The Husband's Secret

by Liane Moriarty

Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior.

He would not pack a little overnight bag every second Friday. He would not have to check a calendar on the refrigerator to see where he was sleeping each weekend. He would not learn to think before he spoke whenever one parent asked a seemingly innocuous question about the other.

She was highly irritating, but her social skills were impeccable. For Tess, it was like watching someone play the violin beautifully. You couldn’t conceive how they did it.

impious,

Was it possible that Tess had never really thought of her mother and aunt as people, except in relation to her?

There was a certain age, Cecilia had noticed, before people stooped or trembled, but where they didn’t seem to trust their bodies in quite the same way as they once had.

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, more spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

She wondered now why they couldn’t turn to each other to share their grief. She knew they loved each other, but when Janie died, neither of them could bear the sight of the other’s tears. They’d held on to each other the way strangers do in a natural disaster, their bodies stiff, awkwardly patting shoulders.

Only Rachel’s heart had stubbornly refused to do the right thing and kept on beating. It made her feel ashamed, like the way her desire for sex had shamed her. She kept breathing, eating, fucking, living, while Janie rotted in the ground.

Because Felicity was obviously too fat to find her own husband and her own life. Was that what Tess had been subconsciously thinking? Or because she thought Felicity was too fat to even need her own life?

There was no such thing as a good divorce for children.

Even when the split was perfectly amicable, even when both parents made a huge effort, the children suffered.

“I guess it shows what you’ll do for freedom. We just take it for granted.”

“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.”

He wouldn’t be Daddy anymore. He’d be “your dad.” Tess knew the drill. Oh God, did she know the drill.

She always pretended to herself that she didn’t let Lauren help because she was trying to be the perfect mother-in-law, but really, when you didn’t let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn’t family, of saying I don’t like you enough to let you into my kitchen

She wanted to be falling in love, not trying to fix a broken relationship.

“You were trying to kill John-Paul?” “Of course not. I was trying to kill Connor Whitby. He murdered Janie. I found this video, you see. It was proof.”

It was so easy being the victim. The accusing words rolled with delightful, irresistible ease off the tongue.

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

She thought about how one of the jobs of advertising was to give the consumer rational reasons for their irrational purchases.

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child.

That was why the sex had been so good with Connor: because they were essentially strangers. It was his otherness. It made everything—their bodies, their personalities, their feelings—seem more sharply defined, and therefore superior. It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became.

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.