Page 28 of Little Secrets
Whatever it is they’re doing has zero to do with romance.
Derek pulls into the parking lot and instructs her to wait in the car while he takes care of the front desk business and picks up the key cards. He’s back a few moments later.
“We’ll use the side entrance,” he says to her, and now he’s smiling, cheerful, trying to distract her from the fact that he doesn’t want the desk clerk to see her. They’ve used the side entrance every time, and it’s insulting that he still feels the need to remind her, as if she’s a child who requires consistent repetition to learn something.
They enter through the side door, Derek carrying his overnight bag, and she carrying hers. In the beginning, he would always carry both bags, and Kenzie loved the chivalry of it. Somewhere along the way, though, he stopped offering. She commented on it once, and he laughed at her.
“Come on, Kenz. You’re a millennial and a self-described feminist. You can’t be those things and then expect a man to carry your bag for you.”
Maybe he’s right, but it’s not about expectations at all, and she doesn’t know how to explain this to him without making it a bigger deal than it is. She wants Derek towantto be the guy who carries her bag when they’re entering a hotel. She wants him to be the guy who holds her hand on the sidewalk, who comes upstairs when he picks her up, who takes her to dinner at places his friends might be, who takes a selfie with her that she’s allowed to post on Instagram.
Kenzie wants him to be so many things he’s not, but she doesn’t know how to ask for them, because she’s never wanted them until now.
She knew he was rich from the beginning. She knew he was married. She knew his young son was missing. She knew he was vulnerable, ripe for an affair, and open to anything that would take the pain away. She also knew he was generous with his wallet.
He was, in short, the perfect mark.
She follows him down the hallway, wondering for the hundredth time how it all could have gone so wrong. She was never supposed to fall for him. And if she doesn’t figure out her next step soon, she’s going to fuck up the entire plan.
Chapter 11
Her nude selfie is Marin’s iPhone wallpaper.
And now, every time she picks up her phone, there are McKenzie Li’s tits. Every time she checks the time, there’s McKenzie Li’s crotch. She stares at the cherry blossom tattoo that winds its way up the younger woman’s slim torso from her hip to her breast. Marin knows next to nothing about tattoos, but even she can acknowledge the artistry, the bold fuchsias and pinks inked on in a watercolor effect. Only a twenty-four-year-old woman with a body like this could feel comfortable lying half-naked on a folding table for the hours it must have taken for a stranger to etch ink into her flesh with a needle.
The picture fills Marin with rage, and she keeps staring at it. Rage is better than sadness. Rage is better than numb. This woman is everything Marin is not, and she can only assume that’s what Derek likes best about her.
It’s nearly midnight, and Marin’s seated in a middle booth at the Frankenstein, waiting for a man to show up whose face she’s never seen, and whose voice she’s never heard. All she knows about him is that his name is Julian, and it’s apparently not abnormal for him to meet strange women in restaurants at midnight.
The Frankenstein is an old-school diner smack in the heart of theUniversity District. She used to come here with Sal back in college all the time—in fact, it’s where they broke up. Booths with scratched wooden tables and torn vinyl seats line up along the walls and down the center of the dining room, each one punctuated by a dim, low-hanging lamp. The vinyl floors are perpetually sticky from spilled coffee and pancake syrup. The bathrooms have been renovated, but they’re still disgusting, and she was forced to hover-squat when she used the toilet earlier for fear her thighs might touch something gross.
The food at the Frank is greasy and fast, the portions are generous, and the prices are low. The diner attracts a lot of homeless folk, mostly men, who come in small groups and sit quietly in corner booths sharing plates of food they often get at a discount. The owner used to be homeless himself, before he got himself clean and got himself a job; it’s a classic Seattle story, and was featured on the news, a still shot from which has been framed and mounted on the wall near the entrance. The Frankenstein also attracts shift workers from the nearby university hospital, and students from the three different colleges in the area, including the art school McKenzie Li attends.
Women like Marin don’t come to places like this. At least not anymore. A man with a half dozen rotten teeth smiles at her as he passes on his way to the bathroom, and she’s momentarily bathed in his body odor, a blend of stale urine and garbage from a life spent sleeping on the streets. Instinctively, she moves her purse closer to her on the vinyl seat. Did Sal pick this place, or did Julian?
It hurts to think about Sal, and she hasn’t even begun to process what happened between them earlier today. Almost twenty years married to Derek, and Marin’s never cheated, never even come close. She takes a deep breath, forcing the memory of the afternoon out of her head. It’s a door she never should have opened, and it’s scary to think about where she and Sal will go from here. She doesn’t want to lose him. She doesn’t know if she can survive another loss.
The longer she sits here, the crazier it seems. It’s entirely possible she’s gone off the deep end.
But any time she second-guesses her decision to be here, her phone lights up with a random notification. And every time it does, she sees the photo of McKenzie Li all over again, young and fresh and unselfconscious, smooth where Marin is wrinkled, perky where Marin is… not. She’s probably fertile, with fully functioning ovaries, ready to pop out a baby or two if that’s what Derek wants.
Andisthat what Derek wants? Another child? Because that’s the one thing Marin knows she can’t give him. Their last round of IVF used their last viable embryo, and it made Sebastian.
Women pitting themselves against other women is the world’s oldest cliché, and she’s always prided herself on being a woman who uplifts other women. Whatever McKenzie is doing, it’s still Derek’s betrayal. But Marin hurt her husband, too. If Derek can forgive her for Sebastian—and he said he has, a hundred times—then surely she can forgive him for this.
Which leaves only McKenzie as the villain in this story. She’s invested nothing, and is trying to take everything. And that cannot stand.
“More coffee, hon?”
The waitress’s scratchy voice catches Marin off guard, and she jumps a little. She’s holding a coffee pot in one hand and a water pitcher in the other, and she offers Marin both with a kind smile. There’s a spot of coral lipstick on one of her front teeth, and just like that, Marin is reminded of the waitress at the family restaurant her parents used to take her to every Sunday morning after church. That waitress’s name was Mo, short for Maureen. One Thanksgiving weekend during college, she and her parents walked into the Golden Basket. Marin asked the hostess to seat them in Mo’s section, only to watch the lady’s face fall when she relayed the news that Marin’s favorite waitress had passed a month earlier.
“I meant to tell you,” her mother had whispered as they were seated in a different section for the first time in probably ten years.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t,” Marin said. “And now I feel like shit, and so does the hostess.”
Her mother pursed her lips. “Language, Marin.”
This waitress’s faded green uniform hangs loosely on her wiry frame, and her nametag readsBETSin slanted letters. Marin wonders if it’s supposed to readBETSY, but somehow theYgot rubbed off. She blinks, realizing she hasn’t yet answered the waitress’s question.
