Camille’s party was the beginning of her end on Maple Crest.
Not because of anything I did.
I was done.
I’d said my piece and gone home.
No, Camille did the rest to herself.
Just like she always had.
The story spread up and down the street by morning.
Not my version.
The neighbors’ version.
Thirty people had seen it.
Thirty people talked.
And the thing about a neighborhood is, it has a long memory.
Camille had moved in as the glamorous newcomer.
Now she was the woman who tried to steal a nineteen-year marriage.
Who told a wife to her face to prepare for divorce.
Who got every cookie and love note handed back in front of the whole block.
Invitations stopped coming.
The friendly waves got shorter.
The coffee invites dried up.
Camille, who needed an audience more than anything, found herself without one.
She tried, for a while.
She threw another party a month later.
Six people came.
She started being extra nice to me, strangely.
Waving. Complimenting my garden.
As if we could reset.
I was polite.
Distant, but polite.
I’m not cruel.
I just don’t forget.
She tried a new angle with Daniel, too, once.
Sort of.
She caught him at the mailbox again.
“I was out of line,” she said. “I hope we can be friends. All of us.”
Daniel told me about it that night.
Of course he did.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said friendship starts with respecting someone’s marriage. And she didn’t.”
“And then?”
“And then I came inside and told you. Like always.”
Like always.
That’s the whole secret, by the way.
If anyone’s reading this and wondering how I was so sure.
How I slept at night with a woman like that next door.
It’s simple.
My husband told me everything.
Not because I made him.
Not because I checked his phone.
Not because I demanded it.
He just did.
From the first cookie to the last cornered conversation.
He brought it all home.
Because that’s what a marriage is.
It’s not two people who never get tempted.
