My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 04

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 04 – He Told Me You Knew

“He told me you knew.”

Five words, and the ground moved again.

I stood on my best friend’s frozen lawn, in the town my husband picked for me and gave to her, and I watched Mara Reyes realize she’d been lied to for six years by the same mouth that lied to me.

“He told me,” she said again, “that you knew. That you’d known since Poppy was born. That we had an

arrangement.”

I said, “What arrangement.”

“That you couldn’t have kids and you wouldn’t sign the divorce papers and you’d made him promise to keep it

discreet.”

Haughed. God, I laughed. It doubled me over. She stood there in her bathrobe with her arms wrapped around herself and let me do it, and when I straightened up my face was wet and I hated her and I could not, at that

moment, entirely blame her.

“Sit down,” she said. “Please. Before you fall down.”

I sat on her porch steps. She sat two feet away. Inside, through the window, cartoons murmured.

Here’s what came out of her in the next twenty minutes.

They met at my engagement party. Of course they did. He found her on the back deck when she stepped out to cry, because she’d just been dumped and everyone else was celebrating love. He was kind. He was so, so kind. That’s Grant’s whole weapon.

It started three weeks later. She tried to end it four times before my wedding. He told her he was going to call it off, that he couldn’t hurt me right before, that he’d tell me after the honeymoon. Then it was after the holidays. Then after my grandmother died. Then after my first miscarriage, because how could he, now, with

Nora like this.

“He’d come here and cry about you,” she said. “He’d say, ‘She’s so fragile, Mar. If I leave her she won’t survive

it.’ He made me feel like I was like I was doing something kind by not making him choose.”

“And when you got pregnant?”

Her jaw went tight. “He was thrilled. He said it forced his hand.” She swallowed. “Two months later he came back and said he’d told you. That you’d screamed and thrown things and then agreed. That you wanted a legal separation but not a divorce, for insurance reasons, and that you never wanted to meet me or Poppy. That if I ever contacted you, you’d take everything from him and I’d never see him again.”

“So you never contacted me.”

unfollowed you,” she said, and her voice cracked. “I moved. I gave up every friend we had in common. I let

girls keep seeing me but I made them swear-” She stopped. “Oh God. They know you didn’t know. They’ve always known you didn’t know.”

“They’ve always known,” I agreed.

We sat there. Two women on the wrong porch.

Then I said, “The mailbox says Whitaker.”

Mara went very still.

“You’re not married to him,” I said. “I’m married to him. So why does your mailbox say Whitaker?”

She stood up. She went inside. I heard drawers.

She came back out with a folder – the flat cardboard kind, the kind you keep documents in- and she held it against her chest for a second like she couldn’t decide.

Then she handed it to me.

Inside was a photograph. Mara in a cream dress on a beach, barefoot, laughing. Grant in a linen shirt. Poppy in a flower crown, maybe eighteen months old.

And behind the photo, on heavy paper with a raised seal:

CERTIFICATE OF MARRIAGE. State of South Carolina.

Grant Michael Whitaker and Mara Josephine Reyes.

Dated fourteen months ago.

I read the date four times. Fourteen months ago I was at my sister’s baby shower in Cleveland. He couldn’t come. Work conference. He sent a gift basket and called me at ten p.m. sounding sunburned and happy and

told me he loved me more than anything on this earth.

“He got married,” I said out loud. “He got legally married. To you. While being legally married to me.”

Mara’s face changed. She saw it a half second after I did.

“Mara,” I said slowly, “do you understand what that is?”

She shook her head, but she did understand. Her lips were white.

“That’s not an affair,” I said. “That’s a felony.”