The Husband's Secret

by Liane Moriarty

There would be no point asking Sarah because she was incapable of making a decision. If Cecilia asked her if she wanted tea or coffee, she would sit for a full minute, her forehead furrowed as she agonized over the pros and cons of each beverage, before finally saying, “Coffee! No, wait, tea!” A decision like this one would give her a seizure.

Planning was the key. Meticulous planning.

Anyway, it was dumb of John-Paul not to have given the letter to Doug. If he’d died she probably would have thrown out all his shoe boxes in one of her decluttering frenzies without even bothering to go through them. If he’d wanted her to find the letter, it was crazy to just shove it in a random shoe box. Why not put it in the file with the copies of their wills, life insurance and so on? John-Paul was one of the smartest people she knew, except when it came to the logistics of life.

Family life, even with just one little boy, had its own familiar rhythms, and it

was perfectly possible to keep right on dancing like you always have, even when your mind is somewhere else.

You’ve been here before. It won’t kill you. It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.

“I don’t think I would have been brave enough. I would have said, It’s not worth it. Who cares if we’re stuck behind this wall? At least we’re alive. At least our children are alive. Death is too high a price for freedom.”

Nobody ever told you that being a mother is all about making what seemed like thousands of tiny decisions.

‘A son is a son until he takes him a wife; a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.’”

She was too old, surely, for helmet-clinking and flirty little remarks like that. She was too married. But perhaps not.

Cecilia remembered with a lurch that Rachel had said today was the anniversary of Janie’s death. Did John-Paul know that? Probably not. He was terrible with dates. He didn’t remember his own wedding anniversary unless she reminded him; why would he remember the day he killed a girl?

She wanted to be falling in love, not trying to fix a broken relationship. She wanted to be someone’s first choice, not their second.

Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.

Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.”

It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn’t like country music than knowing one way or the other.

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It’s probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.