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  Nina was correct. There had rarely been an occasion over the ten years I had known Layne that she hadn’t utilized to recognize herself, even celebratory moments for others. Even during our courting stage, Layne had shown signs of the preferential treatment she bestowed on herself, and it outweighed her generosity toward me.

  When she treated me to my first theater experience, the show wasn’t a well-known production. Though I was mesmerized by the costumes, the singing, and the dancing, the musical was second-rate. The week after, she and her parents saw a play that had been sold out for months, well before its arrival in Chicago. Layne had even trumped me with our wedding rings, mine a 3.5-carat emerald-cut solitaire, hers a 4.0-carat. I never minded Layne’s personal extravagances. As a woman who grew up without even one concert attendance and only costume jewelry, who was I to complain?

  “So, what? Are you the better that she treated herself to?” I asked in response to Nina’s comment.

  Nina placed a pecan-colored hand on mine. Her skin was warm. I didn’t move away that time.

  “I’m not better than you, not in any way,” she said, trying to comfort me.

  “This still makes no sense,” I blurted, unable to understand Layne’s betrayal, Nina’s presence next to me, and why I liked her touch.

  “Right now I know it doesn’t. Maybe in time it will,” she offered.

  Nina’s words were no consolation. I had hoped she could offer details about Layne that I hadn’t known. My most pathetic of inquiries was whether or not Layne had ever truly loved me. Even though Nina had promised that Layne did, I realized it proved nothing. Nina could declare that Layne cherished our love and commitment, and still that made no sense given the fact that Layne cheated on me for seven of our ten years together. She could have deceived me for the rest of our lives, and I wouldn’t have known about it. The only solace I had was I had read every single page of each of Layne’s journals, and her last entry was the only hint that her years of double-crossing might have been coming to an end. I wondered if Nina knew what Layne had written the night before she died.

  “Nina, when was the last time you talked to Layne?” I asked.

  She hesitated before she spoke. Her breathing seemingly halted once again, as it had when I stated my name on the phone with her that morning. Finally, she sighed, and my stomach began to tighten with nervousness.

  “She was on her way to my house when she was hit by the car.” Nina’s voice shook as she spoke, her tone suddenly unsteady and her words seemingly uncertain. “I’ve felt so guilty for so many reasons. For having the affair in the first place, for taking her away from your family, and if it weren’t for me, she’d still be here.”

  She bit her bottom lip to control its shaking. A tear fell from each eye and created identical droplets on the wooden table surface. With the answer to that one question, Nina had flipped from abetting mistress to guilt-ridden sinner. Was I, the pained, confused widow, supposed to console the fascinatingly beautiful philanderer at my side?

  I had to admit, I couldn’t control the pendulum sway of emotions that dominated my being while she was there. I wanted to despise her and be repulsed by her presence, though silently I was intrigued by all that she might be able to offer me: an after-the-show, behind-the-scenes peek into Layne’s curious obsessions and passions. Maybe at the same time Nina would lead me to the unwritten climax of Layne’s story: the vacant journal entry she had yet to write. The one she would have written in oversize, loopy penmanship, as her spirit might have been lighter and freed at that point.

  “Nina, I’m afraid I forgot about something I must tend to,” I told her. “I would, however, like to see you again, if that’s okay with you.”

  Like piercing sun rays through clouds on a dim day, golden glints sprouted throughout her dark brown eyes. “Yes. I’d like that.”

  We both stood. I tasted her, that musky part of her, through the breeze in her movements as we walked to the foyer. I retrieved her coat, which she draped in the bend of her arm. The house seemed warm once again, no longer swirling with chilly, melancholy memories of the dead, but rather the heated thrill of a chase to solve an unsolved mystery.

  Nina abruptly turned to face me before she stepped outside. The skin above her top lip perspired lightly. “When should I expect to hear from you?”

  “Soon.”

  The left side of her open mouth twitched, and an anxious grunt escaped her lips. She covered it with a delicate smile. Her eyes, still highlighted by light bronze speckles, revealed her piqued interest. “Yes, soon, okay. As odd as it may sound, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, Taryn.” Nina stared into my eyes. “You are exactly as I had imagined.”

  “Have a good day, Nina.” Slowly, I began to close the door, forcing her to step outside. I wasn’t yet prepared to confess that she was everything I had imagined and dreamed about so many nights after reading Layne’s journals.

  “Same to you.”

  Nina took the five concrete stairs carefully, the horseshoe-shaped muscles in her calves accentuated with each step. With the front door closed, I watched her through the peephole. The lights on her Mercedes flashed when she unlocked the door via remote. Nina opened the door wide, tossed her coat onto the peanut butter-colored leather of the passenger seat, and sat sideways in her own seat before placing her right and then left leg inside, graceful and trained, like she had attended etiquette school. She retrieved black sunglasses from the overhead built-in holder and placed them over her eyes before she started the car and closed the door. I could no longer see her through the heavy tint of the windows. Slowly, she drove away, exiting opposite the entrance to the half-moon-shaped driveway.

  I turned around and leaned my back against the door. After several minutes of internal debate about what to do next, I returned to the kitchen and retrieved my cell phone from the counter.

  “I need to see you,” I told him when he answered.

  “I’m always available for you,” he responded.

  “I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone, then took the stairs to my bedroom, where I grabbed Layne’s journals. I stuffed them all inside a tote, snatched my car keys off the dresser, and left my suburban home for the South Side of Chicago.

  Chapter Three

  He was the only friend I had, and next to Jimmy, he was the most significant man in my life. Layne hadn’t known about him. I had not mentioned the friendship in order to protect him, not in an effort to deceive Layne. To guard his identity, our meetings remained in the neighborhood in which I grew up.

  I drove the dusty, busy streets of some of Chicago’s most dangerous communities until I reached my destination. I pulled into the near empty parking lot, which would be congested with everything from old Cadillacs to shiny new BMWs on Sunday. The smell of freshly cut grass greeted me when I exited my Jaguar with the tote bag of Layne’s journals in my hand. I admired the perfectly lined grass edges as I walked to the large, front doors made of bronze-tinted glass.

  Inside the air was fresh, as cleaners were prepping the church for services the next day. I headed toward the pastor’s office. His assistant, Cassandra, was making copies at the large printer.

  “Ms. Dawes, good to see you. He told me to let you right in.”

  “Thanks, Cassandra.”

  She led first down the short hall to his office. A large painting of him hung just outside his door. She knocked, opened the door, and closed it behind me after I stepped inside.

  He stood up from the leather chair behind his desk, dressed in light gray pants and a matching vest with a blush-pink oxford shirt underneath. His presence was an attention grabber. He was noticeable at six feet four, he was still fit from his former track days, and he always dressed in expensive tailored suits. His thick black hair had begun to gray around the edges over the past year, whitening since the day Layne and I took Jenna to Spelman for her second year. Ron had sat across from me, Jenna, and Layne in a restaurant as we had brunch the morning before we left. He was just another pa
tron at the restaurant to my family, an elegantly dressed man at our side. Only I knew the reason he sat at a nearby table, sipping coffee with one of his deacons.

  “Taryn,” he called as he walked toward me. He greeted me with a firm, full kiss to my cheek.

  “Hi, Ron.”

  “Here.” He pointed to one of the seats in front of his desk.

  Ron and I had reconnected nine years prior, after ten years of silence. He had been a tricky young man, too handsome and clever for his own good. He had never fallen prey to the streets of our neighborhood, because he had been too busy preying on girls and women.

  Ron had known at the time that I was pregnant with Jenna. He had seen me once as I entered my third trimester, my stomach round and swollen like a bubble. I had bumped into him at the corner store on a run to buy Grandma a bottle of vinegar for the douche bag she left hanging in the bathroom. Ron had had his arm wrapped around the shoulders of Sade, a bubble gum-popping junior I went to high school with. He left her at the counter and approached me as I searched the shelves.

  “I see you knocked up.” He took a swig of the pop Sade had just paid for.

  I rubbed my belly. “Yep.”

  He cocked his head sideways. “So who’s the daddy?”

  I had wanted to throw every bottle of vinegar at his head after that question, but that was too much like my father and I knew better.

  “It’s your baby.”

  He peeped over his shoulder to be sure Sade hadn’t overheard. “You sure, shorty?”

  “I was only with you when I got pregnant.”

  He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “All right then. Let me know when you pop. I’ll bring some milk and bottles and diapers and shit. Cool?”

  I accepted Ron’s offer, but I was too shy to follow up with him after I gave birth. One day, when Jenna was three months old, I was sitting on my front porch with her on my lap. She was drooling and her small, delicate fingers were balled into wet fists when I saw Ron turn the corner onto my street. He was driving a Pontiac Grand Am, a hand-me-down from his parents. With his window rolled down, he and one of his buddies, Eddie, peered at me and Jenna sitting on the creaky wooden porch. Ron held up his first and second fingers in a “V” peace sign formation and rolled past us without a word. After that, I never saw him on my block again. Grandma had insisted I didn’t need “that nothin’ boy,” anyway.

  He became a pastor at a young age, when he was thirty-one, and it was soon after that that I stumbled upon him in Jimmy’s office, while they discussed how the church could be of service to the community center and vice versa. Initially, he didn’t recognize me, but I knew who he was, and as the father of my beloved Jenna, I saw her features in his face instantly. As the three of us talked, I noticed his demeanor quieted and he stared at me intently. He broke into an uncontrollable cough the moment he realized who I was.

  He was relieved when Jimmy told me I would be in charge of developing the program that would serve some of the troubled youth in his congregation. He handed his business card to me. “Please call soon,” he requested, urgent desperation in his voice. Because of the center’s partnership with the church, my meetings with Ron had never come off as questionable or suspicious.

  Ron was head pastor of one of the largest, most influential churches in the city. He had married a woman slightly older than him and had a family of his own. No one had ever found out that Ron had fathered a child as a young man, at least no one aside from Grandma, my parents, and the two of us. I had never sought any aid from him, and even if I had wanted to early on, I wouldn’t have known where to find him. By the time we met again, I was with Layne, living the same high-class lifestyle that he was.

  During our first one-on-one meeting, Ron delivered a plethora of apologies. He explained that he hadn’t forgotten about me and Jenna and had often wondered how we were. I showed him pictures of Jenna, which brought tears to his eyes. He immediately began sending monthly payments to me, which I kept with the inheritance I had received from Grandma. Ron assured me he would assist me in any way, but he never offered to meet her. We decided to keep Jenna the secret she had always been. Ron, still a new pastor, with a toddler and a newborn at home, feared the repercussions should he bring a bastard daughter into his home and church family.

  It might have been selfish to withhold the identity of Jenna’s father from her and from Layne, but I acquiesced to the fact that Jenna never seemed to miss having her father in her life. And when Layne and I moved in together, we agreed that we would be the only parents Jenna could ever want and need.

  “How is she?” Ron asked, referring to Jenna, as I sat across from him in his office now.

  “She’s doing fine. She’s settled comfortably back at school.”

  “Let me see a picture.”

  Whenever I saw Ron, he always wanted to see the most current photo of his daughter, or he would ask me to play a voice mail from her so that he could hear her voice. I used my cell phone to show him a picture Jenna had sent to me via text, one of her and her sorors dressed in pink and green, with erect pinkie fingers. He held my phone in his hand and stared at the screen.

  “Glory to God, she gets more and more beautiful.” He placed his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’ll show you.” I opened the tote bag and placed the stack of Layne’s journals on his desk. “These are Layne’s. Twelve years of her life are documented right here. I found them after she died, and I’ve read every single one.”

  Ron looked at the stack, his breath held behind tightly pressed lips. “Pandora’s box,” he said, exhaling.

  “You said that right. This morning I met the mistress she had been cheating on me with for the past seven years unbeknownst to me.”

  I assumed that as a pastor, Ron had been privy to the confessions of those who had coveted their neighbor’s wife, and I thought little would shock him. And yet his gaped mouth and furrowed eyebrows displayed surprise.

  “Layne had an affair you never knew about it, and you met the woman this morning?” he asked, repeating what I had just told him.

  “We had coffee in my kitchen.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “I had to meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “The way Layne described her, she is the epitome of beauty and sex and all things womanly. This was no normal affair they had. The things they did, and the places they went . . . I don’t think I know the woman that I married.”

  Ron placed his forehead in his palms. Each gold and diamond pinkie-finger ring left imprints on his skin when he lifted his head back up.

  “Taryn, I’m sorry. Certainly a person like you didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. Seven years? Not to come off callous, but how did you not know?”

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, right? With all her late nights out and not answering calls, I should have suspected something, but I never did. It was too convenient for them, anyway. They saw each other every day at work.”

  Ron sat forward in his seat. “She works at the university?”

  “Yes. Nina is her name.”

  “Jesus, Taryn.” Ron coughed and reached for the bottle of water on his desk. “I don’t know what to say,” he said after taking several gulps. “I can’t imagine how you feel.”

  “I found the journals two months ago. I was hurt. I was mad. I cried every day for weeks.”

  “I wish you had reached out to me. We could have prayed through this. God is a healer.”

  “Yes, I know, and I hope He’s forgiven me for taking matters into my own hands.” I picked up Layne’s last journal from the pile and opened it to her last passage. “I can’t let go of what she wrote the day before she died.” I handed the journal to him. He picked up a sleek pair of black- and red-framed glasses, and he began to read.

  Layne had written this passage midway through our vacation, during an afternoon when Jenna and I had gone inland to shop. In it, she det
ailed the closeness she had felt to me and Jenna during the ocean dinner cruise we attended the prior night. Both Jenna and I had worn lightweight gowns, and Layne a white pantsuit. After dessert we had walked on deck, arms linked together, and we each had wished upon a star. Layne had wished for peace and forgiveness.

  Eerily, Layne also wrote that she was tired of leading a double life. It hurts to hurt those I love, she wrote, pressing hard, making deep indents into the page. Yet in the next sentence she stated that she didn’t want to let either of us go. She wrote that she adored Jenna and indicated she’d be more devastated if Jenna uncovered her betrayal than if I did. And still, she continued, she couldn’t imagine her life without Nina. And finally, simply, she documented that she loved me. Even in her most personal writings she didn’t explain why.

  Perhaps it was her confusion—the seeming sudden rupture of the stitches that held her dual lives together—that had somewhat appeased the anger, agony, and resentment that had mounted in me with each journal I read. I had wondered, after I closed the last book, if maybe her weariness had led her to make a decision. I couldn’t help but speculate that she was preparing to end her split life, only which relationship she might have ended had remained unwritten. It was the idea that maybe she would have chosen me over Nina that lingered about my heart, and although I hated Layne most days, in some way her last journal entry had soothed the hurt, even if it was like nursing open heart surgery with a Band-Aid.

  “Not that it’ll change the past at all, but I want to know who she would have chosen, me or Nina.”

  “Why?” he questioned, confused, his hands in the air and shoulders shrugged. “Even if she was going to leave Nina and recommit to you, does it matter after all those years of deceit?”

  He had a point. Layne had already gotten away with her infidelity. To imagine that even if she had chosen me in the end, I would have been oblivious to her acts—and to the fact that she had loved someone else for over two-thirds of the time I had known her—sickened me. But Layne was dead, and her only chance of redemption was a posthumous profession of love for me.