Page 46 of The Interview

“One, the master suite.”

I sigh. “Fair enough. I just wish I’d known the ‘why’ behind it, then I wouldn’t have given you shit about being untidy all these years.”

“Well, now you know, you can stop giving me shit and tell me what you said to the girls.”

“I apologised for raising my voice the way I did. They asked if you were okay, and I told them you’d talk to them in the morning. I didn’t feel it was my place to tell them what Len told us. That’s your call.”

She again glances over my shoulder for just a moment and nods slowly. “I’ll tell them in the morning. Where were the boys? I thought they were coming over tonight.” Her beautiful brain goes off on one of its usual tangents.

“They messaged. Something came up for both of them. They’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell them all together,” she says before biting down on her bottom lip. I wait for her second tell—one I noticed today that Lennon has too. Sure enough, she raises her thumb and chews at the skin on the side.

I knock her hand away. “What is it?”

Her eyes meet mine again before tracking a path all over my face. “Should we tell them about us?”

“Us?” I question, unsure of what she means.

“Us. What we did when I was married.”

“You want to tell them we fucked?” I push myself up onto my palms to take in all of her.

Her thumb goes back to her teeth. Dropping back to my elbows, I again knock it away as my body presses against hers.

“Well, I won’t word it exactly like that, but yeah.”

“Why? Why would you want to do that?”

“Because I want them to know what you’ve always meant to me. I want them to know that I don’t think of you as my consolation prize. The runner-up, backup plan?—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I interrupt.

“I want them to know it’s just that I loved him first and didn’t know how tonotlove him. Then I loved you, I just didn’t know it. Then he came back and, yes, I went back to him, but that doesn’t mean I stopped loving you.”

She pauses for a moment, and a tear escapes the corner of her eye and rolls back towards her hairline. Her lips tremble as she continues.

“If it wasn’t you, I don’t think it would’ve been anyone.”

“What?”

“There was no one else but you out there for me. Not then, not now, not ever.”

“Not then?”

“First, there was Sean. Then it was you and Sean, but Sean’s dead, and I can’t tell you what might’ve happened between us if he wasn’t. But what I do know, with a million percent certainty, if we hadn’t reconnected after Sean died, I’d have remained single.”

I let out a long breath. “You don’t know that.”

“Idoknow that,” she snaps back. “And I want our kids to know that, too.”

“You don’t have to tell them you’re… we… what we…”

“That I’m an adulterer?” she questions. “No, I don’t have to, but I want to. The whole world thinks that what me and Sean had was some kind of fairy tale, and, yeah, in many ways it was. But I also want them to know that I risked all of that to hookup with you because what we had then and have now is so much more than a fairy tale. What we have is real, raw, passionate, and like it or not, it comes with an ugly side.”

“You’re not worried they’ll judge you?”

“They’re already judging me. Judging me for choosing him over you. I want to add some balance, some perspective, and explain that it wasn’t like that.”