do with him, but having been a child on the receiving end of that kind of rejection made her sensitive to its repercussions. She was happy for them that he cared enough to come east for a while. She admonished herself for feeling something positive about Carson when, as if on cue, he admitted his real reason for staying.
“I need to hide, and I can’t run away to Europe right now.”
Any shred of compassion was wiped away.
“Do you realize the damage you’ve done?” Amanda asked, her voice rising. “Not just to our family, but to the women, the women you abused?”
“Do you think I need to hear this from you, Amanda?”
She laughed at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t think I have a right to be angry? Your infidelity is the least of it. You don’t see that I have been abused all these years, too?”
“Me too! Me too!” he shouted, mocking her.
“I’m married to you, Carson. It wasn’t supposed to be ‘me too’; it was supposed to be just me.”
“You knew who you were marrying. It’s not like I’m Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. It was all consensual! I’m the victim! I got caught up in this witch hunt.”
“You know better than to say it was consensual, and it’s not a witch hunt! The witches were innocent, and you didn’t get caught up, you just got caught, period.”
“Powerful men have been facing these allegations for years, but all of a sudden it’s a life sentence?”
She could barely wrap her head around everything that was wrong with what he was saying, but standing in the foyer of the house she had grown up in, having moved her kids across the country, she felt brave. She felt responsible to show this man, her husband, who had hurt so many women under her nose, the pain he had inflicted. She collected herself and gave it to him.
“You are not owed a second chance. That is the same sense of entitlement that led you to believe that you could treat women as you did, treat people as you did, treat your wife, who loved you and gave you two beautiful children, as you did. You will never change until you understand what your words and your actions do to people.”
There was something so strange about having the upper hand, having the truth and the public on her side. She opened the door again and said, “You are a disgrace. Please leave my house, and don’t come back unless you are invited—by me.”
He left. Amanda wanted to think with his tail between his legs, but the truth was, he hardly even heard her. She ran across the street to tell Eliza, just as Luke was getting home from his office. They entered the kitchen at the same time, both equally agitated. Amanda took the back seat to Luke; she had never seen him worked up before.
“Eliza, is there something you want to tell me?”
She shot Amanda a look of panic before turning back to her husband and shaking her head no.
“A new patient named Shari Livingston came in today. She said she got my name from the bulletin board.”
That’s nice, Eliza and Amanda both thought, wondering what the problem was.
“Have you heard of her?”
“No, but our membership has nearly doubled this year, I can’t know everyone,” she said proudly.
“What about her husband, Hank Livingston?”
“No. What’s going on, Luke?”
“When I looked in this poor woman’s mouth and commented how perfect her teeth were, she burst into tears. She said she had just moved from the city, just had her teeth cleaned, but she was worried that her husband was cheating on her and heard that my wife might know if it were true. Do you know if Shari Livingston’s husband is cheating on her, and if he is—how the hell do you know that?”
“Oh boy,” Eliza said and sat down at the kitchen table. How many suspicious wives was she torturing right now? She felt like an even bigger snake than she had before.
“Maybe I should go?” Amanda piped in, feeling that painful awkwardness of witnessing another couple come to blows.
Luke’s tone was unusually indignant. “Maybe you should sit down, too. I have a feeling you know all about this.”
They both flashed back to being sat down together in the same kitchen by Eliza’s mom—she may have even used those same words. Eliza recalled a chocolate stain on the couch; Amanda, a couple of cigarettes missing from Birdie’s pack of Virginia Slims. Suddenly,