Page 235 of Wild Card 13

“No, I am asking. Because if a man lets my best friend think he cheated when the explanation is cousin with a migraine, I need tounderstand whether we are dealing with guilt, cowardice, or a serious vocabulary emergency.”

The laugh came then, small and painful and surprising enough that my eyes burned all over again. I pressed the heel of my hand beneath one lens.

Naomi’s mouth softened, but her voice stayed firm. “Oh, honey.”

“I hate it,” I whispered.

“I bet.”

“I hate that it matters. I hate that part of me feels relieved. I hate that part of me feels stupid. I hate that my brain keeps replaying it, telling me that if I had looked longer or asked better or let him explain, maybe I would have known.”

“Stop,” Naomi warned.

My eyes snapped to hers.

She stepped closer, coffee in one hand, her other hand reaching out to straighten the edge of my scarf with the absent tenderness of someone who had known me since before either of us had learned how to hide well. “You were eighteen. You saw something that looked awful on the same night your mother canceled on you again.”

My mouth trembled.

“That part is still true,” she said.

Dottie trotted back to us, bored by stationary feelings, and shoved her head between my knees. I looked down as she tried to force her body into the conversation like a furry mediator with no credentials. “She wants us to keep moving,” I said.

“She thinks healing is a path-based activity.”

We started walking again.

I watched Dottie bounce ahead, her leash carving a line through the soft edge of the path. “He didn’t excuse it. That’s the problem.”

Naomi glanced at me. “That is the problem?”

“Yes.” I swallowed. “I was ready for him to make it easier to stay angry.”

“Men do disappoint when they grow at inconvenient times.”

“I know.”

“But still his fault for mucking all this up in the first place.”

For eight years, that had been the fixed point. The cleanest explanation for why it had hurt so badly. Ty had chosen someone else. Ty had made a fool of me. Ty had loved me until I was inconvenient, then found a girl at a party and walked into a dark room with her while I stood there wearing the blouse my mother had bought me like a second punchline.

“I don’t know what to do with that part,” I admitted.

Naomi’s boots crunched through a thin crust of snow at the edge of the path. “You don’t have to do anything with it today.”

“I need to reorganize it somehow.”

“Of course you do. Your emotional filing cabinet is on fire.”

“That is not helpful.”

“I disagree. It is accurate and vivid.”

Dottie lunged joyfully toward a clump of snow sliding off a bench. She caught nothing, then looked thrilled with the outcome.

I took my first drink of coffee. It was still too hot, but the burn helped. “He set rules.”

Naomi’s eyebrows lifted. “He set rules for himself?”