Little Secrets Read online

  They then sat beside each other in his uncomfortable, flashy car for a half hour until Kenzie suggested stopping for McDonald’s. As bougie as Derek can be, he grew up on fast food like she did, and she knows he never minds a mass-produced burger and fries. Also, he was in a terrible mood, and she thought the food might chill him out a bit. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect, since all they’re doing is sitting here in this sticky booth while he complains about the burger she bought him with her emergency money.

  She notices his Big Mac is still untouched. “Derek, if it’s that big a deal, I can go ask them to change it.” She puts her chicken burger down and heaves a big, overly dramatic sigh.

  Ladies and gentlemen, they’ve now reached the Who Can Be the Bigger Person? stage of the verbal sparring competition, where points are tallied mentally and passive aggressively until somebody wins. Who will it be? She wants it to be herself, because she likes to win as much as he does, but if they won’t replace the burger for free, that means she’ll have to buy another one with the only five bucks she has left to her name until she gets paid at the end of the week. Which means, in the end, she loses.

  “It’s fine,” Derek says. Now they both have points on the board.

  He takes a big bite of the burger he insists he didn’t order, which means another point for him for eating something he doesn’t want to eat. Then he grimaces to show he doesn’t like Big Macs, which means a point for her, because he said he was fine with it. But then he finishes chewing and swallows, which, shit, means another point for him because he’s actually going to digest the thing.

  “Do you want my chicken burger? I can eat the Big Mac, I don’t mind.” Ding ding ding. She can hear the bell chiming in her head, tallying the score. An offer to switch burgers is surely worth three points, and just like that, Kenzie takes the lead. See, she’s good at this game, too.

  “I said it was fine.”

  Either she loses a point or he gains a point, she doesn’t know. They eat in moody silence, and nobody wins. Nobody ever wins. She doesn’t know why they play this game. She doesn’t know why he even wanted to see her tonight. If he really didn’t want to go home, he could have stayed in Portland.

  Ten minutes later they’re back in the car. He jacks up the music, something he always does when he’s not in the mood to talk, which is more and more lately. Derek used to talk to her all the time. It’s how they started, after all. Conversation was their jam for those first couple of months, until they started having sex and discovered how much they enjoyed that even more.

  His playlist hasn’t changed in the six months she’s known him, and his musical tastes mainly comprise Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana. Great Seattle bands, sure, but they’re all before her time, and they remind her of her dad, who used to play those albums loud until the summer he moved out. They also remind Kenzie that Derek is older, and while at first those differences were a turn-on, it’s a loose thread that they both keep yanking on, and their relationship is starting to unravel.

  It can’t unravel. Kenzie’s invested too much into this.

  The Cedarbrook Lodge is a hotel thirty minutes outside Seattle, right by Sea-Tac. When Derek first told her about it, she assumed it was going to be one of those generic airport hotels. But it’s surprisingly nice. It has a fancyish restaurant and a luxury spa, and the suite Derek books is nearly as large as the apartment Kenzie shares with her roommate Tyler, but with a fireplace. The property surrounding the hotel is well tended and lush, and it’s rather romantic. But that isn’t why Derek likes it. They come here because he isn’t likely to run into anyone who knows him, and if he does, he can always say he’s got an early flight the next morning.

  Whatever it is they’re doing has zero to do with romance.

  Derek pulls into the parking lot and instructs her to wait in the car while he takes care of the front desk business and picks up the key cards. He’s back a few moments later.

  “We’ll use the side entrance,” he says to her, and now he’s smiling, cheerful, trying to distract her from the fact that he doesn’t want the desk clerk to see her. They’ve used the side entrance every time, and it’s insulting that he still feels the need to remind her, as if she’s a child who requires consistent repetition to learn something.

  They enter through the side door, Derek carrying his overnight bag, and she carrying hers. In the beginning, he would always carry both bags, and Kenzie loved the chivalry of it. Somewhere along the way, though, he stopped offering. She commented on it once, and he laughed at her.

  “Come on, Kenz. You’re a millennial and a self-described feminist. You can’t be those things and then expect a man to carry your bag for you.”

  Maybe he’s right, but it’s not about expectations at all, and she doesn’t know how to explain this to him without making it a bigger deal than it is. She wants Derek to want to be the guy who carries her bag when they’re entering a hotel. She wants him to be the guy who holds her hand on the sidewalk, who comes upstairs when he picks her up, who takes her to dinner at places his friends might be, who takes a selfie with her that she’s allowed to post on Instagram.

  Kenzie wants him to be so many things he’s not, but she doesn’t know how to ask for them, because she’s never wanted them until now.

  She knew he was rich from the beginning. She knew he was married. She knew his young son was missing. She knew he was vulnerable, ripe for an affair, and open to anything that would take the pain away. She also knew he was generous with his wallet.

  He was, in short, the perfect mark.

  She follows him down the hallway, wondering for the hundredth time how it all could have gone so wrong. She was never supposed to fall for him. And if she doesn’t figure out her next step soon, she’s going to fuck up the entire plan.

  Chapter 11

  Her nude selfie is Marin’s iPhone wallpaper.

  And now, every time she picks up her phone, there are McKenzie Li’s tits. Every time she checks the time, there’s McKenzie Li’s crotch. She stares at the cherry blossom tattoo that winds its way up the younger woman’s slim torso from her hip to her breast. Marin knows next to nothing about tattoos, but even she can acknowledge the artistry, the bold fuchsias and pinks inked on in a watercolor effect. Only a twenty-four-year-old woman with a body like this could feel comfortable lying half-naked on a folding table for the hours it must have taken for a stranger to etch ink into her flesh with a needle.

  The picture fills Marin with rage, and she keeps staring at it. Rage is better than sadness. Rage is better than numb. This woman is everything Marin is not, and she can only assume that’s what Derek likes best about her.

  It’s nearly midnight, and Marin’s seated in a middle booth at the Frankenstein, waiting for a man to show up whose face she’s never seen, and whose voice she’s never heard. All she knows about him is that his name is Julian, and it’s apparently not abnormal for him to meet strange women in restaurants at midnight.

  The Frankenstein is an old-school diner smack in the heart of the University District. She used to come here with Sal back in college all the time—in fact, it’s where they broke up. Booths with scratched wooden tables and torn vinyl seats line up along the walls and down the center of the dining room, each one punctuated by a dim, low-hanging lamp. The vinyl floors are perpetually sticky from spilled coffee and pancake syrup. The bathrooms have been renovated, but they’re still disgusting, and she was forced to hover-squat when she used the toilet earlier for fear her thighs might touch something gross.

  The food at the Frank is greasy and fast, the portions are generous, and the prices are low. The diner attracts a lot of homeless folk, mostly men, who come in small groups and sit quietly in corner booths sharing plates of food they often get at a discount. The owner used to be homeless himself, before he got himself clean and got himself a job; it’s a classic Seattle story, and was featured on the news, a still shot from which has been framed and mounted on the wall near the entr
ance. The Frankenstein also attracts shift workers from the nearby university hospital, and students from the three different colleges in the area, including the art school McKenzie Li attends.

  Women like Marin don’t come to places like this. At least not anymore. A man with a half dozen rotten teeth smiles at her as he passes on his way to the bathroom, and she’s momentarily bathed in his body odor, a blend of stale urine and garbage from a life spent sleeping on the streets. Instinctively, she moves her purse closer to her on the vinyl seat. Did Sal pick this place, or did Julian?

  It hurts to think about Sal, and she hasn’t even begun to process what happened between them earlier today. Almost twenty years married to Derek, and Marin’s never cheated, never even come close. She takes a deep breath, forcing the memory of the afternoon out of her head. It’s a door she never should have opened, and it’s scary to think about where she and Sal will go from here. She doesn’t want to lose him. She doesn’t know if she can survive another loss.

  The longer she sits here, the crazier it seems. It’s entirely possible she’s gone off the deep end.

  But any time she second-guesses her decision to be here, her phone lights up with a random notification. And every time it does, she sees the photo of McKenzie Li all over again, young and fresh and unselfconscious, smooth where Marin is wrinkled, perky where Marin is … not. She’s probably fertile, with fully functioning ovaries, ready to pop out a baby or two if that’s what Derek wants.

  And is that what Derek wants? Another child? Because that’s the one thing Marin knows she can’t give him. Their last round of IVF used their last viable embryo, and it made Sebastian.

  Women pitting themselves against other women is the world’s oldest cliché, and she’s always prided herself on being a woman who uplifts other women. Whatever McKenzie is doing, it’s still Derek’s betrayal. But Marin hurt her husband, too. If Derek can forgive her for Sebastian—and he said he has, a hundred times—then surely she can forgive him for this.

  Which leaves only McKenzie as the villain in this story. She’s invested nothing, and is trying to take everything. And that cannot stand.

  “More coffee, hon?”

  The waitress’s scratchy voice catches Marin off guard, and she jumps a little. She’s holding a coffee pot in one hand and a water pitcher in the other, and she offers Marin both with a kind smile. There’s a spot of coral lipstick on one of her front teeth, and just like that, Marin is reminded of the waitress at the family restaurant her parents used to take her to every Sunday morning after church. That waitress’s name was Mo, short for Maureen. One Thanksgiving weekend during college, she and her parents walked into the Golden Basket. Marin asked the hostess to seat them in Mo’s section, only to watch the lady’s face fall when she relayed the news that Marin’s favorite waitress had passed a month earlier.

  “I meant to tell you,” her mother had whispered as they were seated in a different section for the first time in probably ten years.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t,” Marin said. “And now I feel like shit, and so does the hostess.”

  Her mother pursed her lips. “Language, Marin.”

  This waitress’s faded green uniform hangs loosely on her wiry frame, and her nametag reads BETS in slanted letters. Marin wonders if it’s supposed to read BETSY, but somehow the Y got rubbed off. She blinks, realizing she hasn’t yet answered the waitress’s question.

  “More of both would be great, thank you.”

  Bets/Betsy fills her mug and glass without spilling a drop. Her knuckles resemble ginger roots.

  “Something to eat?” the waitress asks. “Or still waiting for someone?”

  The door to the diner opens, and a group of noisy college kids sweeps in along with a gust of cold wind. There’s nowhere for them to sit; every table is occupied. The last thing Marin wants is food, but it doesn’t feel right to occupy a booth big enough for four when all she’s having is coffee.

  She looks over the waitress’s head at the menu scrawled onto the large chalkboard that takes up half the wall above the open kitchen. “I’ll do the Monster special. But with scrambled egg whites, please, and no pancakes, toast, or hash browns. Do you have turkey bacon?”

  Bets/Betsy raises a painted eyebrow. “Hon, that’s not really the Monster special. It costs extra for the egg whites, and you’ll be paying for a bunch of food you won’t eat. And we don’t serve turkey bacon.” She frowns as she says turkey bacon, as if the very idea is blasphemous. Which it probably is, because only an asshole comes to a twenty-four-hour diner known for its all-day breakfast and tries to make it healthy.

  Marin smiles at her. “You know what, I’ll do eggs over easy. Sourdough toast. Hash browns. And the regular bacon, which, if I remember, is delicious.”

  The waitress returns the smile. “Want to add a pancake for a dollar?”

  She won’t finish any of it, but what the hell. “Sure, why not.”

  Bets/Betsy writes none of this down. Marin wonders how she ended up here, working the midnight shift at a greasy spoon at her age. Mo used to say she enjoyed it, that the customers at the Golden Basket were like friends, the coworkers like family. But the midnight shift at the Frankenstein is an entirely different situation.

  It’s exactly midnight now, and Sal’s “guy” still isn’t here. She has no way of texting or calling to verify that Julian is still planning to come at all. Sal assured her that they would get along fine. And that’s really all she knows. But what if Julian doesn’t show?

  Her phone pings. It’s a text from Sal. You alive?

  He’s not here yet, she texts back with nervous fingers. I’m freaking out. I don’t know if I can do this.

  Sal’s reply is equally fast. You’re fine. Stay put. It’s just talking.

  With nothing to do but wait, she clicks on her Instagram app. She doesn’t prioritize social media; Sadie and the managers at the salons handle the posts on Instagram and Facebook. But Marin’s been addicted to it today, and she’s learning that the younger generation seems completely comfortable uploading their entire lives onto these virtual platforms. And if you look closely enough, you can learn almost everything about anybody.

  Derek’s mistress, for instance, posts something on Instagram every day. Every. Goddamned. Day.

  There’s one new photo since she last checked, and it’s of … feet? Long feet attached to skinny ankles, encased in pink-and-white polka-dot socks, crossed casually on the dashboard of a car. It was taken at a strategic angle to show off the steering wheel, where the unmistakable Maserati crown logo is right in the center. There’s a hand on the steering wheel, clearly masculine, and the caption reads, Hot rod, hot guy, with a sunglasses emoji face.

  There are over a hundred comments on the picture, but the first one is the only one McKenzie responded to.

  sugarbaby1789: bitch who dis????

  kenzieliart: got boo’d up, gurl! [kissy face emoji]

  Again, Marin has to consult Urban Dictionary for the official definition. Boo’d up means with a boyfriend/girlfriend; in a serious relationship.

  Humiliations galore.

  A man slides into the ripped vinyl seat across from her. Startled, Marin almost drops her phone. Again, she was so consumed with her thoughts that she didn’t notice his approach. She didn’t see him walking up to the booth, and she didn’t feel the gust of the wind on her face from the front door opening. The same rowdy college kids are still crowding the front entrance.

  He must have come in a different way, through the back door, or maybe through the kitchen.

  Her heart is pounding, and her palms are sweaty, and reflexively she sticks out her hand, but he makes no move to shake it. Instead, he signals the waitress, who comes over with a clean mug and the coffee pot.

  “The usual, Bets,” he says, and she nods.

  So her name really is Bets, and it’s clear they know each other. If he uses a back entrance, he probably comes here a lot. Marin tucks her hands into her lap, so he won’t see them sha
king.

  Is she really doing this?

  She’s having trouble making eye contact with him, but he doesn’t appear to be feeling any awkwardness whatsoever. He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a packet of Wet Wipes, and extracts one from the plastic packaging. She watches as he wipes his hands meticulously, getting every finger, and when he finishes, he balls up the used wipe and wraps it in a napkin. He leaves the napkin on the corner of the table.

  He stares at her, taking her all in, his gaze moving over her face, her hair, her necklace, her blouse, the wedding rings on her left hand, the bracelet on her right wrist. He isn’t smiling, but his face is naturally pleasant. What did Sal tell him? She wonders if she looks the way he was expecting.

  She wonders how many times he’s done this.

  Finally, he speaks. “I’m Julian. Don’t be nervous, Marin. We’re only talking.”

  She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she exhales.

  “Hello,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

  Julian—if that’s his real name—is about her age, maybe a few years older. Dark eyes, thick brows, strong nose, head shaved down to the skull. Scuffed black motorcycle jacket over a black V-neck T-shirt. Extremely muscular build, from what she can see. Strong hands, no watch, and no wedding ring, though she supposes it would be weird if he were wearing one in this scenario. He doesn’t look like a guy who has a nine-to-five desk job, but neither does he look like a—what was Sal’s word?—fixer.

  Not that she has any clue what a professional fixer is supposed to look like. She’s never seen Ray Donovan.

  He’s watching her watch him, and another moment passes before he says, “So, you’re the one who broke Sal’s heart?”

  She blinks. This isn’t how she expected the conversation to start.

  “I mean … sort of.” She doesn’t know what Sal told him exactly, so she doesn’t know how to explain it, how much detail he expects. “We dated in college. A long time ago.”