The Husband Hour

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The Husband Hour Page 29

by Jamie Brenner


  As she trod through the sand, the idea of turning back crossed her mind half a dozen times. She didn’t.

  I have to know.

  Ethan’s delighted squeal caught her attention, and when she looked at the ocean, she saw him with her father, bobbing in the rolling waves.

  “Be careful!” her mother called out to them, hidden from Lauren’s view by the umbrella.

  Lauren stood behind the wall of chairs, unnoticed.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” Stephanie said from the chair next to her mother.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Beth put her paperback down on the beach towel, stood up, and marched to the water, calling out, “Not so deep, Howard!”

  Lauren slipped into her mother’s chair, and Stephanie nearly jumped out of hers.

  “Jesus! You scared me,” Stephanie said.

  “Let’s walk. I need to talk to you.”

  Stephanie didn’t say a word, but she left her chair with a quick glance at their parents and Ethan before following her.

  They walked north along the water, just past the first lifeguard stand. It was so miserably uncomfortable to be near Stephanie, Lauren gave up on finding a quiet spot just so she could get the conversation over with more quickly.

  “You have to tell me: Did Rory know about Ethan?” Lauren blurted out.

  Stephanie looked at her in surprise. “No! Absolutely not. I thought you understood that.”

  “Understood that? Clearly, I didn’t understand anything, thanks to you!”

  “I tried to warn you not to marry him.”

  Lauren felt stricken. She’d thought about so much in the past twenty-four hours, yet she hadn’t considered their argument in the car that day in the airport. She had been certain Stephanie was just jealous of her engagement. How could she have imagined the truth?

  “Why didn’t you tell me what happened?”

  “If I told you that I…that we slept together, would that have stopped you from marrying him? Or would you have forgiven him and hated me?”

  “If you’d told me about Ethan, I can guarantee I wouldn’t have married him.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “You say that now.”

  They stood in silence. Stephanie broke it first.

  “I never intended for this to come out. And I still hope that Ethan never knows the truth. How could I explain this to him?”

  Lauren looked at her, incredulous. “You don’t plan on telling Ethan? Ever?”

  “What good would it do? Rory is gone. It’s not like telling him the truth gets him a father. And the poor kid—his very existence isn’t just a mistake; it’s the biggest shame of this family.”

  Oh God. What had she done? By accusing Matt of knowing about Ethan and keeping it from her, she’d inadvertently given him the information. And now he had it, and he would use it.

  “Stephanie, you’re not going to like this, but…you have to tell Ethan about Rory.”

  “Lauren, please spare me a morality lecture here, okay? No matter how much I deserve it.”

  Lauren nervously toyed with the end of her ponytail. “It’s not that. I…told Matt Brio. I thought I could convince him not to go ahead with the film. But he didn’t listen to me.”

  Stephanie reached for her arm.

  “You didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “He’s going to put this in the film?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Ethan? He’s innocent in all of this, and he’s going to be the one who suffers!” Stephanie’s eyes filled with tears. Before Lauren could think of a response, Stephanie ran back to the house.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Brooklyn felt smaller and darker than Matt remembered it. And the editing suite was hot as hell.

  “Do you mind if I turn these fans up higher?” he asked the one person left in the office. The guy, plugged into his computer and surrounded by empty coffee cups, gave a faint go-ahead wave.

  Matt didn’t need coffee. The return to the city had energized him, made the Sundance application deadline feel real, made the creative pressure of finalizing the cut he would send to the sales agent crushing. No matter how many times he went through this process, it would never be easy. And there was an added level of stress to this project.

  He’d hoped that once he was back in New York, he would get some emotional distance from Lauren. If he could just stop worrying about her feelings, he would be free to make the best creative decisions for the project. But as it was, his thinking was muddled; instead of exposing the truth about Rory, cutting ruthlessly to bring his decline into sharp, dramatic view, he was pulling punches and trying to see what he could get away with not showing.

  Matt paused the footage on an image of Lauren from the Fourth of July. She was wearing a sundress; her long hair was loose and her eyes especially dark against her sun-kissed cheeks. From an artistic standpoint, her loveliness made the story all the more poignant. From a personal standpoint, it made his job nearly unbearable.

  He hit the Play button.

  “He told me it was boring—frustrating sometimes,” she said. “One day he spent eight hours mowing a lawn.”

  “Was this discouraging to him?” Matt asked off camera.

  “No. He said, ‘I had to learn to skate before I could score.’ But he did have to get through months of Ranger School, and that wasn’t easy. I think people wanted to remind him that he might have been a star on the ice, but he was a nobody there. The thing they didn’t realize was that by that point, Rory hadn’t felt like a star in a long time. And he was deeply motivated to change that.”

  “And how did things go at Ranger School?”

  “He graduated with the Darby Award. Top honors. And his decision to do this was completely affirmed.”

  “And in your mind?”

  Lauren took a deep breath.

  “In my mind, I guess something was affirmed too. The understanding that my husband was an exceptional person and that everything that was happening was part of the deal. My life with him was going to be one of high highs and low lows, and it always had been.”

  High highs and low lows. Matt paused the video. Had it really been only two days since he’d seen her? He couldn’t stop thinking about the look of anger and disgust on her face. It’s my job to tell the whole story, he’d said.

  But how far did he have to go to tell it?

  The restaurant bustled with an early-evening run-through in prep of the dinner service starting next week. Nora had put together an inspired menu that was even closer to her super-foods cooking edict than her breakfast and lunch menu: a pomegranate-glazed portobello steak, three different varieties of stir-fries, a Mediterranean vegetable pizza, her specialty garden lasagna, a mesclun and Asian pear salad.

  The one area where her menu veered toward the decadent was dessert. That was where Beth came in; it was strange for Lauren to have her mother baking in the restaurant kitchen, but at the same time, there was something wonderful about it. She felt the seams of her life knitting together, and she realized that the distance from her mother was a real downside to the way she’d lived for the past few years.

  Beth pulled her aside, her face shiny with the exertion of baking in the heat of the kitchen, and steered her to the back of the dining room.

  “Don’t you just love this?” she said, stopping in front of one of Henny’s new signs. A CHILD WILL MAKE LOVE STRONGER, DAYS SHORTER, HOME HAPPIER, CLOTHES SHABBIER, THE PAST FORGOTTEN, AND THE FUTURE WORTH LIVING FOR.

  “Wow, Mom. That’s subtle.”

  Lauren did not, in fact, love the sign. Nora was the one who loved it, but since Lauren had been helping her hang things, she’d been able to bury it in the back. She hadn’t looked at it since the day she’d nailed it to the wall.

  “I’m not trying to be subtle,” Beth replied.

  “You know what? We’re all living under one roof and no one’s killed anyone yet. I think that should be enough to satisfy you for
now.”

  The truth was she spent every day avoiding Ethan.

  He’s innocent in all of this, Stephanie had said the other day on the beach. She was right, of course. That didn’t make it any easier. Every time Lauren looked at Ethan, she saw so clearly what she had failed to see for six years: He looked like Rory. But it was worse than that; she didn’t look at Ethan and see Rory’s son—she looked at him and saw Rory.

  It was seven p.m. by the time she got back to the Green Gable. She closed herself in her room, sat on her bed, and eyed her wedding band on the floor. She had not touched it since throwing it against the wall days earlier. Now she picked it up and placed it on her nightstand.

  She thought of the vows they’d made to each other. Rory had broken his, not by betraying her with Stephanie—that had happened before their marriage—and not even by hitting her, because he had been suffering. The betrayal had been his refusal to try to fix himself so they could be together.

  In the years since his death, she’d been carrying the burden of believing she’d failed him by turning him away. Now, all the pieces added up differently. He’d known he had slept with Stephanie. And if the doctor in Matt’s film was right, Rory would have to have known he wasn’t himself after those hits to his head. And he knew he was anxious and angry after his deployment. He ran away from it all, and, ultimately, he ran away from her.

  Beth knocked on her door.

  “I just wanted to check on you,” she said.

  They sat together on the edge of her bed. Lauren looked at her hands, fighting tears.

  “I tried so hard not to let him down. To be worthy of him. And in the end, he was the one who let me down. And that scares me so much. Out of everything that happened, that’s the one thing I can’t get past.”

  “Sweetheart,” her mother said, putting an arm around her. “He was just a man. He was your husband, but that’s all a husband is. Just a man. Flawed. Infinitely fallible. The only way marriage works is to forgive and move on. And you can’t do that for the sake of your marriage, obviously. But you have to at least do it for yourself.”

  “I don’t know how,” Lauren said.

  “I think you do.”

  Lauren hesitated outside of Ethan’s bedroom. The idea that seemed to make so much sense moments ago in the safety of her own room was now terrifying. She knocked once then turned the doorknob.

  He was in bed, playing with his robot action figures.

  “Hey there,” she said.

  He looked up with a big smile. “Are you better?” he asked.

  “Better?”

  “My mom said you were sick so we needed to give you some time alone for a while.”

  “Oh! Well, yeah. I’m feeling better. But, um, we’ve kind of fallen behind on Harry Potter. How about some reading?”

  The look on his face was her answer. She walked over to his shelf to pull out the book; her breath caught at the sight of the astronomy book.

  “Ethan? Are you interested in the stars and planets?”

  “I love the planets. I’m going to be an astronaut,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, then asked, “Have you ever gone to the planetarium at the Franklin Institute?”

  He shook his head no.

  “I’ll take you,” she said.

  “Cool,” he said. Then: “Aunt Lauren?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you crying?”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  There was something calming, almost hypnotic, about watching the rings of dough bubble and bob in the fryer. And it smelled heavenly.

  Beth struggled to narrow down the doughnut options for Nora’s party. Nora had asked for three varieties, and Beth was torn between traditional with a twist—German chocolate, apple-pie, and a vanilla glazed—or summer experimental, like salty margarita, spicy chai, or s’mores.

  “Have you heard any news on the sublease?” Howard asked, startling her.

  “Don’t sneak up on me like that. And no, I haven’t. Maybe you can call to follow up this week?”

  He nodded. “I’ll take care of it. By the way, I was just in Lauren’s room. What’s with all the boxes? Is she moving out?”

  “Those boxes are from the attic. She’s putting them in storage.”

  “Great. Are you finished with the attic?”

  “No. Because I’m not going anywhere.”

  Howard ran his hand through his hair, his ultimate expression of impatience.

  “That’s the game plan? Living here for the rest of our lives with our adult daughter, raising her son?”

  “Would that be the worst thing in the world?”

  Howard sighed. “And what, Beth? You’re going to bake doughnuts for a living?”

  “Why not?”

  “And I should just…what?”

  “I don’t know, Howard. And, frankly, that’s not my concern. I gave up doing what I loved professionally to help you with the store for thirty years. Now it’s my turn.”

  Lauren piled the boxes by the front door for the storage company to pick up later in the afternoon. She headed to the kitchen for coffee but hearing her parents in a heated conversation, she turned around.

  She sat on her bed and her phone pinged with a text. Matt—again.

  He’d started texting days ago, telling her that he was thinking of her, that he was sorry she was upset but that he believed he was doing the right thing. I hope someday you can forgive me.

  Lauren had deleted them all. She wasn’t the one whose forgiveness he would have to reckon with someday. Rory had a son who was about to have his life changed forever. She could only hope the press showed some mercy. If not, Stephanie would have to prepare herself. At the very least, she had to find a way to tell Ethan the truth before the media learned it.

  She opened the top drawer of her nightstand, where a shallow glass bowl held her heart necklace, wedding band, engagement ring, and Rory’s dog tags. Storage wasn’t an option for these things, but neither was keeping them. Well, maybe the engagement ring. She couldn’t stand to part with it. It was too special. God, it was all so confusing. So much!

  “Lauren?” Stephanie knocked on the door.

  She closed the drawer. Maybe the storage people had shown up early.

  “Come in.” She looked around for her wallet so she could tip the movers. “Are the guys out front?”

  “What? No. I don’t think so,” Stephanie said, closing the door behind her.

  “Oh. I thought…never mind.”

  “I just wanted to thank you. I know you’ve been reading to Ethan again and…it means a lot to him. It can’t be easy for you and I want you to know that I understand that.”

  Lauren nodded. “Have you decided when you’re going to tell him the truth?”

  “No. I mean, before the film comes out, obviously.”

  “I hate to say this,” Lauren said, “but I think there’s someone else you need to tell. Rory’s brother.”

  “Emerson? Why?” She looked appalled.

  “He’s Ethan’s family as much as I am. And Emerson has kids—Ethan’s first cousins.” Lauren had thought about all of this during the many hours she’d lain in bed at night grappling with everything.

  Stephanie shook her head. “It’s too much. I can’t.”

  “I’ve been going through all of my old boxes because of the move. Stuff I didn’t want to deal with four years ago. A lot of it’s Rory’s and I’ve found some family photos Emerson should have. I’m going to get in touch with him anyway, so I can tell him if you want me to.”

  “Really? You would do that?”

  She hadn’t thought about the offer before the words were out of her mouth, but as she spoke them, she knew they weren’t coming from a place of altruism; she wanted to say to Emerson, See? I told you I wasn’t the bad guy.

  No, she wasn’t proud of this. But at least she recognized it.

  She did, however, have one impulse that was pure, that came from a good place in her heart. She opened her nights
tand drawer and pulled out Rory’s dog tags.

  “I was thinking that when the time is right, you might want Ethan to have these,” she said, handing them to Stephanie.

  Stephanie looked down at them in disbelief.

  “Lauren,” she said. “I can’t take this from you.”

  “I don’t feel like he’s my husband anymore. But he will always be Ethan’s father.”

  Stephanie burst into tears. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “I don’t know,” Lauren said. “But you’ll always be my sister.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  The Williamsburg bar, with its wall-mounted bicycle, exposed brick, and painted tin ceilings, was too cute for Matt’s tastes. The craft-beer list was so rarefied Matt didn’t recognize a single brand. Basically, it was as far from Robert’s Place as you could get. He missed the shore. No, he missed Lauren.

  It was still early—day-drinking early—so he and Craig got a seat at the bar. Craig ordered the beer for them both, something from the Netherlands. Matt checked his phone, a chronic and worsening compulsion as his texts to Lauren continued to go unanswered. He knew the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but he was too far gone. It was impossible to forget about someone when you saw her face on the screen every day, when you listened to audio of her voice dozens and dozens of times, until you heard her words in your dreams. Until her words and your own thoughts were intertwined.

  “You ready for the meeting tomorrow?” Craig asked.

  They were having breakfast with their sales agent. A major step toward distribution.

  “I’m ready,” Matt said.

  “To American Son,” Craig said. “Sure to be the most-talked-about doc of next year.”

  Matt halfheartedly raised his bottle.

  “Aren’t you happy with the cut?”

  Matt nodded. “Of course I am.”

 

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