Page 60 of Rock Paper Scissors
“I thought it was you,” you said, wrapping the sheet around yourself. When I didn’t respond, you said it again. As if the words might sound less like lies if you said them a second time. “I thought it was you.”
Just the thought of lying can make you blush, and your cheeks turned bright red.
I’m not proud of what I did next. I wish I had said something clever, but I’ve never been good at knowing what to say until long after an event, and even now I can’t find the right words for what I saw that afternoon. So I didn’t say anything,but I did go to the garden shed, grab a shovel, then dig that bloody magnolia tree up and out of my once perfect front lawn. She left and you just watched in horror. The tree had grown bigger than me by then, but I dragged it through the front door and up the stairs, scratching the walls and leaving a trail of dirt and broken branches behind me. Then I threw it on the bed where you had slept with her, before tucking it in beneath the sheets, like a baby.
“I’ll do whatever you want to fix this. Counseling? A holiday? We could go to Scotland, like we did for our honeymoon? Anything?” you said, as I packed a bag. But I don’t think anything can fix us now. Do you?
Your wife
AMELIA
Adam still hasn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together.
He stares at the little girl’s bedroom where everything is covered in robins, looking like a lost child. Until I take his hand and lead him back out onto the landing. We stop at the top of the spiral stairs, and I point at the final framed photo on the wall.
“Who is it?” he asks, although I’m fairly sure he must know by now. Having face blindness can’t stop someone from seeing the truth.
The grandfather clock in the bedroom starts chiming and we both jump… I thought it had stopped.
“It’s you,” I say. We study the image then: the expensive-looking suit he wore for the wedding, the confetti on his shoulders, the wedding dress, the rings, the happy smiles… and someone else in the shot. “Henry is in the background. We both know he wasn’t invited, but the fact that he was there—standing on the street outside the registry office by the looks of it—along with seeing this picture onhiswall of family portraits, suggests that he thought of you as much more than just a screenwriter who adapted his books.”
Adam still doesn’t understand.
This isn’t going to be easy. But my husband needs to know the truth now, and I need to be the one to tell him.
“The woman in the wedding photo isn’t me.”
ADAM
“What do you mean?” I ask, staring at a picture of a bride and groom whose faces I can’t see.
“It’s a photo of yourfirstwedding. When you married Robin.”
We stand in silence at the top of the staircase. It feels as if we stay like that for a long time, while I try to process what Amelia has said.
“I don’t understand—”
“I think you do,” she says. “I think that even though you were married to Robin for ten years, she never told you that she was Henry Winter’s daughter. I think she grew up here and that little girl’s bedroom was hers.”
I stare at my second wife for a long time, trying to see from her face whether this is some kind of prank. But the van Gogh swirls are back, and I grip the banister for balance.
“This is insane. That can’t be true!”
Amelia shakes her head. “I know you can’t see it, but these three photos on the wall—the ones that were missing yesterday—are all of your ex-wife. This is you and Robin getting married, with a photobomb from Henry.” She points at the next picture. “Thisis Robin when she was younger, teenaged I’d guess, in a rowboat fishing onBlackwater Loch. And this”—she nods toward the final frame—“is a little girl, who looks like Robin, sitting on Henry’s lap and reading a book, while he smokes a pipe.”
My mind is racing back and forth through time, and I speak my thoughts out loud.
“This can’t be real. Henry didn’t have children—”
“The headstone in the graveyard says different.”
“Robin never wanted to talk about her family, especially her father. She said they were estranged—”
“I don’t doubt it, but I’m guessing there’s a reason why she never told you who he was.”
I study the faces in the photos again, but even now that I know what to look for, they all look the same.
“I know you can’t see it for yourself, so you’re going to have to trust me,” Amelia says. After seducing me, her best friend’s husband, trustingheris something I’ve never been great at. “I’m telling you that these pictures are all of your ex-wife. The ones of her as a little girl look the spitting image of the ones of Henry as a little boy. The likeness is uncanny. They could be twins separated by forty years, or it might be time to accept that RobinisHenry’s daughter.”
