The Truth I Owed Him

CHAPTER 2: PLUS ONE

Cleo showed up at my apartment forty minutes later with a bottle of wine in one hand and a bag of chips in the other, like this was a breakup we were nursing instead of a wound that had been sitting open for ten years.

“Okay,” she said, dropping both on my counter and looking at me like she was doing a full inspection. “You look terrible. In a hot way. But terrible.”

“Thank you so much.”

“I’m serious, your eye makeup is having a whole event on your face right now.” She grabbed a paper towel, wet it under the tap, and just walked over and started wiping under my eyes like I was a toddler who’d gotten into the markers. I let her. I didn’t have it in me to stop her. “Talk to me. What happened.”

So I told her. The scaffold. The email. The name. The two words that had taken me apart in under a second.

“Plus one,” she repeated, like she needed to say it out loud to believe it. “Okay. Do we know who?”

“No.”

“Do you want to know?”

I thought about that question longer than I expected to. Longer than felt normal, honestly, for something that should’ve had an easy answer.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “I think I want to know if it changes anything. Like, is there a version of this where I find out who she is and suddenly I feel fine? Or is it always going to feel like this no matter who she turns out to be?”

Cleo sat down across from me at the kitchen island, twisted the cap off the wine, poured two glasses without asking if I wanted one, because of course I wanted one. “I think,” she said slowly, “you already know the answer to that. I think you’ve known it since the second you read his name.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be helpful. It was supposed to be true.” She slid a glass across to me. “Drink that. Then tell me the part you’re not telling me.”

I looked at her over the rim of my glass. My sister has known me my entire life. She was there the day I came home from school crying because Noah Calloway, age twelve, had told everyone I had a crush on him, which was true, and she’d helped me plot an entirely unnecessary revenge plan involving his backpack and a frog. She was there four years later when we actually got together, and she watched the whole thing happen in real time, the way only a sister who shares a wall with you can watch something happen.

And she was there, two years after that, the week everything fell apart. She just didn’t know the real reason. Nobody did. I made sure of that.

“There isn’t a part I’m not telling you,” I said, except my voice did this thing at the end where it went up just slightly, the tiny giveaway my whole family has had since we were kids, the thing that means you’re lying and you know you’re lying and you’re hoping the other person is polite enough not to call it.

Cleo did not call it. She just looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that says I’m letting this go for now, but we both know what just happened, and then she reached for the chips instead.

“Okay,” she said. “Are you going?”

“To the reunion?”

“No, Mara, to the moon. Yes, to the reunion.”

I hadn’t actually let myself think about it in those terms yet. Going. Like it was a decision I got to make calmly, sitting at my own kitchen island, instead of something my whole body had already decided for me back in that hardware store parking lot.

“I have to,” I said.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I do, though.” I turned my wine glass in slow circles on the counter, watching the light catch in it. “There’s something I never told him. Something from before he left for school. And I’ve spent ten years telling myself it didn’t matter, that it was too late, that bringing it up now would just be selfish and pointless. But he’s getting married, Cleo. He’s about to spend the rest of his life with someone, believing something about me that isn’t even true. And I can’t, I can’t just let that happen. Not without at least trying to fix it.”

She set the chip bag down. Her face had gone very still, the way it does when she’s actually listening instead of just waiting for her turn to talk. “Fix what, exactly?”

And there it was. The question I’d been avoiding answering, even inside my own head, for ten straight years.

I opened my mouth to tell her. I really did. I got as far as “The night before he left…” before my throat just closed up on me, completely, like a door slamming shut from the inside, and I had to stop, and drink some wine, and pretend the pause was about emotion and not about the simple fact that I had never once said this out loud to another living person and I didn’t actually know if I had the words for it yet.

Cleo waited. She’s good at waiting. It’s possibly her best quality.

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “I will. I just… I need to say it to him first. Does that make sense? I need the first time I say it out loud to be to him, not to you, not to anyone else. Because if I say it to you first, I think some part of me is going to feel like I already did the hard thing, and I’ll lose my nerve before I ever actually get to him.”

She studied me for a long moment, and I watched her decide not to push, the same way she’d decided not to push about the lying-voice thing thirty seconds earlier.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “I trust you. But Mara..” she let the words hang, then continued. “Whatever it is, whatever you’re about to walk into that room and say to him, I need you to know I’m coming with you. I already RSVP’d. I’m not letting you do this alone.”

“You don’t have to…”

“I already did it. It’s done. Argue with me about something else.” She picked her phone up off the counter, scrolled for a second, and then went very quiet, her thumb stopping mid-scroll, her whole face changing in a way that made my stomach drop before she’d even said a word.

“What,” I said. “What is it.”

She didn’t answer right away. She just turned the phone around slowly and held it up so I could see the screen for myself. The RSVP list, the same one I’d been staring at on a scaffold three hours earlier, except now there was a new name on it, one that hadn’t been there before, sitting right under his.

“Cleo. What am I looking at.”

“I think,” she said, very carefully, like she was handling something that might go off, “you should look at who he’s bringing.”