Instead I just felt quiet.
A little sad, even.
Because here’s the truth about Camille.
She wasn’t a villain in a movie.
She was a woman who’d been left.
Divorced. Alone. Scared.
And instead of building something new and real, she tried to take something old and real from someone else.
She thought that was easier.
It isn’t.
It never is.
You can’t steal a home.
You can only build one.
And building takes nineteen years, and a thousand red lights where someone reaches for your hand, and a thousand nights where someone says “guess who’s at the door.”
Camille never learned that.
I hope she learns it now.
Wherever she is.
I hope she builds something.
Instead of trying to take.
As for us.
Daniel and I are still here.
Still on Maple Crest.
A new family moved into Camille’s old house.
A young couple with a baby.
I brought them a casserole.
Daniel fixed their cabinet door.
I’m still kind.
I’ll always be kind.
Kindness was never my weakness.
Camille just mistook it for one.
The box is gone, by the way.
After the party, I didn’t need it anymore.
But I kept one thing.
The card.
The one I read aloud.
Daniel had it framed.
It hangs in our hallway now.
Right next to the wedding photo.
A little strange, maybe, to frame a letter you wrote to the woman who tried to take your husband.
But to me it’s not about her.
It’s about the line at the bottom.
The one I wrote last, the fourth time through.
“For nineteen years, he has never kept a secret from me. And he wasn’t about to start with you.”
Every time I walk past it, I smile.
Because it’s true.
It’s still true.
Max graduated last spring.
He’s off to college in the fall.
The house will be quiet soon.
Just me and Daniel.
Nineteen years becoming twenty. Becoming thirty.
And last week, driving home from dinner, we hit a red light.
And without thinking, without looking, he reached over.
And he took my hand.
The way he has ten thousand times.
