Heart of the Matter - Emily Giffin [98]
“Where are you going?” she says, pulling the covers up over her shoulders. Her voice is hoarse, the way that it is after a concert or an evening spent in a loud bar, which is puzzling, because she is quite sure she made no noise last night.
“Downstairs,” he says.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not yet,” he says, his left hand gripping the wide mahogany banister, one of the features she loves most about this house, especially at Christmas when she decorates it with swaths of garland. “I just wanted to watch some TV?”
She nods, giving him carte blanche permission. He smiles, then disappears from her view, down the stairs. Only then, as she is left staring at her ceiling, does the weight of her actions sink in. She slept with a married man—a father of two young children. And further, she did so with her own child under the same roof, breaking a cardinal rule of single parenthood, one of her own rules that she has vigilantly followed for six years. She reassures herself that Charlie is a sound sleeper, even after days filled with much less duress than yesterday. Yet that is beside the point, really, because she knows that he could have awakened. He could have come to her bedroom, pushed open the door held shut only by a small leather ottoman and a heap of their commingled clothing. He could have seen them together, moving under the covers, over the covers, all over the room.
She must be crazy, she decides, to do such a thing. Initiate it, in fact, both the walk upstairs to her bedroom and the actual moment when it happened, the moment she looked into his eyes and whispered, Yes, tonight, please, now.
There is only one other possibility, apart from lunacy—and that is that she, too, is falling in love, although it occurs to her, with equal parts cynicism and hope, that there might not be much of a gulf between the two. She thinks of Lion, the last time she felt anything remotely like this, remembering the temporary insanity of that relationship, how she believed it was real with her whole heart and mind. She wonders if she could be wrong again. Deluded by an intense attraction, a need to fill a void in her life, a search for a father for Charlie.
But she cannot make herself believe that any of these explanations are true, just as she cannot fathom Nick making love to her for the wrong reasons—for lust or conquest or fun. This does not mean that she is oblivious to the immorality of their actions. Or to the risks—the clear and present danger of emotional ruin. She realizes, fully, that this might end badly for her, for Charlie. For Nick and his family. For everyone.
Yet she also believes to her core, that there is a chance, albeit slim, for a happy ending. That maybe Nick and his wife have a loveless marriage, and that if it ends, everyone will wind up in a better place. She tells herself that she doesn’t believe in much, but that she does believe in the essentialness of love, the thing that has been missing from her life. She tells herself that Tessa might be just as miserable married to Nick, that she might be having an affair of her own. She tells herself that their children might be better off with their parents happy and apart, than together and lonely. Above all, she tells herself to trust fate in away she has never trusted before.
Her cell phone rings from her nightstand. She knows, feels, that it is Nick, even before she sees his name light up her screen.
“Good morning,” he murmurs into her ear.
“Good morning,” she says, smiling.
“How are you?” he asks, sounding self-conscious in that universal, morning-after-first-time way.
She isn’t sure how to answer the question, how to convey the complexity of what she is feeling, so she simply says, “I’m tired.”
He lets out an uneasy laugh and says, “Well, other than being tired, how are you? Are you . . . okay?”
“Yes,” she says, offering no further explanation, wondering when she will let her guard down completely, finally spill her heart. Wondering if such a thing is even possible for her. She has the feeling that it just