The Smile Across the Yard: A Story of Betrayal and the Video That Changed Everything

Chapter 9 - I Am Not the Other Woman

I sat on my sister Deb's back porch for forty minutes with Ellen's envelope in my hands before I opened it.

It was early October by then, the kind of cold that gets into the boards of an old house, and Deb brought me a mug of coffee and set it on the arm of the chair and went back inside without saying anything, which is the reason I love her.

The envelope was small, the size you would use for a card, and Ellen had written my name on the front in the same careful capitals she had used on the sticky note in the closet.

Inside were three pages, folded in thirds, blue ink on both sides.

I read it twice on the porch and then a third time in Deb's kitchen the next morning, and I am going to tell you what it said as close to her words as I can, because I think you should hear it the way I did.

She started by explaining who she actually was, because none of us had ever been told.

Her mother died when Ellen was nine, and Nick's mother - her aunt, her mother's sister - took her in and raised her through high school, and then paid for two years of community college before she got sick.

Ellen wrote that her aunt always said the lake house was meant to keep the women in that family standing, not the men.

She wrote that when the will was changed, four months before Nick's mother died, Ellen was in the room, and the attorney read the condition out loud, and Nick was not there.

She wrote that she never wanted the lake house, and that if Nick had simply let the trust run its course, the court would have divided it between the two of them without anyone losing anything.

But he did not do that, she wrote.

He started calling her the next week, and then the payments started, small enough at first that she told herself they were family helping family.

By the second year they were not small, and she was cashing them and hating herself for it, and she wrote those exact words about hating herself.

Then I got to the part I did not expect, and I want to be honest with you because I was not a saint in this either.

Ellen wrote that she came to the party because she overheard Nick on the phone the week before, in the parking lot of the bakery where she was picking up an order for her mother's old greenhouse, and he said it to whoever he was talking to in a laughing voice.

She wrote his exact words on the page.

"Toddler arm thing is in the past.

Nobody records anything at a kid's party."

She wrote that she stood behind the bakery van with a cake box in her hands and understood that he was not worried about anything anymore, because he believed the only witness in that house was a two-year-old.

So she went to the party.

She bought a paper gift bag at the drugstore on the way, and she put nothing in it, because she wanted him to assume it was the last payment and to keep his eyes on her instead of on Ellie.

That is why she brought the bag.

That is the entire reason.

And the smile.

I have stared at that smile for six months now, on my phone and in my head, and I had built an entire woman out of it in my own mind, a woman who was laughing at me from across my own yard.

Ellen wrote that she smiled at Nick's phone because she had just hit record on her own, and she needed him to look at her and not at our daughter while she got the twenty seconds she came for.

She wrote that her hands were shaking the entire time and the smile was the only thing she could hold steady.

I set the letter down on the porch rail and looked out at Deb's yard.

The last page had four lines on it, and she had pressed hard enough that the pen had gone through the paper in two places.

I am not the other woman.

I am the daughter of the woman your husband left behind.

I waited eighteen months for somebody in that family to open the closet.

You did, and I am sorry it had to be you, but I am not sorry it was you.

I read that last line twice, and then I folded the pages back in thirds and put them in the envelope, and I went inside and washed my coffee cup and stood at Deb's sink for a long time.

I had spent two years looking at the wrong woman, and I had spent two years being the wrong kind of angry, and the only person in that whole house who had ever tried to protect my daughter was the one I had been cursing in my head every night since the party.

I called Rachel from the kitchen and told her I had one more thing for the file.