He Kept Me Secret Seven Years, Then Proposed to Her novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Red Dress
At his parents' garden party, Miles announces his engagement to Lydia; Clara returns his key in his champagne and walks out, to a text that her mother is in her father's kitchen.
Miles Ashworth tapped a fork against his glass, and four hundred people in his parents' garden went quiet.
I was standing six feet from him in a red dress I had bought for him.
He had never once asked me to a party at his house.
That afternoon my best friend had texted me: "Wear the red! He loves you in red. Big night, I promise."
I had thought she meant the firm's anniversary.
I had thought he was finally going to say my name.
"Thank you all for coming," Miles said. His voice was calm and careful. "I want to tell you about the woman I'm going to marry."
My heart went light and stupid.
For seven years I had been the girl he kissed in the dark behind his garage.
For seven years the answer to every question was the same.
After the next thing. After I make partner. After Dad retires. Hold on for me.
I had waited.
Last Sunday, in my bed, he had put his mouth against my hair and said it again.
"Just get me through Friday, Clara. Then I'm done waiting too."
Today was Friday.
He turned his head and looked across the lawn.
He did not look at me.
"Lydia," he said. "Come here."
Lydia stepped out from behind the rose arch in a blue dress and walked to him with her chin down.
She was twenty-five, and she had been my best friend for ten years.
She had walked up to me at a school art show and asked if I would explain the paintings to her.
I had taught her how to drive.
I had held her hair the night she was sick on her first tequila.
Miles put his arm around her waist, and she leaned against his side without looking at him.
"We're engaged," he said. "And we're expecting a baby in January."
The garden made one big warm noise.
Somebody cheered. A glass broke on the patio. His mother pressed a napkin to her eyes and smiled.
Lydia lifted her champagne in her left hand, her little finger bent at the crooked angle mine bends.
We had laughed about that crooked finger for ten years. Her joke was that we must be secretly related.
She laughed now, wet-eyed, and said, "I can't believe I'm saying it out loud."
Then she found me in the crowd and mouthed, "Please."
Please what, I thought. Please be happy. Please don't make a scene.
I did not know my own hands.
They were cold, and one of them was already in my bag.
Everybody was looking at the couple. Nobody was looking at the girl from next door in the red dress.
That was how it had always been. That was the whole arrangement.
I walked across the lawn.
The people between us stepped aside to let me through.
I reached Miles, and he finally looked at me.
His face went white.
"Clara," he said, very low. "Not here."
"Seven years and you picked here," I said.
I took his house key off my ring.
It opened the side door of his father's garage.
I had used it every Tuesday and Friday since I was twenty-one, always after dark.
I dropped it into his champagne.
It sank and settled against the stem. Bubbles rose around it.
His mother stopped smiling.
His father said, "What on earth is this?"
"A gift," I said. "For the groom."
Lydia grabbed my wrist. Her fingers were icy.
"Clara, I wanted to tell you," she whispered. "I swear I did. Please don't hate me."
I looked at her hand on my arm.
I looked at the little crooked finger that matched mine.
Then I took her hand off me, gently, because even then I could not make myself rough with her.
"Congratulations," I told the garden. "Both of you."
So I stepped out.
I walked down the lawn and through the gate.
I passed the low stone wall I had stepped over at four, when the neighbor boy was the only one who came to find me.
I heard him call my name behind me.
He caught me at my car, out of breath, with the key still wet in his fist.
"Clara. Listen to me. I can't explain tonight. Give me until next week."
"You've had seven years."
"It isn't what it looks like."
"It's a baby, Miles. It's exactly what it looks like."
He flinched.
I got into the car and shut the door on whatever he said next.
My phone lit up on the dash before I had turned the key.
The last time my mother was in that kitchen I was four.
All I kept of her was the sound of a suitcase rolling down the hall.
The new text was from my father, who never texted, who had never learned to use the little keyboard.
He had typed it letter by slow letter.
"Come home right now. A woman is sitting in our kitchen. She says she's your mother."
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