Page 63 of Everyone Is Lying to You

I’d seen him scrolling her Instagram feed hungrily when he thought I wasn’t watching. He was obsessed with his friend’s wife. Gray had always wanted what Marsden had and vice versa.

I never expected Gray to cheat on me, but I wouldn’t have put it past him and frankly I didn’t care. His interest in sex with me had waned over the years. I had looked at his computer’s browser history once before because I was curious about what kind of porn he watched. There were two extremes. The most boring vanilla sex MILF videos with women old enough to be hisgrandmother, and then intense female dominatrix videos where men were tied to a bed and degraded and humiliated verbally, but never touched. This all tracked with his emails to Veronica.

I was less upset about the affair than maybe I should have been. My marriage was over the second I found out about the paternity of the kids. Let Veronica have him. Let Marsden and Gray fight over her.

I also found what he had written to Lizzie all those years ago when I lay bruised and battered in his bed. He’d written to her from my email account but he had bcc’d himself.

Dear Lizzie,

You shouldn’t have come out here. I didn’t even ask you to come. I should have been more firm about the fact that I think we’ve grown apart and I don’t want to see you. Get on with your own life. You’re obsessed with me and it has to stop. I’m a little scared of you.

Rebecca

He had sent this and deleted it from my email. I never knew. I’d assumed Lizzie never got back in touch with me after her nasty texts because I’d ghosted her, but now I knew that I’d done so much more than that.

Gray, writing as me, had eviscerated her and made sure that our friendship and shared history were completely destroyed. He made sure that she would never want to be in my life again. He made sure that he would be the only person I could turn to.

There didn’t seem to be a deep enough well of hate for whatI felt for my husband. I didn’t just want him out of my life, I wanted to destroy him. But doing that would destroy my children. I had to be careful. I just needed to be able to leave him, not an easy task when every judge in the state drags a woman through the mud for requesting a divorce.

I knew three things: I needed Gray out of the way, I needed to keep my business, and I never wanted my children to know what their father had done. No one could ever know their connection to Marsden. So I had to make sure that both men would remain silent. No matter what.

I waited until all my potential deals were in place. Olivia was outstanding at brokering them. That’s when I contacted Lizzie. I knew there was a chance she would say no, but I also hoped that I could get her back, that one day we could return to what we were. And I needed her. I needed her platform and her voice. I needed her empathy if I was going to do what needed to be done to escape from Gray.

It was only after I reached out to Lizzie, only after I signed all those contracts and all those deals, that I could confront Gray and Marsden about what I knew. It was the one part of my plan that I could not control, but it had to be done if I wanted their silence.

I had to proceed carefully. So carefully. Every detail had to be meticulously planned out or I would lose everything. Didn’t I know how easily the world would turn against a woman defending herself? I needed all the ammunition. I needed their confessions.

I invited Marsden to breakfast in a public place, as public as possible because I worried what he might do to me in private.

He strode to our secluded table in the back of the small bistro I’d chosen in the city, oozing arrogance. At our wedding he stood next to Gray as the best man and gave a speech that was mostly about himself. Hours later he cupped my backside on my way to the bathroom and slurred into my ear, his breath hot and nauseating, “Let me know when you’re ready for a real man.” I think about that every time I see him, about his hand squeezing so hard it left a bruise. I’d had to explain that bruise to Gray by telling him I’d bumped into the side of a table. “Oops, I’m so clumsy.” I knew even then that I could not come between Gray and Marsden.

He didn’t marry Veronica until a few years later. He’d become a star by then, traveling the country with the ball team. I remember the first time he brought Veronica to our house. She was an actual teenager, just seventeen at the time, and she hardly spoke or met my eyes. She seemed terrified until I asked if she wanted to hold baby Willow. Her eyes lit up then. “I’m dying to have a baby girl,” she gushed and cooed over the baby.

“How did you and Marsden meet?” I tried to start a conversation with her while the men were out throwing darts in the barn after dinner.

She cast her eyes away from me. “I didn’t have a choice,” she whispered.

“What?” I said, louder than I should have.

“I mean. I’ve always known him. Gray too. We grew up going to the same church. My daddy has had his eye on Marsden for a while. He knew he would be the perfect son-in-law.”

Veronica’s family was conservative, much more than we were. We were heathens compared to them. I knew plenty ofthose kind of people out here. The father chose his daughter’s groom. She didn’t have much of a say in it. The men came back in then and Veronica and I didn’t speak any more. She started her own Instagram account where she cheered at Marsden’s ball games, doted on his every play, and then she became a mom influencer just like me. I think she saw me as competition then because she always seemed like she was avoiding me. Little did I know she was probably carrying on with Gray behind my back.

“To what do I owe this honor, Your Highness?” Marsden smirked at me as he sat down.

“Just a catch-up.” I smiled my thirty-six-thousand-dollar smile. That’s the way I always think about it, because that’s what it cost to fix the damage of not having proper dental care or braces as a child and replacing the tooth my husband had knocked out of my mouth. What I have now are veneers. My back teeth are mostly capped. My teeth were the only thing about my appearance that Gray criticized early on. He pointed out my snaggletooth, the grayish, crooked canine that I should have dealt with years earlier but had no money for. It ached all the time and even my top-notch dental care from the tech company I worked at right after college didn’t cover what it would take to fix it. It’s one of the reasons I rarely smiled with teeth for about twenty years. Now I do it as often as possible. And even though I had no reason to be happy or joyful, or generous or kind, I kept beaming at Marsden. I needed to catch him completely off guard.

“Should we order mimosas?” I studied the menu.

“Naughty girl. I thought you didn’t drink.”

I winked at him conspiratorially. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

He waved over the waiter and ordered absurdly expensivedrinks. I knew I would hardly taste mine and I’d be careful to only have a few sips. I needed all my faculties for what I was about to do.

Marsden ordered food for both of us. Matching egg white omelets. We were both apparently watching our figures. I let him gulp down his drink and tipped mine into a planter when he wasn’t looking, so he would keep refilling the glasses from the pitcher on the table. We made small talk, or rather he did. It was the thick of baseball season but he was on the bench with an injury, something to do with his shoulder, so he wasn’t traveling with the team, and according to him, that was the reason “they truly suck balls this season.” But I knew the truth. I knew he was probably done for in the majors. We all knew it. It was part of the rumor mill. That’s why he was branching out, trying to build some dumb app, investing in real estate just like Gray had and probably doing it as badly as my husband.

His chair inched slowly around the table as we nibbled on our respective eggs. By the time the waiter asked if we wanted dessert he was close enough I could hear him chew. He’d finished off most of the drinks himself, but he didn’t know that.

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