My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 02

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 02 — Everybody Knew
I don’t remember sitting down. I remember the floor being closer than it should have been.

“Say that again.”

Jules was shaking. “Nora, I’m so sorry—”

“Say it again.”

“Poppy,” Cassie said quietly. “Her name is Poppy. She’s three.”

Poppy. Like a flower. Like something you’d embroider on a onesie. I had a onesie in a drawer upstairs that I’d never taken the tags off of, from the third time, the time I made it to nineteen weeks.

“Whose is she.”

Nobody wanted to be the one. They kept looking at each other, doing that silent hot-potato thing, and I understood that they’d had this conversation before. Not tonight. Over years. What do we do about Nora.

“Grant’s,” Dana finally said.

I laughed. It came out horrible. “Okay. Okay, so my husband got Mara pregnant. When? When did it happen?”

Silence.

“Cassie.”

“It didn’t happen,” Cassie said. “It’s not — Nora, it wasn’t a mistake. It’s not a one-night thing. They’re together.”

“Together.”

“They’ve been together since your engagement party.”

I want to describe the feeling but I can’t. It’s not pain. It’s more like all the furniture in your head gets rearranged in one second and you can’t find the door.

My engagement party. Six years ago. Mara wore a green dress and gave a toast and made everyone cry. Grant hugged her at the end of the night and I remember thinking good, my two favorite people, they finally like each other.

“He married me,” I said. “He married me after that.”

“We know.”

“You were at my wedding.” I was looking at Dana, who did my hair that morning. At Jules, who held my dress up in the bathroom stall. “Mara stood next to me in a lavender dress and read a poem about how I deserved to be adored.”

Dana started sobbing.

I stood up. “How long have all of you known?”

Nothing.

“HOW LONG.”

“From the start,” Cassie said. Her chin was up, and there was something almost defiant in it, which I did not expect and will never forgive. “From the start, Nora.”

“Then why—” My voice broke in the middle. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

And here’s the answer. Here’s the thing I’d give a lot to unhear.

“Because we all thought you’d figure it out,” Cassie said. “And when you didn’t, it just — got too late. And then Poppy came, and Mara was so happy, and she’d already lost so much, and we didn’t want to be the ones who blew up a little girl’s whole family.”

A little girl’s whole family.

Not mine. Hers.

I looked at the three of them and I saw the shape of it, finally, the shape I’d been living inside without knowing. All those group texts I got added to late. The birthdays where the photos looked like the party had started hours before I arrived. The vacation I couldn’t go to because of work, the vacation everyone was weirdly quiet about after.

Two lives. Two calendars. Two women. And a whole village of people cheerfully managing the schedule so the wrong one never bumped into the right one.

I’d been the guest at my own marriage.

“Where does she live,” I said.

Cassie shook her head. “Nora—”

“WHERE.”

“Ridgefield,” Jules whispered. “About ninety minutes.”

Ninety minutes. My husband’s “client site.” My husband’s “cousin’s cabin.” My husband’s Tuesdays and every other Saturday and half of every holiday since the year we got married.

I told them to get out. I said it very calmly. Dana tried to hug me and I stepped back so fast I hit the counter.

At the door, Cassie turned around. “Nora. Don’t do anything tonight. Please. Just — think about Poppy.”

“Get out of my house,” I said.

I locked the door. I threw up in the kitchen sink. Then I sat down at my laptop, opened our joint bank account, and typed Ridgefield into the search bar of five years of transactions.

Six hundred and eleven results came back.

And the first one was a mortgage payment.