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Chapter 12

The doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," Layla said, but it was a weak promise, one broken by her feet's refusal to leave the coffee table as she perched her laptop on her knees, while her mother-in-law was walking briskly toward the door.

Her stomach seized. Who could be there? It couldn't be Hayden. Loretta had said he'd called, claiming work was running late, something she didn't want to think about. She set down her laptop and whirled around to glance out the window, trying to see who was outside. Layla only caught a glimpse of a red skirt.

"Hi, how can I help you?" Loretta Song said, her tone cordial.

"Hi, I'm Amy Tang. I'm a friend of Hayden and Layla's... Hayden left his sunglasses at my house," said Amara.

Why was she here, again? Especially when her mother-in-law was there? Was she trying to ruin all of their lives? At this point, Layla was considering allowing her husband to kill her just to escape the constant, tiresome barrage of annoyance that seemed to have inundated her life.

"Sunglasses?" Loretta repeated. Clearly, she was suspicious of Amara. Clearly, she was suspecting something of her son.

Considering it her familial duty to keep an all-out-war from breaking out between her mother-in-law and her sister, Layla hopped off the couch, smoothed out her lounge pants, and walked toward the door. "Hi, Amy. It was so nice of you to drop these off, but I'm sure you have somewhere to be."

"No, not at all," her sister said, clad in another fifties-style dress, this time in red, and wearing an innocent smile. "Nice to meet you, Mrs...?"

"Mrs. Song," Loretta said with a sniff of what sounded like contempt. She shook Amara's hand stiffly, "You're friends with my son?"

Was she accusing Amara of sleeping with Hayden? The thought was laughable. She was about fifty percent sure her sister was asexual, or at the very least married to her job.

"And I'm friends with Layla, your daughter-in-law," she said without missing a beat. A silver skull ring shone on Amara's thumb. Layla took Hayden's Ray-Bans from her.

"Hmm." Loretta, of course, was being about as rude as possible without fully reverting into brute savagery. "Why don't you take a seat? We were just about to have dinner."

They were? She glanced at the time, the hours having flown by despite being trapped in a house with a woman she loathed. It was six. Perhaps it was the excessive napping that caused her to lose time.

"I'd love to," Amara was saying, still grinning at Loretta like a prey animal who wanted her throat ripped out. Then again, her sister was far more dangerous than any mother-in-law.

"Great," Loretta said. "We're having bibimbap."

"I'm going to call Hayden," Layla said if only to have a reason to leave the room. "Excuse me."

He picked up on the third ring like a high schooler trying not to seem desperate. Or maybe she was just making things up, maybe she was just so impatient that every second between her and what she wanted was a monumental obstacle. "What's up?"

"Amara is here," she said, drumming her fingers on a cream-coloured leather barstool. "I mean--Amy. Tang. Our neighbour."

"What does she want?" She could picture him running a hand through his hair, annoyance clear on his face.

"She dropped off your sunglasses. Apparently, you left them at her house when we had dinner."

"You're kidding me," he said. "I still have my sunglasses. I'm wearing them right now."

She didn't like the implication that her sister was a liar, but what else could she believe? One of them had to be telling the truth, and it was easy enough to verify. "Your mother invited her for dinner."

"Tell me she said no," he said.

Layla leaned her hip against the kitchen counter, staring at the pristine granite. Loretta's idea of a vacation was apparently waxing, polishing, and cleaning every available surface in her son's house. "I'm afraid I can't."

"I'll be home in five," he said.

"Wait," she said, just to stall. She didn't know what would happen in the space between, what he might say, what she wanted. Layla only knew that she didn't want him to go just yet.

"What is it?"

"I'm sorry," she said and was surprised to find that the words tasted like the truth. What was she sorry for? Allowing Amara to invite herself in? Keeping the pregnancy a secret from him? What she had done? What she would do?

"Don't be," he said before he hung up, but it sounded like a threat. "See you soon."

She stared at the black screen of the phone like it was a bomb. Then she put it down, plugging it in to charge and went about setting the table for dinner.

"Layla," Loretta said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders in a maternal gesture that she wasn't too comfortable with. The woman's garish French manicure dug into her arm. "Amy was just telling me about how she entered a chilli cooking competition and won first place."

"Really," she said, not believing a single word of the story. "Where was this?"

"In Kansas," said Amara, who was so pale that she looked like she'd never stepped a foot outside her house. Her red lipstick stood out against her white skin, and Layla recalled how her older sister's features had always reminded her of Snow White when they were little. Layla's own skin was tanner from days spent gardening without a sunhat.

"What were you doing in Kansas?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

"I had a consulting job there," she said vaguely.

"So, what was your chilli recipe, Amy?" asked Loretta. "Oh--I've been so rude! Would you like something to drink?"

"Just a water."

"Layla, dear, why don't you get our guest a drink?"

"Of course."

She fumed silently at how easily Amara had ingratiated herself into Layla's life. Ten years ago, she might have been ecstatic at the thought of seeing her sister again. But the time for reconciliation had passed. She wasn't eighteen anymore wishing for an older sister's guidance and advice. She was a grown woman and she had her own life. A life that her sister seemed to be slowly overturning, piece by piece.

"Here you go," she said, handing a glass of ice water to her sister just as the key jangled in the lock. "Oh, that must be Hayden. Why don't you two go continue your conversation in the dining room?"

It was her house, after all, not her mother-in-law's.

Loretta's smile was as fake as Amara's as the two of them went into the dining room. Hayden opened the door, carrying a briefcase and a clear plastic bag with what looked like a white paper bakery box in it. "You're late," she said. Usually, he was home an hour earlier.

"I wanted to pick up your favourite dessert." He lifted the bag.

"You hate dessert," she said, folding her arms over her chest. There was something about the scene that she missed. Not necessarily something about him, but--something about him coming home from work, something about him picking up her favourite dessert, something about him doing little things and acting as if he cared... But it was all acting. She was missing a vapour, a ghost, a hallucination.

"I don't hate you." He set the bag on the foyer table and kicked off his shoes, shrugging off his jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. "Where are they?"

He said they like there was an us to match it. She almost wanted there to be one.

"Dining room." She picked up the box from the table. "Gunter's cheesecake?"

"Of course." Hayden almost sounded offended that she'd think it was anything else.

"Thank you." Her words surprised even herself, before she straightened again, letting their facades build up between them again.

His eyebrows rose but he said nothing. "Let's go have dinner."

#

Hayden picked at his rice, hating the thin metal chopsticks that his mother had taken out. He wasn't even aware that they had these chopsticks since Layla preferred the wooden ones. He'd come to like them more, too. His appetite had all but vanished, not only from entering the bakery with its overabundance of sweet fragrances but from the conversation he'd had with his wife. She had called Amy Amara. Was it a slip of the tongue? Was it her real name and the two had come to know one another well enough to be on a friendly, first-name basis?

Or was there something the two of them weren't telling him?

He found himself hungry not for food but for knowledge. For the truth.

Halfway through the meal, his mother cleared her throat. "So, Amy, how well do you know my son?"

"Oh, I don't know..." Amy--or Amara--took a sip of water, looking at ease under the spotlight. "Really, I'm closer friends with Layla, than Hayden."

"Hmm." His mother's eyes narrowed on the pair of sunglasses that hung from the collar of Hayden's shirt, the one that Amy had brought in. The one that he hadn't been missing at all. He knew it. His sunglasses were somewhere in the house, and they certainly weren't hanging from his shirt. "I'm glad to hear that. Here, I was thinking you had some ulterior motives for inviting yourself over."

He saw Layla clap a hand over her mouth and release a strangled cough. "Excuse me."

Loretta Song arched an eyebrow. "You're excused."

Hayden knew at that moment that they were thinking the same thought: she's the one who invited herself over with no clear motive.

"So, Mom, is there a reason that you're here?" he said. "You know you're welcome at any time, but..."

"Yes, in fact." She straightened up, sitting on his left where he was seated at the head of the table. "I'm getting married."

Those three words dizzied him, threw him into a tailspin, and left him utterly gobsmacked. He blinked once, slowly, and shook his head as though it would clear his mind of the words he had just heard. Surely, she wasn't serious. Not his mother, who, after the death of her husband, had worn black for a year as though going into mourning in the Victorian era. Not his mother, who still hung his father's picture over the mantel next to an urn with his ashes, and made the annual trek to his graveside every year.

Getting married? Not his mother.

His lips parted, barely enough for two syllables to edge their way out. "Again?"

"Congratulations," Amy said, not reading the room at all.

On his right, Layla coughed again, into her napkin. Surely if anyone could see the ill-advised decision that was his mother remarrying, it was her.

Then again, his judgment these days was far from sound. Not to mention, these days, he and his wife were never on the same side.

"Who's the lucky guy?" Layla said sunnily, breezily, without batting an eye.

"My coworker," she said, showing off a diamond ring that he had somehow completely overlooked until this moment.

"Your coworker?" he repeated. "I didn't even know you had a job, Mom."

His mother had spent his adolescence as a homemaker, the two of them living comfortably on his father's pension after he'd had a heart attack. She hadn't held down a job in over two decades.

"Well, Hayden, there's a lot you don't know about me," she said.

"We talk on the phone every Sunday, and you've never mentioned it." He pushed his bowl away, every urge to eat drying up as quickly as water in the Sahara.

"You know what, son, maybe I wanted something that was just a part of my life. I'm not only a mother, and you haven't even been living in the same state as me for many years now. I got a job as a teller, at the bank."

Her words were reasonable. Calm. Understandable. Hayden ought to have been happy for her. He should have been glad that she had found someone so late in life.

Still, he couldn't help but feel as if some essential part of him was slipping away. Sensing Layla and Amara's eyes on the two of them, he took a drink of water. "I'm happy for you, Mom."

The keen look in her eyes told her that his performance was anything but convincing. "Thank you."

He wanted to rejoice for her. He should have. She couldn't have been a widow forever. She was only in her early fifties, after all. All the rational explanations and justifications for an emotion he ought to feel emerged, but with it, there was no joy. No celebration. Not even when Layla brought out the champagne, pouring a little for everyone but herself. He couldn't even be happy about that, about the prospect of becoming a father.

There was something terribly broken in him, and it yawned wider every day, a fissure turning into an abyss.

"Why don't the three of you take a picture together," Amy suggested after dinner. "To celebrate this happy event."

Something in her smile reminded him of a shark's: bloody, waiting for the metallic tang and the red droplets to infuse into the water.

Both his mother and Layla agreed, so he found himself sandwiched between them, plastering on a fake smile as the camera flashed. Layla kept a noticeable inch of distance between them, even as her hand rested on his waist and his on her shoulder. His mother was content with showing off the diamond ring on her finger as though she were a twenty-five-year-old girl posing for Instagram. Bitterness consumed every inch of him and he didn't know how to keep from drowning in it.

"Hayden, why don't you help me take out the dessert from the oven?" his mother suggested when they were all back in their seats.

To his surprise, Layla stood up. "I'll do it, Mrs. Song."

"Thank you, Layla, but be careful, it's very hot." His mother was absentminded, clearly gratified by Amy's fawning over her, her job, her haircut, and her engagement ring.

Ensconced in the kitchen, Layla began rifling around for the oven mitts. "They're not in the usual cabinet."

They were, actually. But they were buried beneath a plastic bag of cameras, microphones, and rat poison. She yanked open a drawer and he wondered if he should mislead her. "Here."

Hayden gave in and showed her where the oven mitts were, lifting the bag of contraband. He wasn't quick enough, however, to escape his wife's prying eyes.

"Why is this here?" She shot him a look filled with nothing but suspicion. He was not a person to her anymore, but a story, to be spun into narratives and a compelling tapestry of facts.

"It's just a bag of trash that I stuffed here when my mother came over." The oven beeped. Neither of them went to open it.

"Then go throw it away," she said, folding her arms across her chest.

He couldn't. She was calling his bluff. "I will."

"Great."

They stood in the kitchen and stared one another down, each waiting for the other to break.

Neither of them could.

"What's really in the bag, Hayden?"

He counted her blinks. One. He was going to get a divorce.

Two. From his mother.

Three. He definitely wouldn't attend the wedding.

Four. Why was any of this a big deal to him?

Five. He should have just thrown the extra cameras and microphones away.

"What's. In. The. Bag." She reached for it.

The smoke alarm went off as black clouds streamed from the oven. Both of them staggered back, coughing and waving their hands over their faces. He dropped the bag, snatched up the oven mitts, and pulled a blackened cake from the oven. The middle had drooped, sagging in, and the icing had all but melted off. He was pretty sure icing was supposed to go on when the cake was cooled, but what did he know about baking?

Hayden stared down at it. Layla had snatched the bag from him and was staring down at its contents with an unreadable expression. When she saw the cake, she laughed. "I shouldn't."

"Laugh, or eat it?"

"Both."

If they were twenty-five again and he was standing barefoot in the kitchen with a sappy love song on the radio, he would have danced with her. He would have been someone else. He would have loved her, and held her in his arms, and pretended that they would last. That between them was something that could endure the test of not just time but fights and lies and secrets and broken promises and shattered hearts.

But it was all a lie.

And as they threw the burnt cake into the trash disposal and shut off the smoke alarm, he knew it was a lie he had never really wanted, anyway.

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