And One Last Thing... Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Mike Terwilliger is a lying, whoring degenerate who would have married his mother if it were legal.”
    Everything was a little hazy after that.
    Needless to say, talking to Beebee hadn’t improved my frame of mind. Staring at her was like looking into a particularly warped fun-house mirror. Mike was ruining our marriage for her? Sex with her, spending his nights with her, was worth hurting me? It was worth wrecking the life we’d built together?
    I’d never be able to trust anything about my life again. I would question everything Mike said, from his after-work plans to telling me he loved me. For the rest of my life, I would look back on the little moments in my marriage, the parts of my life that I thought meant something, and know that they’d been tainted.
    If I was going down, I was taking Mike with me.
    My hand shaking, I moved the cursor and clicked on send.
    And much faster than I would have imagined, a screen popped up, cheerfully announcing, “E-mail Expo has distributed your message!”
    Distributed my message. To three hundred and two of our friends, family, and clients. Complete with dancing firecracker graphics.
    There was no cancel button, no retrieve function. The genie was out of the bottle. The shit had hit the fan.
    “Ohgodohgodohgod, what have I done? What have I done?!” I shrieked. I made a grab for the plug on the safety strip and yanked it out of the wall because, in my panicked brain, I thought somehow that might keep the message from spreading from my computer. But it was out - now there was no taking it back.
    My eyes stinging, hot tears threatening to spill down my cheeks, I sagged back against the desk chair. It was all so useless. I couldn’t go back to living with Mike in that perfect, empty house, to those pictures of him pretending to be happy with me.
    I glanced at the clock. It was a little after 1:00 a.m. I had a few more hours before my friends and neighbors woke up and checked their e-mail. My stomach churning, I bounced between dreading their discovering what a blind idiot I’d been and being happy that the final layer of bullshit would drop away. All of my cards were on the table. I felt … free. I didn’t have to smile while I lapped up Mike’s stupid lies. I didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t have to care anymore. What was done was done.
    ******
    The slow-burning fuse for this particular act of self-destruction had been lit sometime in the afternoon. After my disastrous meeting with Beebee, I’d driven straight to Goote’s Jewelry Shop on Main Street and placed my wedding ring set on the counter. “How much can you give me for this, Mr. Leo?” I asked.
    Leo Goote, who probably wore his jeweler’s loupe into the shower, had gone to church with my parents for forty years. “Lacey, honey, you don’t want to sell your wedding rings,” he said, the papery skin of his hands buckling as he wrapped them around mine. I stared into his kind, clear brown eyes and something told me that he knew. “You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”
    Gritting my teeth together and willing myself not to cry again, I gave Mr. Leo a tight-lipped smile. “No, Mr. Leo, I do. I’m going to be doing some traveling. And I need some cash.”
    Leo spent another forty-five minutes trying to talk me out of selling the platinum-set 1.5 carat brilliant cut that Mike’s father had called a wise investment when he helped Mike select it from Leo’s stock. He gave me ten thousand dollars for the set, a practically unheard of price for Leo, who prided himself on resale value.
    I, did, however, use Mike’s Visa to charge an obscenely large cushion-cut sapphire to replace my engagement ring. The ring itself didn’t really make me feel any better, other than covering a rather disturbing groove worn into my ring finger. But imagining Mike’s face when he opened the Visa bill did improve my mood.
    As I left, Leo offered me a butterscotch candy, patted me on the head, and told me he would