Page 86 of Lies and Other Acts of Love
Dan was crumbling fast. And I think that’s how you know that you’re really meant for a person. When, in the trail of their crumbling, you can be upright and unwavering.
“What will we tell our parents?” he practically cried, sitting down again. “Won’t they be a little suspicious when we arrive with this child we never told them about?”
I put my finger up to my chin. “We’ll tell them the doctor thought the baby was sick, that she wouldn’t survive to term. We didn’t want them to be hurt by the news, so we never told them.”
He looked up at me, his elbows on his knees. “Will they believe that?”
I shrugged. “They don’t really have a choice because neither of us is ever, ever going to stray from that story.” I raised my eyebrows. “Right?”
“But her birth certificate...” Dan trailed off.
“Well, we’ll have to get her a new one,” I heard myself snap. I took a deep breath and whispered, “I’ll have to adopt her, I suppose.”
“You would...” Dan stood up and wrapped me in the most sincere hug of his life, the tears in his throat choking him, keeping him from finishing a question that didn’t need an answer. He already knew the answer because he knew me.
He pulled back and looked at me. “How can I ever deserve you again?”
“You really can’t,” I said. And I meant it. “But I damn well expect you to spend the rest of your life trying.”
And I can truly say that he stood by that promise.
That night is, I believe, the crux of my life. Knowing that my husband had strayed from me broke something inside me. But maybe it was something that needed to be broken. Walking away from the life we had built never even occurred to me. Raising Jean as my own was the best decision I ever made and perhaps the easiest. But those hard decisions, the big ones, the ones that really matter, have always come easily to me, especially in a crisis. I make a decision and I stand by it. Period.
And so, leaving behind most of our worldly possessions, we piled in the car before sunrise and left Bath in the dust, heading up the road toward Raleigh to take the job that the heavens had so benevolently opened for Dan two weeks prior. We had no place to live, no furniture and no idea what the future held. But we had the hurtful, shameful, family-destroying truth to hide. And we had another daughter to raise, a little white lie, a secret that would thread the seven of us together like pearls on a string forever. And, though my husband had once been the one that had made me feel that love like cream rising to the surface, it was my girls now.
And that, as it goes without saying, was more than enough.
I told myself riding into the sunrise that early morning, Jean warm and fast asleep in my arms, that Dan and I could get back to that place of love and trust where we had once resided. After the secrets were buried and a new truth was formed in the lives of our family members, we would repair that fissure and become as strong as we once were. I looked back at my four other little angels, their eyes closed, snoring in the backseat, and then I looked at Dan’s profile, the way the sun seemed to radiate off of him less glowingly than it once had. And the thought, though I willed it not to, crossed my mind:The lies that matter most are the ones we tell ourselves.
