lots to give to her, her sister and their kids. Which was nice, because Selena’s actual father was an impatient jerk—always annoyed with the kids, their noisemaking, their poor table manners, their fighting. Scolding and frowning was his default setting. He thought they were pampered, hassled Selena and Graham about their lack of discipline, their lack of scheduling, and just made himself generally difficult to be around. Then he wondered why they weren’t all closer and complained that they didn’t visit enough.
Cora and Paulo came to the car to greet Selena, Paulo giving her a big squeeze and an encouraging pat on the back, then ushering the boys inside with their luggage and big box of toys. Cora took Selena into an embrace.
“I’m sure it will just be a couple of days,” said Selena. There was a weight on her shoulders that she couldn’t shift off, a deep fatigue tugging at her brain.
“As long as you need us,” she said. “We’re here.”
Inside, they got the boys settled in the room that was just for them, another one adjoined by a jack-and-jill bath for their two cousins, Lily and Jasper. Paulo said that he’d tend to the kids, and Selena and her mother went to the kitchen, where Selena told her everything. The cheating, Geneva not showing up for work. Not the girl on the train.
“This is all just some crazy thing,” she heard herself say. “A misunderstanding.”
That could still be true, right? She pulled a tissue from the box Cora had produced, dabbed at her eyes.
Cora pulled the folds of her blue cashmere wrap tighter around her. “But he slept with her?”
Selena turned to the door to the kitchen, which her mother had pulled closed. The kids, especially Oliver, had a way of sneaking up.
“Yes,” Selena admitted. She felt her face redden, her eyes fill again. “He did.”
Her mother reached for her hand.
“But you don’t think—”
“That he has anything to do with her disappearing? No,” said Selena, a shock moving through her. “Of course not.”
But of course everyone was going to think that, if it came out. Which, it still might not. Geneva would turn up. All of this was going to be a big nothing. So what if Geneva’s car was there all weekend and she’d missed a date with her sister, hadn’t turned up for work? Maybe she’d met someone, went on a bender. It happened, right? Even to nice girls like Geneva. Who wasn’t such a nice girl, after all, was she? Sleeping with Graham, and now rumors of issues with her last employer. So, maybe Geneva was somebody else entirely than she pretended to be. That happened all the time.
“No,” Selena said again, adamant in her mother’s silence. “He’s a man-baby, not a monster, Mom.”
“No,” said her mother gently, patting her hand. “Of course he’s not.”
She thought of him standing in the shadows, that unreadable expression. Maybe Graham, too, was someone other than he pretended to be. And she, like her mother, was the incurious wife so wrapped up in work and family and the inner hurricane of her own thoughts that she missed what was right in front of her. Like that big ape dancing in the background of a video where the viewer was focused on counting basketballs. Almost no one ever saw the ape at all, so concentrated were they on the bouncing orange orbs.
“Selena,” her mother said. “Are you listening?”
“Sorry,” she said, snapping back from her thoughts.
“You need a lawyer, sweetie. You should call Will.”
“I already did,” she said. “He’s meeting us in an hour.”
Which hurt. It hurt to call him, her kind, handsome, successful criminal defense attorney ex who was a loving, faithful guy. Right. Why would she want to spend her life with someone like that?
Her mother pushed a strand of her gray-blond bob behind her ear, looked down at the table between them.
“When I look back on the mistakes I made in my marriage, I’m ashamed,” she said. “I thought I was protecting you girls. I turned away from the truth, made excuses for a man who didn’t deserve it.”
“I’m not doing that,” said Selena. She didn’t like how defensive she sounded, felt. “I know who he is.”
On the kitchen counter was a framed portrait of all of them—Selena, Graham, Stephen and Oliver, Marisol, her now ex-husband Kent (another cheater), Jasper and Lily. It was last Christmas. They were all relatively intact less than a year ago.
“Those days, you tried to stay together for the children,” she said. “But