He Kept Me Secret Seven Years, Then Proposed to Her novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Wall

On the stone wall between their gardens Clara hears the April story and says what seven years cost her; at dawn Lydia begs her to stay.

I went down in my father's old sweater and sat on the stone wall.

Miles sat three feet from me, on his own side.

That was the rule we had kept for seven years. We never touched in the light.

The party was long over, and the only sound was crickets and the pool pump next door.

"Tell me," I said.

"The fight in April," he said. "You remember it."

"I asked you once to tell your parents about me."

"And I said not yet."

"And I said then don't call me."

He rubbed his face.

"I didn't call. I went to Lydia's birthday dinner because I'd promised, and because I couldn't be in my own house."

"You were drunk."

"I had two drinks, Clara. Two. I've had two drinks a thousand times."

"Then what?"

"Then it's gone."

He said it flatly, to the grass.

"I woke up in her bed at eight in the morning with my shirt off and a headache I've never had."

"She was in the kitchen making coffee. She said I'd been sick, and she'd let me sleep it off."

"And you believed her."

"I believed her. Why would I not? She's Lydia."

He turned the key from my ring over and over in his fingers. He had fished it out of the champagne.

"In August she called me crying. She said she was four months along. She said it was that night."

"You didn't ask her what she meant?"

"I did the math. It fit." His voice cracked.

"I couldn't tell you. I kept thinking I'd find a way that didn't end with you looking at me like that."

"How am I looking at you?"

"Like I'm someone you used to know."

I let that sit.

The pool pump ticked on.

"You could have told me in August," I said.

"You could have told me every week since. You could have told me last Sunday, in my bed, with your mouth in my hair."

"I was going to tell you Friday. After the party."

"After the party."

"I thought it was a dinner. I swear to you."

"My mother planned a family dinner. It turned into that. Lydia stood up with a ring my mother had given her, and I..."

"You stood there."

"Yes."

"You let four hundred people clap."

"Yes."

"You didn't say no."

He did not answer.

I felt a calm settle over me then, almost kind.

"Seven years," I said. "Tuesdays and Fridays. A key and a text."

"I stood next to you at every funeral and every Christmas, and I called you a neighbor."

"Clara."

"Do you know what I told myself every time?"

"That one day you'd walk across this lawn in the daylight and say my name."

"I will."

"You said hers."

He closed his eyes.

He had always taken a hit without moving, even as a boy.

Watching him do it now made me want to hit him again.

"I'm not asking you to wait," he said. "I would never ask that again. But I'm going to find out what happened that night."

"Why?"

"Because if it's mine, I'll stand by that baby. And if it isn't," he said, "I'm going to find out who lied to me."

I stood up.

"Go home, Miles."

He stood up, too, on his side of the wall.

We looked at each other across a few feet of cold stone and seven years of dark.

Then he did what he always did.

He went home.

I did not sleep.

At first light, I was sitting on my father's back steps with a cup of coffee when the garden gate clicked.

It was Lydia, in a long grey cardigan, barefoot on the wet grass.

Her face was blotched, and her eyes were swollen.

"Please don't send me away," she said.

I should have.

I know I should have.

But she had sat on these steps the day she failed her driving test.

She looked small.

She sat down beside me and was sick into my father's hydrangeas.

I held her hair.

I rubbed her back and said, "Breathe. It's all right. Just breathe."

When it passed she wiped her mouth with her sleeve and started to cry, quietly.

"I didn't mean for it to happen like this," she said.

"I was going to tell you first. I swear. Then his mother got the ring out and..."

"Lydia, I'm leaving."

She stopped crying.

"What?"

"Providence. The clinic. I'm taking the job."

"No. Clara, no."

She grabbed my left hand with both of hers.

Her little finger lay bent across my wrist at exactly the angle of mine.

"You're the only family I've got," she said. "I have nobody else. I told you that. You're the only one who ever stayed."

I took my hand back, carefully.

"I'm not staying for this."

She nodded.

She did not say another word for a long time.

Then she looked up at me with her wide wet eyes.

"Whatever people tell you about me after today," she said, "remember I asked you to stay."

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