“What part?”
“Being the woman everyone feels sorry for.”
“You’re not a woman to feel sorry for.”
She raised an eyebrow through her tears.
“That sounded better in your head, didn’t it?”
“Much better.”
Despite everything, she laughed.
I smiled.
Then her expression grew serious again.
“Do you know what hurts most?”
“What?”
“I spent twenty-two years making sure everybody else had what they needed. Daniel had a good childhood. Michael had a comfortable home to return to. My in-laws had someone to call when they were sick. I remembered birthdays, anniversaries, appointments, school events, every little thing that kept our lives moving.”
She stared at the city.
“And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself whether I was happy.”
I thought about the woman I had known for a decade.
Karen had always been generous, composed, and capable. She could organize a family dinner for twenty people while answering work calls and helping Daniel solve a problem he had created himself.
I had mistaken her ability to carry everything for proof that nothing weighed her down.
“Maybe it’s time you asked yourself,” I said.
She looked at me.
“What I want?”
“Yeah.”
“And if I don’t know anymore?”
“Then you start finding out.”
She studied my face, as if she were trying to decide whether I actually believed what I was saying.
Then she leaned back against the seat.
“Take me somewhere with terrible coffee.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“I need something normal. Something completely unimportant. Somewhere nobody knows me as Michael Mercer’s wife.”
I started the engine.
“I know a place.”
Twenty-five minutes later, we were sitting in a roadside diner with red vinyl booths, a flickering neon sign, and a waitress who looked as though she had heard every heartbreak in the county.
Karen ordered coffee.
I ordered coffee and apple pie.
She stared at my plate.
“You told me the coffee was terrible.”
“It is.”
“And yet you ordered it.”
“I believe in supporting local businesses, even when they disappoint me.”
For the first time that night, Karen laughed without trying to hide it.
We talked until nearly three in the morning.
We talked about Daniel’s disastrous teenage haircut, the time he accidentally flooded his parents’ laundry room, and my failed attempt to start a landscaping business when I was nineteen.
Then Karen mentioned something that surprised me.
“I always wanted to open a bookstore.”
I put down my fork.
“A bookstore?”
She looked embarrassed.
“It sounds silly now.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m forty-eight, my marriage is collapsing, and I have a mortgage to worry about.”
“None of those things explains why a bookstore is silly.”
She smiled faintly.
“When Daniel was young, I used to take him to this little shop near the old library. I loved the smell of the pages, the quiet, the feeling that every book contained a different life waiting to be discovered.”
“What happened?”
“Michael’s career took off. We moved. Then Daniel needed stability. Then my father became ill. There was always something more urgent.”
“And the bookstore?”
She stirred her coffee.
“It became a dream I kept postponing until I eventually convinced myself I had outgrown it.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t outgrow a dream just because you stop talking about it.”
She studied me.
“Have you always been this annoyingly optimistic?”
“No. I used to be much worse.”
She laughed again.
And something happened in that moment.
I noticed the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the small silver strands in her hair, and the way her entire face changed when she smiled.
For one dangerous second, I saw her not as Daniel’s mother, but as Karen.
A woman with dreams she had buried, a marriage she had trusted, and a future she had never imagined having to build from scratch.
I looked away immediately.
She noticed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Alex, you are a terrible liar.”
