My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 12

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 12 – The Call

stared at the phone for four rings.

I want to be honest about this. Everything in me said don’t. She was the maid of honor. She was the green dress at my engagement party. Whatever Grant told her, she made choices for six years, and some of those

choices were mine to pay for.

I answered on the fifth ring.

–

“Nora.” She was breathing wrong. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to call you. I don’t have there’s nobody else-”

“Where’s Poppy?”

“Asleep. I can’t I can’t drive, they said don’t drive-”

“Unlock your front door and sit down,” I said, already pulling on jeans. “I’m ninety minutes out. Call 911 if it

speeds up.”

I drove to Ridgefield at four in the morning for the second time in my life.

The ambulance beat me there. I got Poppy-warm, boneless, three years old, smelling like baby shampoo – out of her bed and into a car seat and followed the flashing lights to the county hospital, and at 7:12 a.m. I was standing in a delivery room holding my husband’s mistress’s hand while she screamed.

His son was born at 8:04.

Six pounds, one ounce. Dark curls. Those eyebrows.

Mara looked at me over the top of his head and said, “You didn’t have to come.”

“I know.”

“Why did you?”

I thought about it honestly, because she deserved that.

“Because if I didn’t,” I said, “he’d still be running things. He’d be in prison and still deciding who’s allowed to be

in a room with who.”

She cried. I cried. The nurse, who clearly thought we were sisters, said we had a beautiful family, and Mara and I laughed so hard she pulled a stitch.

We are not friends. I want to be clear. We’re something with no word for it.

We text about school pickup and pediatricians. She sends me photos of the kids maybe once a month, and I look at them, and it still costs me something, and I look anyway. She named the baby Theodore. Not after anyone. She said she was done naming children after people.

She testified in the fraud case. She didn’t have to. Her testimony is a big part of why the restitution went

through.

She sold the blue house on Winslow Street – it was in his LLC, which the court unwound, and she got what was legitimately hers and not one dollar more, and she signed the paperwork without fighting. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment now and works front desk at a dental office and she is, by her own description, “ppor

and sleeping great.”

Last summer she sent me a photo of Poppy at a splash pad, and underneath it she wrote:

She asked me today why Nana doesn’t call anymore. I told her some people love you like a secret and that’s not real love. Learned that from you.

I sat in my car in a grocery store parking lot and cried for ten minutes.

Then I drove home to my grandmother’s house.

Because that’s the other thing that happened.