The Secret of You and Me - Melissa Lenhardt Page 0,33

abashed for a split second before remembering she was mad at me and turning away with a scowl. I closed the door and leaned against it. Logan plopped down on her bed.

I put my hand on my stomach in a futile effort to calm my nerves. “I got pregnant with you in June; we got married in August before Charlie went to school.”

Logan straightened, her face lighting up with skeptical interest as if she couldn’t believe I was telling her the truth, and she expected me to clam up without giving the full story.

“You were two weeks late, which made our lie about you being a month premature believable enough.”

“Does everyone in town know I’m a bastard?”

“You aren’t a bastard.”

“Don’t avoid the question.”

“Yes, everyone in town knows. It’s not like you’re the first kid conceived outside of marriage in Lynchfield, Texas.”

“How long were you and dad sneaking around behind Nora’s back?”

“It wasn’t like that. It happened after Nora left for boot camp. She’d broken up with Charlie and...” I swallowed. Logan watched me as if she could read my thoughts, as if she could see the truth playing through my mind like a jumpy black-and-white home movie. I wanted to vomit. “She and I had a falling out before she left.”

“Over Dad?”

“No. It wasn’t an episode of Gossip Girl, Logan. Nora left us, and your dad and I... One thing led to another.”

“And you fucked your best friend’s boyfriend.”

I gasped. She hated that word with a fierce passion. “Logan!”

“Well, that’s what you did, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t the only one in the back of the goddamn truck.”

“You did it in the back of a truck?” Logan flopped onto the bed and covered her face with a pillow. I could hear her muffled voice clear enough. “I was conceived in the back of a truck. Kill me now.”

I released the doorknob I’d been gripping. Blood rushed back into my cold fingers. I sat on the edge of the bed. “I’d known your dad my whole life. It didn’t take much for us to fall in love.” I looked away, ashamed at the partial lie.

Logan lifted the corner of the pillow. “It sure sounds like an episode of Gossip Girl.”

I smiled. “It does, a little.”

She scrutinized me from beneath the pillow. “What’s the rest of the story?”

“That’s the whole story.”

“Why did Nora break up with Dad? What was your falling out over?”

I inhaled. Tread lightly. Stick to the truth as much as possible. Lie by omission. “Nora wasn’t in love with your dad, and he expected her to marry him. He had their future all planned out, and it wasn’t the future she wanted.”

“Going to Iraq and nearly dying was better than being married to Dad?”

“It was six years before 9/11. No one thought Nora would be in a war zone.”

Logan folded her pillow in half and shoved it beneath her head. “What was your falling out about?”

I took Logan’s hand in mine. Her nails were filed short, but I could feel the tiny ridges across the flat part of her nails. “You need to buff these,” I said.

“Mom.”

I cleared my throat and tried to find the words—God, why are you forsaking me?—tried to ignore the explosions of fear going off in my stomach, hoped Logan didn’t notice how the palm of my hand had gone clammy, my fingers cold. What would my daughter think if I told her the truth: I was in love with my best friend, but was too scared of the world finding out? Would she allow for how different attitudes were barely twenty years before, or would she think of me as a coward? Something must have shown on my face because Logan sat up. “My God, Mom, what did you do? Did y’all kill someone and bury them in the desert?”

My laugh sounded hollow. “Nothing like that. I’ve done a lot to be ashamed of in my life, I’m sorry you’ve witnessed more than your share, but my biggest regret was my falling out with Nora. I’ve made amends with everyone but her.”

“So, it was your fault, why she left?”

I sighed and wondered if there would ever be a time in my relationship with my daughter when she didn’t instinctually think the worst of me. I knew I’d brought a lot of her attitude toward me on myself with my binge drinking and standoffishness, but whenever I’d tried to get our relationship on a better footing, she always seemed to sidle closer to Charlie. I suspected he