You Chose Another, Now Forget Me novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Sunday Lunch Again
On Sunday the same long table stood in the same dining room, and the same people sat around it.
Nobody had told them why they were invited.
Valeria had written a one-line message to each of them: "Lunch at the house. Please come. It matters."
They came.
I stood by the window with Inés beside me, and my mother in the corner chair, and Emilio at the end with his glasses off.
The friends talked in low voices.
They kept glancing at us.
Valeria's colleagues sat at the far end in their good clothes, a heart surgeon and two nurses and the chairman's wife, uneasy.
Then the door from the kitchen opened, and Valeria came in.
She wore a dark dress, and she carried our daughter against her shoulder, wrapped in a white blanket.
The room went quiet.
She walked to the head of the table and stood where she had once stood to toast me.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "This is Sunday lunch, and I haven't cooked. I'm sorry."
Someone laughed, nervously.
"I've asked you here because most of you have heard a version of my story, and it was wrong."
Nobody moved.
"The version was that my husband left me, and that I was the injured one. That he was tired, that he'd gone strange, that I was tolerating it with grace."
She looked down the table.
"One of you said to me, on the phone, that I was a saint."
A woman in a green scarf looked at her plate.
"I was not a saint. For two years I had an affair with a married man, in hotels, while Rodrigo cooked my dinner and ironed my coats."
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