Page 22 of Room 4 Rent

To be polite, I shake her hand. She reminds me of a yoga instructor and incredibly beautiful in a natural way. Without a stitch of makeup, you can tell she doesn’t need it. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Well, I don’t know how to say this.” She pauses and adjusts her hair. “Can I come in?”

Nothing would surprise me at this point. It really wouldn’t. Tatum’s outside with Sadie, both of them fully dressed in the pool now and laughing. “Yeah, you can come in.”

She takes a seat on the couch and sighs for some reason, as I sit across from her on the chair. Maybe she’s the reason he had the condoms?

Ha. Look at her. No way she’d sleep with Collin. Clearly she could do better than a banker with a dad bod.

Oh, but friends, I’m wrong. Look at her face. Look closely. See the devastation? The confusion? The worry? It’s all there, like her world has been turned upside down over this news. “I came here thinking he’d be here, not that he was dead,” she admits tearfully. At this point, I’m a little concerned about her mental stability because she begins to shake. “I can’t… I think I’m having a panic attack.”

Shit. Look at her. She’s taking this worse than I did. That’s when she hits me with the fastest curveball there is. One that curves at the very last second. She looks right into my eyes, and for a moment, I take in the color of hers. I have no idea why either because what the fuck does the color have to do with anything at this point? But I stare. They’re kind and gentle. Unusual. Not brown or hazel, but gold with navy blue rings on the perimeter. Her eyes remind me of a painting I have above our bed of a sunset on a fall afternoon. There’s a dusting of freckles like sun kisses on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

She sniffs and catches a tear. “I’m… well, I uh, we….” She pauses, draws in a quick breath, and then sighs.

My body heats up, sweat pricking every part of me. It’s like I have a fever all of a sudden. Anger smashes into my chest and then pounds as if I’m riding on a roller coaster, and we’re just about to the top. And then I reach the top and break through that tension. It needs release. It needs an outlet in the form of words. “Just spit it out already,” I snap, numbness working through me. Emotion clogs my throat for a minute, but I push forward. “You were fucking my husband.”

At first, she doesn’t want to. I think the only reason she does is because she doesn’t want to lie anymore. There’s a tight nod from her as tears roll down her red cheeks. “I was seeing your husband. For the past year.”

Blank stares. Did I hear her correctly?

And you know, I gave her a lot of time to say she’s bullshitting me. But it never came, so I had no choice to believe it.

What kind of pot of shit is this? Ten years. I gave Collin ten years of my life, and this is how he runs the bases?

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