My Best Friend Put My Ex-Husband’s Wife In The Room Next To Mine—Then We Realized We’d Been Told Opposite Stories

PART 2

Kara and I did not solve nine years in the hallway.

Lydia tried to herd us downstairs with the promise of snacks, which was so completely Lydia that I almost laughed. She believed food could lower the temperature of any room, and for years I had let her believe that about people too.

“I’m not fighting,” Kara said.

“Neither am I,” I said.

Lydia looked unconvinced.

At the kitchen island, Anita Brooks was slicing peaches. She had been my friend before my divorce and Kara’s friend through a volunteer board they both served on later. Until that afternoon, I had never thought very hard about the geometry required for Anita to know both of us without ever putting us at the same table.

Kara poured herself seltzer.

I took the stool across from her.

“When did Lydia tell you I wanted separate invitations?” I asked.

Kara glanced toward Lydia, who was opening a drawer too aggressively.

“The first time? Your son’s college graduation, I think.”

I blinked. “Evan graduated six years ago.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t invite you because Lydia told me you’d said it would be easier if I had one day that was just family.”

Kara frowned. “I never said that. I didn’t even expect an invitation.”

I remembered the relief I had felt when Lydia offered to handle the awkwardness. I had been newly comfortable enough around my ex-husband, Greg, to share a graduation row without shaking. The idea of adding his wife had felt complicated, but not impossible.

I had never asked Kara what she wanted.

Kara looked down at her glass.

“Two years later, Anita had that memorial dinner for her sister. Lydia told me you’d asked for one evening without ‘new family complications.’ So I stayed home.”

My stomach dropped.

Anita stopped cutting peaches.

“I never said that,” I said.

Kara looked at me steadily.

“I believe you.”

The sentence should have felt comforting.

Instead it felt like a door opening onto a room I had not known existed.

Lydia turned from the drawer.

“I was trying to spare both of you.”

“From what?” Anita asked.

Lydia looked genuinely startled that Anita had joined in.

“From being forced into things before you were ready.”

Kara’s eyebrows rose. “Ready according to whom?”

Nobody answered.

I thought of all the invitations I had declined because Lydia said Kara would be there and “probably deserved one evening without tension.”

Kara thought I had been the one requesting distance.

I thought she had.

We had been polite enemies to a policy neither of us had written.