not just the one that had fallen out, but all of the crooked ones that had been a mess for years. He bought me extravagant presents and eventually he did whisk me away on a surprise vacation to Hawaii, a place I had only ever seen in movies and magazines, and it was there that I began to soften to him again. He gave me all the safety and security I had always craved. He made life feel easy.

The bakery did well until it didn’t. San Francisco was such a fickle city. They loved you one day and forgot you the next. Business eventually dwindled when some other shop across town began making some hybrid of an éclair, a cannoli, and a croissant that became all the rage on Facebook. An ecolissant. It sounded like an infectious disease, but it looked divine in pictures.

Then an Au Bon Pain opened next door and just sold the cheap version of both our stuff.

But it only made me try harder, work harder and longer. Gray hated it, but he never laid a hand on me again. Nor did he have a single sip of alcohol. He was on his very best behavior. So much so that the memories of that night eventually stopped haunting my dreams.

And when he proposed with his mother’s vintage diamond ring encrusted with the most delicate tiny emeralds that perfectly matched the color of his eyes, I even cried when I said yes. I truly believed he would never hurt me again, that it was an accident, a onetime thing. And I still lived in fear of becoming my mother. I was massively in debt from school and always would be unless Gray paid it all off. I wanted a nice life. By then I felt like I deserved it and getting ahead in this world isn’t based on merit.

Gray wanted babies right away. That was fine by me. I’d always wanted a gaggle of kids, the opposite of my solitary upbringing. But apparently it was not fine by my body. I couldn’t get pregnant. I took the herbs and saw the acupuncturists. We used the apps that monitored my ovulation and the temperature of my uterus. Every month, there was the same result. I bawled when I bled, and Gray held me and rocked me like the baby Icouldn’t have. My doctors all said to wait a year to try IVF so we did the other things.

“You’re under too much stress at work,” Gray said over and over again. He wasn’t wrong.

Each time my body failed I became more and more obsessed with trying to fix it. I was prediabetic, the doctor told me. My blood pressure and cholesterol were both high. My aura was off, a holistic specialist insisted.

When the lease on the bakery came up for renewal, we decided to let it go. I mourned, but I was also possessed with fixing whatever was broken in my body. I wouldn’t work myself to death like Mom had. The desire to have a child took over my every waking moment and somehow I let my previous dream slip away. When Gray’s dad had that stroke and turned the farm over to him, it all seemed perfect and simple and easy.

Our life out there would be beautiful and much simpler. We’d eat food grown on our land. Nothing processed. No chemicals and additives. My aura would heal.

I doubled down again on every possible noninvasive fertility treatment—pills, injections, acupuncture. Gray said we needed to pray, that prayer would fix whatever was wrong with me. We attended virtual prayer groups twice a week since we were so far out in the country, but we made the long drive into the city a couple of times a month to be with the congregation in person. I loved the community of it, the camaraderie. This is what had been missing from my childhood, a village to care for us, to support us and help us. So what if I didn’t believe in God, if I could never truly believe; I wanted all of the other parts of it so badly that it didn’t matter. When everyone placed their hands gentlyon my belly and told me I was in their nightly prayers I thanked them profusely.

I saw a new doctor out there, Dr. Carmichael. He was the man who had delivered Gray and he told me that it took my husband’s mother more than a year to get pregnant with her first baby too.

“What you’re going through is normal,” he assured me. “And we are going to heal you.” I asked about IVF.

“Not necessary,” he insisted. “Artificial fecundation is a sin.”

I didn’t believe that was true, but I didn’t push it. He promised me I would be pregnant soon. I felt so safe, so protected, so cared for. Gray doubled down on making sure I had everything I needed and eventually it all worked exactly the way everyone had promised it would. Who is to say what did the trick: the fertility treatments, the intrauterine insemination, the acupuncture, the lack of stress, or the constant prayer. I didn’t care. Six months later I was pregnant, and I stayed pregnant. I know a lot of women who wouldn’t agree, but I adored pregnancy. I felt whole for the first time in my life.

Alice was perfect and delicious and my everything. We stayed in bed together for entire days when Gray would travel for work, and it was the happiest I’d ever been. Everything I had been through, everything I had endured, was for her. I was so grateful to finally be a mother that I threw myself into it with the same furious intensity I had with my bakery. I made baby food from scratch. I sewed her little dresses. I rid our house of every possible toxin. I was a good mother. I was finally good.

It was Alice who found me after Gray came at me again, when he hit me so hard I passed out on the floor of our bathroom. I’dbeen unconscious for hours. That’s when I saw the bruises on the top of her arm, thick purple lines made by a man’s hand.

My sweet gangly colt of a daughter fetched me warm washcloths and wiped the blood from my face while I lay on the bathroom floor. I reached up to touch her arm.

“He grabbed me when I walked into the barn and startled him.” She said it so simply. So resigned. I hated that she was resigned to his violence. But it turns out she wasn’t.

“It will never happen again,” I managed.

“No, it won’t,” she said. Only twelve and so wise. “It will not happen again.”

“Where are the others?”

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