The words hit harder than if he’d shouted. Not here. As if the problem was my timing and not his mistress in my father’s front pew wearing my birthday gift.
“Family supports family during hard times,” Becca said, loud enough for the nearest rows to hear.
I turned to her slowly. “Family?”
She smiled again, but this time I caught the nerves underneath. “I’m practically family now.”
The sentence landed like a dropped tray. Heads turned. Somewhere to my left, someone actually gasped. Grant’s shoulders tensed. Good. Let him feel something.
“Practically family?” I repeated.
Becca lifted her chin. “Grant and I have been together for almost a year. It seemed appropriate that I be here.”
A year.
The number moved through me like ice water. A year gave shape to everything. Our anniversary weekend in Paris, when Grant had “missed” the first flight and arrived smelling like airport whiskey and a different hotel soap. The sudden flood of conferences. The nights he came home too tired to talk but smelling faintly of a floral perfume I didn’t own. Cabo, supposedly for clients. My father’s second round of chemo, which Grant had skipped because of “board pressure.”
A year.
“Natalie.”
Aunt Helen appeared at my side in a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and rage. She was small, sharp, and built like a woman who’d survived the seventies by setting problems on fire. Her red lipstick never moved, not even at funerals.
“The service is about to begin,” she said quietly. “Sit down. We will deal with this.”
“There’s no seat,” I said, because that was suddenly the detail my brain chose to cling to. “My seat is there.”
Helen’s mouth went thin. She took one look at Grant, one at Becca, and the temperature around us dropped ten degrees.
“Then they can sit in hell,” she said under her breath.
But she guided me to the row behind them because the organ had swelled and Father Martinez was stepping to the front and three hundred people were turning toward the casket. My knees felt unreliable. I sat. In front of me, I could see the back of my husband’s head and the familiar line of my own dress against another woman’s spine.
The service began.