Lauren knew where Nora kept her extra house key, under a loose board on the back deck. But she had one stop to make first.
Her phone had pinged all morning with texts and voice mails from Matt. She’d finally checked them just to see if he’d figured out that she’d taken some of his interviews. Apparently, he had not.
Whatever happiness she’d felt after her intimacy with him was destroyed. All she could think about was the fact that he’d known about her sister’s betrayal and kept it from her. She wanted to give him just the tiniest benefit of the doubt that he hadn’t figured out the truth about Ethan, but why else would he have filmed him?
She knocked on the door, and he opened it wearing headphones.
“Hey! Where did you run off to? I’ve been calling you all day.” He hugged her and she recoiled. Had it really only been a few hours since she’d left that room? She looked to the corner where Stephanie had sat for her interview and wondered if her sister had hesitated, even for a moment, before making her confession.
Lauren just didn’t understand it. Stephanie had seemed so upset, so shocked, when Lauren confronted her. What did she think was going to happen? Maybe she hadn’t meant to spill it. Stephanie had always been bad with impulse control.
Lauren glanced at the wall. The index cards were gone.
“What happened to all your work up there?”
“I’m packing.” He moved closer to her. “Are you okay?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Stephanie?”
To his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about.
“Aw, shit,” he said. “Come here—sit down.” She hesitated but then let him steer her to his desk chair. He sat opposite her on the edge of his bed. “Lauren, I’m just supposed to be an observer. I’m not in the business of getting involved in other people’s lives.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” she said.
“Did Stephanie talk to you? What happened?”
“I took your files, that’s what happened. I watched the second interview.”
He shook his head. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I bet.”
“Lauren, the last thing I wanted was to see you hurt any more than you’ve already been hurt.”
“And you think letting me live with this in my face every day, oblivious, was doing me a favor?”
She looked up at him. He reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about what Stephanie said in the interview. But on a professional level, it’s not something I would do. And on a personal level, it’s not something I wanted to do. Rory is gone. There’s no point in you feeling betrayed because there’s no way to litigate this, no resolution. It’s over.”
“Over? How is it over with Ethan in my life?”
“I don’t follow.”
“For God’s sake, Matt. Stop playing games with me!”
“Lauren, I truly don’t know what you’re talking about. I am not playing games with you.”
“What would you call it? Pretending to be my friend, sleeping with me, all the while knowing that Rory had a son with my sister?”
“What took you so long?” Beth said, ushering Howard into their bedroom and closing the door.
“Beth, it’s the middle of the summer. The turnpike was a parking lot. Why were you so vague on the phone?”
“I wasn’t vague. The word crisis isn’t vague. We have a crisis,” she said, deliberate in her use of the we. If there was ever a time they needed to be a unit, it was now.
“What’s the problem?” he asked impatiently, his hands on his hips.
She sat on the bed and picked up a framed photo from her nightstand: her mother with Stephanie and Lauren when they were little girls. She started to cry.
“Beth, for God’s sake, what is it? You said the girls are okay?” Alarmed now, he moved closer to her.
“Yes, yes.” She sniffed. “Physically, I mean. But the rest…I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Just out with it,” he said.
“They had a terrible argument earlier, and I tried to intervene and then Lauren said…she said…”
Howard sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Beth, you can’t force those two to be best friends. Maybe not even friends. Haven’t I been trying to tell you this?”
She shook her head, pressing her fingers to her temple. “Lauren said that Rory is Ethan’s father.”
Howard shrank away from her.
Beth hated to tell him, hated for him to know what a terrible, unforgivable sin Stephanie had committed. She wished that she didn’t know. But when she looked at his face, she didn’t see shock or dismay…not even a little surprise.
“Did you…know about this?” she said.
Howard walked to the patio doors and looked out at the ocean. “Why do you think I was so against your plan to force the two of them—and Ethan—here under the same roof all summer?”
Beth jumped up. “You knew about this and you kept it from me? How? How did you know?”
He turned around. “Stephanie confessed to me after Lauren and Rory got engaged. She panicked.”
“Why didn’t she talk to me? Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“She thought you would side with Lauren and that you would hate her. And she was terrified of Lauren finding out the truth. I gave her my word that I wouldn’t tell a soul, including you.”
Beth covered her mouth with her hands and began to pace. So many things that hadn’t made sense over the years started to come together. Stephanie’s refusal to talk about Ethan’s biological father. Her boycott of Lauren’s wedding.
“You should have told me.” Beth marched over to him, forcing him to look at her. “You didn’t tell me about the second mortgage on the house. You didn’t tell me about this. We clearly haven’t been partners in a very long time.”
He shook his head sadly. “Let’s not make this about us.”
Beth fought back tears. “Isn’t it, though?”
“No,” he said. “I think our problems are our problems and this is something else entirely.”
“Fine. So what do we do now?”
“The only thing we can do,” he said. “We have to put our issues aside and be parents.”