“You’re marrying my father for me?”
“Then tell me what IS happening, Lydia. Tell me right now. Look me in the eye and explain how my best friend ends up engaged to my widowed father in less than a month.”
Her eyes filled.
For one second, I thought she was going to tell me the truth.
Her lips parted.
And then she whispered, “I made a promise.”
“Tell me right now.”
“A promise to who?”
But she only shook her head.
That answer haunted me far more than if she’d said nothing at all.
“Fine. I want you out of this house,” I said.
“Honey, this is MY house,” my father said.
“Then I want ME out of this house.”
“A promise to who?”
I grabbed my keys off the counter.
“Please don’t leave like this,” Lydia whispered. “Please. There are things I can’t say yet, but I need you to trust me.”
“Trust you?” I turned at the door. “I have known you since we were eleven years old. I held your hair when your mother yelled at you. I drove three hours to your graduation. And the second my mother was gone, you crawled into her bed.”
“I need you to trust me.”
“That is not fair.”
“None of this is fair, Lydia. None of it.”
I slammed the door so hard the porch swing rattled.
***
They got married two weeks later at the courthouse.
Lydia mailed me the invitation.
I tore it in half and dropped it in the trash.
They got married two weeks later.
My father called the morning of the wedding.
“It would mean everything to me if you came today.”
“Have a nice ceremony, Dad.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Don’t.”
I hung up.
“Have a nice ceremony, Dad.”
For a year, that was how it went.
He called on holidays, and I answered with one-word replies and an excuse to get off the phone.
Lydia sent cards. Birthday cards. Christmas cards.
I stacked them, unopened, in a shoebox in my closet.
One day, the shoebox fell while I was rearranging my closet.
One card landed on the floor, open, the message visible.
It sent a chill down my spine.
