I leave the bar and go back to the hotel. I have a little time before the big family dinner, so I sit out on the balcony, thinking. Then I take a long shower. I put on makeup and adjust my hair. I iron my favorite dress. I’m suiting up, putting on my armor. Only I’m not sure who I’ll be fighting. Maybe just myself.
When I get to the restaurant, I linger for a moment in the doorway of our private dining room. They’re all in there, arranged around the table like a painting. It’s not a staid family portrait this time, though, but one of those big, splashy scenes by Caravaggio or some other Baroque artist. You know the ones—set in a gambling den or tavern, filled with color and movement, capturing an assortment of thieves, brigands and loose women in the moment right before the knives come out.
Dad is at the head of the table, consulting the wine list with a baronial air, pausing from time to time to smile at the waitress fawning over his shoulder. Ana is to his left, scowling and muttering to herself as her thumbs fly rapidly over her phone. On her other side, Will’s dad is desperately trying to impress Jane by relating some convoluted legal anecdote. She’s nodding politely and playing with a large sapphire ring on her right hand, clearly wishing it was filled with poison. Mom is next to Jane—or would be, except that she’s on her knees, hair in her face, trying to stop the table from wobbling. Across from them, Gran is holding forth about the colossal stupidity of the Supreme Court while Anita is tapping her fingernails impatiently on the table, trying to get a word in edgewise.
And there’s Will, glancing at his phone, looking around anxiously. Waiting for me.
It’s so easy to see how this night could have unfolded. After the first rush of introductions and hasty conversations, everybody would relax. Settle in. Wine and food would loosen us up. Dad would charm Will’s parents. Ana would fascinate us with political gossip. Gran and Anita would manage to find common ground. Harry would tell funny stories about Will as a kid. We would begin the slow, rocky process of getting to know one another, of forging the big, messy, fractious union that surrounds every marriage.
I bet it would have been fun.
Will finally spots me in the doorway. He jumps up and comes around the table. He kisses my cheek. “Wow. You look beautiful.”
“Thanks. You look great, too.” I’ve never seen him in a suit and tie. He even shaved. He looks so handsome. I swallow hard. “Will? We need to talk.”
“Let’s get a drink,” he says. “Just you and me.”
He leads me back down the hallway and into the bar of the restaurant, where he picks a table in the corner. A waitress comes over, and Will orders a beer.
“Anything for you?” she asks.
I shake my head. It’s time to do this.
“Will, there are a few things I need to talk to you about.”
“Actually, can I go first?” He takes a deep breath and exhales it shakily. He runs his hands through his hair. “So I’ve been thinking about it all day, and … it’s kind of funny. When we were at the Audubon House this morning? The wedding became so … so real to me all of a sudden. In a way it never had been before. I knew it was going to happen, obviously, but … and all day, I’ve been thinking, you know, that …”
He trails off. He looks down at the floor and wipes his hands on his pants. “You know what? I’ll cut to the chase.” He looks directly at me. “I know everything, Lily.”
I stare at him, speechless.
His beer arrives. He picks it up and takes a long drink.
“I know you’ve been unfaithful to me,” he continues. “Repeatedly.”
My stomach drops. My face is hot. I feel like all the air in the room has been sucked up.
“How?” I ask. “How did you know?”
“I’ve always known,” he says simply. “Almost from the very beginning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lily,” he says. “You come home from ‘work’ in the middle of the night, drunk as hell, your hair a mess. You’re always floundering for explanations about where you’ve been and who you’ve seen. I see how you look at other men when you think I’m not paying attention. And some of the things you do in bed make it clear that you haven’t spent the last decade in a convent. Finally?” He smiles at me almost pityingly. “You leave your phone lying around, with that rookie contacts list of yours. I’d have to be a moron not to suspect something.”
He takes another long drink of his beer. How can he be so calm right now? I am completely at sea, until I manage to latch on to a single detail. “You figured out my texting system?”
“Two phones, totally separate,” he tells me. “It’s the only way to go.”
“Would you like another beer?” the waitress asks. He nods. She turns to me. I shake my head. I haven’t taken my eyes off Will.
“What do you mean, two phones?”
Will sits back in his chair. “That brings me to my next point.” He looks me right in the eye again. “I’ve been doing the same thing.”
I stare at him blankly.
He stares back.
“What?” I say.
“I’ve been unfaithful to you, too.”
“No, you haven’t,” I say.
“Yes, Lily. I have.”
“Is this a joke?” I say in an unsteady voice. “Some twisted way to salvage your pride? Because listen—what I do has nothing to do with you.”
“I know,” he says. “Believe me, I understand.”
“No!” I cry, a little too loudly. “You don’t understand. You can’t. You’re not me. You’re Will Field. You’re thirty-two years old. You have, like, three Ph.D.s. You work at the Metropolitan Museum of Fucking Art! You’re funny, and dorky, and sweet. You love me. You can’t be me.”
“I love you, and I sleep with other women,” he says.
“That’s impossible.”
He leans forward. I look away, but he reaches out and lifts my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. “Not impossible, Lily. True. Remember the waitress Monday night? The one you teased me about—you said she thought I was cute? She did. She gave me her number when you went to the bathroom. I met up with her the next night, after my bachelor party. And again on Wednesday afternoon.”
I pull back, but I can’t look away.
“That night, when I came back to the room and you wanted to have sex but I couldn’t get it up? I wasn’t hungover, Lily.”
“Why are you saying this?” My voice sounds small.
Now he takes my hands in his. His eyes are eager, imploring. “Because I don’t want us to lie to each other anymore! It’s killing us. I tried to tell you the truth Monday night, but I chickened out.”
Monday. The night of our long, strange discussion about the past. I thought he was pumping me for information. Not working up his courage in order to make a big confession of his own.
I pull my hands away. “I don’t believe you.”
He gazes at me for a moment, perplexed. Then he takes a phone out of his pocket and sets it on the table between us.
“What’s this?”
“My work phone,” he replies. “Quote-unquote.”
“Why are you—”
“Read the texts,” he says.
I look down at the phone. “It’s locked.”
“The code is 5459.”
I type it in. The screen activates.
“It spells L-I-L-Y,” he says. “I hope you keep that in mind, after.”
I look up at him. “After what?”
He takes the phone from me, opens the messaging application and hands it back.
“After now.”
I scroll through the log of conversations. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Weirdly, it doesn’t show the names of whoever Will was texting—only phone numbers. I open one at random. Someone writes:
—where ru
—In bed.
I click on another conversation. Someone else writes:
—whatre you doing right now?
Will responds:
—I’m at work.
—take a break.
—Impossible.
—ill make it worth yr while
—My while is worth a lot.
—haha how much
I choose another:
—cant wait to see you again
—Don’t wait. It could be dangerous.
—lol give me an hr
It’s dated yesterday morning.
The waitress places another beer in front of Will. I pick it up and take several long swigs. I start to choke. Will tries coming around the table to pound me on the back, but I wave him off.
“This is not your phone,” I gasp. “It can’t be.”
I read:
—tomorrow nite?
—How about right now?
—srsly?
—I’ll be there in 20 minutes.
“These texts are so dumb,” I say. “You’re much wittier than this. I—”
—want u to tie me up and—
No no no. No way. I check his contacts folder. It’s empty. “Why are there no names?”
“I memorize the numbers,” he says. “It’s safer that way.”
“You made this up. You doctored it somehow.”
But then I stop talking. I just clicked on a text with a photo of a girl. A redhead. She’s naked, smiling at the camera, stretched out on a bed with one hand behind her head.
It’s Will’s bed in his old apartment. I recognize the headboard.
I look up. He takes the phone from my hand. I can’t breathe. I feel all hollowed out inside. Is this actually happening? Can this really be Will?
A yawning pit has opened up below me, and I’m falling through a world that I had no idea existed. Everything is new. Everything is strange.
“There’s one more thing you need to know.” He’s scrolling through the texts. Then he hands me back the phone. He’s opened a conversation from Saturday night. It begins with a message from a Brooklyn number:
—where r u?
He responds:
—At home. You?
—club. So bored
—I’ll meet you at your place.
—haha
—I mean it.
—I cant.
…
—wait. Shes leaving.
—shes going to work. Ill be there
“Saturday night?” I say. “During my party?”
Will taps the number, and the phone dials. He puts it on speaker and sets it on the table between us. We hear the tinny ringtone through the speaker. Then someone answers.
“I said I didn’t want to hear from you again.”
I know that voice. That sharp, slightly nasal intonation. It’s the voice of a thousand late-night conversations whispered in the library over books and coffee. The voice of dozens of study sessions, when we crammed for final exams. The voice that was the first to call and congratulate me when our bar exam results were posted.
“Hello?” Nicole says. “Will?”
I look down at the phone. Will ends the call.
Nicole. And Will.
My friend Nicole. And Will, my fiancé.
The man I love.
I lunge for him across the table.
He grabs my wrists before I can claw his eyes out. “Lily!” he cries. “Stop!”
“You whore!” I scream.
I try lunging again, but he’s holding me tight. The entire bar has gone quiet. I struggle—all I want to do is get at him, to make him feel some fraction of the pain and fury that I feel right now. I want to bite and kick and scream.
“Did you know her apartment has bedbugs, Will? If you gave me bedbugs I will fucking kill you!”
“Everything’s fine,” Will says to the waitress, who’s approaching us hesitantly. “We’re okay.” To me he says, “Lily. Calm down. You can’t be mad.” Slowly, cautiously he releases me.
“Can’t be mad!” I say loudly. “How interesting. I can’t be mad!”
“Lily, stop.”
“And yet, here I am,” I say, a fresh gust of rage filling me with energy. “Feeling the teeniest bit … mad. Isn’t that odd? Isn’t that astonishing? You should put it in one of your academic papers. Assuming that you are, in fact, an archaeologist, and not a fucking garbage man!”
I lunge at his face again, but he catches me. “Stop!”
“How could you, Will? She’s one of my bridesmaids!”
He brings his face close to mine. “That’s what bothers you—the fact that she’s in the wedding party? Are you sure you want to go there, Lily?”
I stop struggling. I’m leaning toward him over the table—I try to pull back, but he won’t let go.
“You’re not angry,” he says again. “You’re surprised. You’re shocked. But you can’t really be hurt by this. Not you.”
I look at him. My fury is gone, vanished as quickly as it came. He must sense it, because he releases me and sits back warily, waiting for another assault.
But all I have left is a single question, and I ask it calmly and quietly.
“Why did you ask me to marry you, Will?”
He leans forward and takes my hands. “Because I love you.”
I pull them away. “That’s impossible.”
“Lily Wilder,” he says. “I have been in love with you since the first second I saw you. When you walked up to me at that bar and put your hand on my arm, and I turned to you, and you smiled at me? My life started. Everything that came before was … preparation. Spring training.” He smiles. “Foreplay. You walked in, and it was like the world went from black and white to color. You heighten everything. When you’re around, music sounds better. Food tastes better. You make alcohol completely superfluous. I never know what you’re going to say or do, and that’s so exciting. Sometimes I have a hard time breathing when I’m near you. I’m worried that my heart is wearing out from beating so fast. You’re smart and beautiful. We have real conversations. You’re sweet and caring and funny. I love you so much that it makes me a little crazy. And if I can’t spend the rest of my life with you, I’m going to have a really hard time figuring out what to do with myself.”
I feel my eyes fill with tears.
We’re going to sort this out. We’ll fix it. We’ll find a way.
“But I still want to sleep with other women,” he adds.
I slap him as hard as I can. The sound rings through the restaurant. All the people who weren’t already staring at us turn to look. Will says nothing, holding his burning face.
His phone is on the table. I pick it up and drop it in my bag. “I’m going back there,” I say, jerking my head toward the room where our families are waiting. “Don’t follow me.”
I pull off my engagement ring, my beautiful, romantic ring, and I set it down in front of him. Then I turn and walk away.