Page 3 of The Secrets We Hide
The barrage of information was too much to process. Emmy looked for Cole again. He was talking to Celia. Jude was being dragged away by Aunt Millie. She watched the old woman motion for Jude to lean down to share a confidence. Emmy found it strange that Millie turned tight-lipped when anyone asked her about Jude. There was clearly a history between them that neither was inclined to share. Cliftons loved gossip so long as it wasn’t about them.
“Good Lord God, this heat is something else.” Taybee fanned her hand in front of her face. Her eyes darted around, desperate for someone who could hold a conversation. “Doesn’t feel a bit like fall.”
Emmy forced a noise from her throat that sounded like agreement. Taybee had never been good with silences. She smoothed back her blond hair, which hadn’t moved since she’d rushed Alpha Delta Pi at the University of Georgia thirty years ago. She looked so well put together that Emmy shuddered to think of the contrast.
Taybee gave Emmy’s arm another three pats. “We should get this thing moving back to the farm. Why don’t I start shooing people down the hill?”
“Yep.”
Emmy figured she could lead by example and started toward the zigzagging sidewalk to the parking lot. She had no memory of making this same trek on the day they’d buried her father. Law enforcement officers from the tri-state area had covered the cemetery in a sea of uniforms. The governor had attended. A sitting United States senator. Local politicians. News reporters. Emmy had felt like an imposter wearing her father’s sheriff’s star. Her dress uniform had been so starched she might as well have worn a cardboard box.
Now, she felt wobbly in the high heels she’d borrowed from a cousin. The label on the dress she’d bought at the outlet store yesterday morning specified hand-wash only, but she’d tossed it into the machine last night and hoped for the best. The best had not happened. Her hip bones felt chafed from the scratchy poly-ester blend. Every time her arms moved, the zipper bit into the back of her neck like a stinging wasp.
“Em?”
Her ex-husband was wearing a navy suit with a stained blue tie and black cowboy boots, the same outfit he’d worn to her father’s funeral, and the same suit that had been hanging in the closet when she’d left him twelve years ago. Jonah Lang’s smile had the slippery ease of a man who was stoned out of his mind.
Emmy looked for his truck in the parking lot. “Did you drive here?”
“I showed up for our son like I always do.” He left out the fact that he was three hours late. “I don’t know why, but Cole loved the old bitch.”
Emmy bit her tongue.
“You cleaned up nice.” Jonah took her in, head to toe. “Good to see you dressing like a woman for a change.”
Emmy tasted blood on her tongue. The horrible part was that she knew he meant it as a compliment. Even worse, for almost the entirety of their marriage, she would’ve seen it that way, too. “Cole’s back up the hill.”
She continued the trudge toward the parking lot. The feeling of wrongness flowed back into her body. She was missing something. Doing something wrong. Forgetting something important. Jonah wasn’t the reason, but he certainly hadn’t helped.
Emmy had just buried her mother. Her father was dead. Her prodigal sister had wooed away her son. Her brother had ghosted his own mother’s funeral. Her sister-in-law looked ready to pop some champagne. Her ex couldn’t go five minutes without getting high. She was forty-two years old, and she was sleeping in her childhood bedroom with her son down the hall and her sister on the couch, and she was worried about losing her job to a man who thought his Y chromosome made him more qualified than the woman who was already doing the work.
She took a detour from the parking lot and walked toward the stand of oaks in the corner of the cemetery. Emmy had caught a flash of strawberry-blond hair during the service, but she wasn’t sure until she rounded the bend that the sun hadn’t been playing tricks.
Hannah Collier was sitting on the ground with her back against a tree. She was dressed in black but had wisely chosen Nikes instead of heels. A wadded-up tissue was in her hand. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying.
She saw Emmy and laughed. “Fucking Myrna. She finally found a way to make you wear a dress.”
Emmy laughed, too. Then she sat on the ground across from Hannah. She let out a long, slow breath. Her shoulders relaxed. Her heart stopped shaking. Some of the wrongness began to seep from her body.
She had met Hannah the first day of kindergarten. They had become instant best friends, grown up together, practically lived at each other’s houses. Hannah had been the first person to hold Cole. Emmy had been the first to hold Davey, Hannah’s son. Then Emmy had made a huge mistake and years later Hannah had made a huge mistake of her own, and now they were both sitting on either side of a rift that neither of them knew how to heal.
Hannah asked, “I wonder who Father Nate was talking about? She sounded like such a gentle creature.”
Emmy laughed again. “I was trying to remember which book you accidentally dropped in the bathtub that time.”
“The Great Gatsby. Myrna threw her sandal at my head when she found out.” Hannah touched her fingers to her scalp, thoughMyrna’s aim had been off. “Remember when you scratched her car with your bike?”
“I remember whenyouscratched her car and told her I did it.”
Hannah shrugged. Water under the bridge. “Where’s Big Dyl?”
Emmy was about to say it was complicated, but the explanation for why her eight-year relationship with Dylan Alvarez had fizzled was actually very simple. “I pushed him away when Myrna started to spiral. I tried to go back, but he couldn’t trust me to stay. So that’s the end of it.”
Hannah looked surprised—not by the reason, but by the candor. “I hooked up with a guy I met in the self-help section at the bookstore.”
Emmy grinned, because that was the most Hannah of Hannah stories.
“I dunno, Em. I was lying in bed after, and all I could think about was how much nicer it would’ve been if I didn’t have to listen to him breathe.”
