I have a photograph from our wedding day that used to sit on the mantle in our living room. Jake and I are standing outside the venue, just after the ceremony, in that brief window before the reception when it’s just the two of you and the photographer and the particular light of late afternoon. Jake is laughing at something I said — I don’t remember what — and I am looking at him with an expression that I can only describe as certainty.
Not happiness exactly, though I was happy. Certainty. The clean, uncomplicated kind that comes when you believe you know exactly where you are and exactly what comes next.
I moved that photograph off the mantle about two years into our marriage. I told myself I was rotating the decor. The truth was that looking at my own face in it had started to feel like looking at someone I used to know.
My name is Cassidy. Jake and I met when I was twenty-six, got engaged when I was twenty-seven, and married when I was twenty-eight. He was warm and funny and attentive in the way that some men are in the early stages — genuinely so, I believe, not performed — and I loved him in the way you love someone when you still believe that love is mostly about the other person and haven’t yet understood how much of it is about you and what you’re willing to accept.
I knew about Lorraine before I met her. Jake had mentioned her in the way that people mention weather — as context, as something you should prepare for, as a force that operates independently of anyone’s preferences. His mother.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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