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man since Decker died. Mourning a spouse while simultane-
ously having desires for someone else is fraught territory, to
say the least. But the confusion of it all isn’t everything.
There’s a horror to the universe when you lose someone
you love. But there’s also an awesomeness when someone new
and amazing arrives. I know that, but I’ve never been ready
for that, despite how all my outward efforts to find love would appear to differ.
I wanted to deny so badly that I was still struggling from
my husband dying, that I thrusted myself into a program that
would help me find a future with someone else. A future I’d
have complete control over, which included knowing before
date one that that person would never have a chance with me.
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“Daddy’s home,” shouts Casey from the doorway, wak-
ing Leno from the cutest puppy sleep in my lap and jogging
me out of my untimely revelation. Immediately, our apart-
ment smells like a deep fryer. She’s stopped at In-N-Out on
her way home.
I tuck Brian’s card into the kitchen junk drawer and steal
one of Casey’s fries, which are covered in cheese and chili
sauce.
“Okay, I will definitely not miss this when I move out,” she says of me snatching her food.
“Can you throw me a bone, please?” I bargain with her.
“I’m just coming to terms with the fact my husband has a
son, giving my husband’s ashes back to his mother, and reel-ing from seeing the skull of a double-headed flamingo at a
curiosities expo. And one more thing. Remember my missing
money? Turns out everyone’s favorite children’s doctor is the
one who stole that ten grand from me. I’m very fragile right
now if you couldn’t tell.”
“Wow,” she says with a mouth full of cheese fries. “Crack
open a bottle of rosé and tell me more about it in the living
room?”
I’m not so sure how rosé pairs with greasy fast food, but I’m
game to take Casey up on the invitation for a fireside chat.
I’m tempted to say that I owe that to her—to open up, have
a little “girl talk” in the living room over a bottle of wine—
but actually, I owe that to us. Parameters about how to move on, when, and with whom were put up around her, too. From
the first day of living with Casey, I’ve always wanted to break those walls down. I’ve always wanted to be Casey’s friend.
Why? She’s one bad-ass chick. Not to mention, loyal to a fault.
An hour goes by and we both have a pore-minimizing
mud mask on our faces. I have officially caught Casey up with
all things Brian-Debbie-Gemma-Aiden. And unlike the way
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she acted on the boat, she actually seems to care this time—
especially about the part Brian’s played.
“Sneaky bastard, eh?” Casey says.
“I mean, I see why he thought it was a good idea. I just don’t see how he didn’t realize there’d be serious blowback doing
what he did,” I explain, two glasses of rosé in.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure he knew there’d be blowback. But
I’m also pretty sure he knew for as fucked up as it may all
have been, that every player in this game had the capability to cope with it in the end. You know? Like, this actually isn’t the worst thing y’all have been through. So, let me ask you this.
Now that the truth is out there, how do you feel about him?”
“Decker?”
“I was going to say Brian, but, sure, we can start there.
How do you feel about your husband?”
Like the time Monica came over and asked me about
Decker, I find myself staring out into the traffic on the 405.
Every headlight zooming down the highway looks like a
shooting star on land.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever have an answer as to why he never
told me about this. I know ‘Hey, I knocked someone up once,’
isn’t considered table conversation any more than ‘Hey, make
sure I’m cremated if I drop dead, okay?’ so I kind of get it.
But I’d like to think I was worth the whole truth. So that’s
hard. But, he was a good guy. I’ll always say that. I’ll always believe that.”
Casey clinks her wineglass against mine as I brush away
the start of a single tear.
“And Brian?”
“I think he’s an idiot.”
“Oh, good,” she says, relieved. “Then there’s still a chance
for Brilette to happen after all.”
“Excuse me?”
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“Charlotte, let me explain something to you. How do I put
it? Brian has a thing for you and you’ve got a thing for Brian.
And before you start denying that, let me tell you why. Be-
cause if you didn’t have a thing for Brian, you’d want to kill him for what he did. You would have started this whole thing
off guns blazing telling me how you never want to see or speak
to him again before I could set my In-N-Out on the counter
and unlace my Dr. Martens. But you didn’t. You were sarcastic
about the shit-day you had, him taking your money was the
last thing on your laundry list of complaints for the day, and
you just summarized how you feel about it all by calling him
an idiot, which all of us are at some point or another. Am I
wrong?” She holds up her arm, which still has the wristband
from the boat party on it, then points at me. I think she’s al-
luding to the way I acted when deboarding the ship.
“Kidding,” she says. “But it is possible to forgive and look past things. You know?”
“I just have no idea how to look past this—or deal with it
at all,” I confess.
“Do what I do,” Casey says. “Get a tattoo.”
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24
Zareen gave me two weeks off to figure out what to do with
the urn. Turns out, I made that decision in a split second. So
as the days tick on, what I really think she was giving me was
time to make some much-needed progress in other areas of my
life. Progress that isn’t as tangible as just turning his ashes over to someone else and checking this debacle off the to-do list.
The longer I am away from my desk, the more evident it be-
comes that I’m about five years into seeing the world through
a lens of how things are supposed to be, not how they are, and
that’s not sustainable. At least that’s what I was taught when
the worst thing to have ever happened to me unexpectedly
reappeared at my door a little over a week ago. No longer
can I force-feed my future to fall into place a certain way. No longer can I strip out the difficult people, the hard conversa-tions, the unplanned-for events. No longer can I pretend that
mourning and new love cannot coexist.
Since Decker’s return, it’s been a crash course in how my
computer isn’t always right. It can’t just push out a magical so-9781525805981_TS_BG_txt.
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lution to every single problem, no matter how many times I
tweak the code. Despite how badly I want it to, it can’t make
every story perfect. I echo what Brian said back in my apart-
ment: that the real world functions with an arc. That trials
and tribulations aren’t things we can program to be wiped
out or ignored. Instead, we have to find ways to accept them,
cope with them, and let them enrich the overall story. And
mine, I’m beginning to understand, is one that’s always being
written.
It’s the next day when I find myself pacing at the curb, wait-
ing for Brian’s Uber to drop him off at King Cobra. As I see
the car pulling up the ramp a few minutes later, my stomach
does a triple axel. I’ve lived my entire post-Decker life being scared of anything nonlinear. Now, I’m intrigued by what it
feels like to just go with your gut. And after talking to Casey last night, my gut said to text Brian this morning and tell him to meet me at a tattoo shop Casey recommended.
Brian shuts the door to the Uber and slogs his way over
to me, emotionless. He doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic
and I can’t blame him. I didn’t give him any details and shut
down his opportunity to ask questions via text. But between
shutting him down like a jackass, and the letter he wrote me
that revealed he was the even bigger jackass, I figured two jackasses texting back and forth about the logistics of an impromptu tattoo appointment was not the best way to ensure
we’d actually meet up here.
“Hi,” I say. “How are you?”
“Tired. Haven’t slept. What are we doing here?” he asks.
What are we doing here? It’s a good question. And if I think about it too long, I’ll change my mind. But for now, the answer I’m going with is a simple one: “I’m getting my tattoo
covered.”
My hand trembles as I hold out my arm and expose the D
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tattoo for what is bound to be one of the last times. I’ve never made the decision to permanently ink myself in five seconds
flat based off a fleeting comment from my kooky roommate,
but here we are.
“Right now? Are you sure?” Brian tips his black Wayfarer
sunglasses up to see the D tattoo a little more clearly. He looks good for a serious lack of sleep, and his gray joggers coupled
with a Clippers jersey, nothing underneath, is an excellent
look on him. Debbie said it best when she was explaining
med-school Brian: a poster child for disheveled living. But as
I look at him now, I have to admit his whole post-turning-
thirty look begs to be featured in a spread in GQ.
“Yes. Right now. You have your ID, right? They don’t let
anyone in without it.”
“Yeah. I’m just… I have questions,” he says timidly.
“And so do I. Let’s talk about them in the chair.”
Brian is staring up at the ceiling from the chair next to me.
I’m also keeping my eyes gazed at the ceiling as I can feel my
armpits sweating. A small D tattoo I got over five years ago pales in comparison to the pain I feel now with this cover-up
job. It’s like cats scratching at a sunburn but I have to stay still.
There’s no going back now. In this captive position while my
tattoo artist is jamming to the Metallica in his headphones to
stay focused, I decide it’s time to hash some stuff out. I know I should be the one who breaks the silence, but I’m not yet
sure what the first thing out of my mouth should be.
“So…you stole from me,” I blurt out in some sort of weird,
half-joking way.
Brian turns to me. His eyes wide like he got caught with
a hand in the candy jar. I immediately regret this approach,
but such is life when you go with your gut.
“Charlotte. I—”
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“Let me guess,” I forage on, trying to smooth over my
clunky start. “You ‘didn’t want me to find out this way.’ Deb-
bie used that line on me and it didn’t make anything better.”
“Clearly, yes, you read my card. I took the money. And
when I gave it to Gemma, I told her that you said you’d be
open to meeting Aiden ‘one day.’ I regret it. I was just try-
ing to handle a sensitive moment the best I could. She hasn’t
stopped asking if anything has changed on that front for years.
I should have known that one day she’d take matters into her
own hands and find out for herself what the deal was. I can’t
speak for Debbie, but that’s why I didn’t want you to find out this way. But now you have everything you need. I explained
what happened and returned your money. What more do you
want from me?”
Twenty-four hours ago, he’s right, that’s all I would have
needed. Cold, hard facts and a check that would make Deck-
er’s policy go back to looking like I thought it was for the
last five years: clean and balanced. But those things are doing nothing for me right now. I want…
“I want to know…did you take it when I locked myself
in the bathroom so I could sob alone? Or was it when I was
looking for my bra behind me on the floor?”
He cracks the bones in his neck.
“I’m not some douchebag who took advantage of a griev-
ing widow. You know me better than that. I would never do
that. But after that line was crossed, the idea just came to me.
We talked earlier that night about what your plans were as we
packed up your place, and I knew you weren’t going to touch
the funds for a while. I also knew you weren’t coming out of
the bathroom until you heard that door shut behind me. So I
just took the transfer form and put it in my pocket, not sure if I’d ever actually make the withdrawal. And now here we are.”
“Here we are,” I repeat, defeated by his explanation. “Why
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didn’t you just ask Debbie and Kurt to step in then? Everyone
knows they’re loaded.”
“I did. I went to them immediately after. They refused to
believe the kid was Decker’s. They wouldn’t even look at a
photo of him unless paternity was established, which I was
eventually able to prove,” he says.
“Wait. You did the paternity test? Debbie said Kurt handled the labs.”
“It took a while for me to find it, but I located his electric
razor in some of my old college boxes and brought it to the
lab at the hospital for testing. Debbie wanted no part of this
until things were confirmed, so I dealt with Kurt, gave him
the results from the lab when they were conclusive, and they
both have been involved in Aiden’s life since the results came
back. But by then—”
“You had already taken my money and didn’t need any-
thing from them.”
“I could have asked them for a loan, sure, and replaced your
money right away. But
I was trying to keep the spill con-
tained. This was my mess, not theirs. If I roped them into it,
I was afraid they’d already be off on a bad foot with Gemma,
and she didn’t deserve that. They didn’t know Gemma like I
knew Gemma.”
“Does that mean that you and Gemma…?”
“No, never. But I am the one who invited her to the party
at the frat house the night I’m pretty sure Aiden was conceived.
She was a couple years older than us. I met her through an
upperclassman. Thought she was cute. We talked a bit before
the party, exchanged some flirty texts. I guess she thought we
were ‘hitting it off’ or something, but I never wanted any-
thing serious. So, I ended up ignoring her at the party. Typical Brian Jackson during the college years. Anyway, next thing I
know, Decker tells me the following day he hooked up with
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‘that cool TA chick.’ It kind of surprised me, to be honest, but I just fist-bumped him and that was that.”
“That’s enough,” I say with frustration. I’m disappointed,
but I can’t tell in whom. It’s a situation wherein everyone
seems guilty, but everyone seems innocent, too. “You know,
a whole lot of shit could have been avoided if people actu-
ally talked about things instead of just covered them up with
money and lies. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ever tell me anything? I can’t even imagine keeping this kind of
a secret.”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how to tell you.
I’ve never known how to tell you. Do you think I really be-
lieve a few paragraphs and a check and some flowers actually
cut it? That that’s what you deserve after all this? Hell no. But I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’ve never really known
what I was doing here. The only guide I’ve ever had was just
trying to put myself in my buddy’s shoes in a really tough sit-
uation. What would Decker have done if he were here? He
would have helped Gemma.”
“He would have told his wife.”
“And I missed the mark on that.”
“Conveniently.”
“No. I missed the mark on that because I’m not Decker. I’m nowhere near as good as Decker. I’ll never try to claim that
I am. But I will claim that I tried to do the best that I could.
I tried to minimize the damage. Maybe it didn’t work, but I