Ladies' Night Andrews, Kay (great novels .txt) 📖

window of your wife’s boyfriend’s car so violently that you smashed his window and injured your own hand.

“Grace, you deliberately drove your husband’s car into a swimming pool and destroyed it.

“Camryn, you discovered a provocative and salacious video of your husband and put it on YouTube, thus exposing him to public ridicule and humiliation.”

Paula nodded at Suzanne. “Suzanne, we’ve all been very patient, waiting for you to admit to us the actions you took that caused you to join this group. Because I’m such a strong believer in personal responsibility, I’ve been reluctant to force your hand. Up until now.”

Suzanne lifted her chin. “I’m ready, Paula. I want to tell the group…”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Suzanne said, with a nervous laugh. “I’ll never be ready. But I’m willing, and that’s the best I can do.”

*   *   *

“Did I tell you all that Eric, my husband, is also a professor at Ringling?” Suzanne didn’t wait for a reply. “He’s in the English department, too. Anyway, I discovered, by accident, that he was sleeping with a co-worker, a woman who’d been my grad assistant last year.”

“How’d you figure it out?” Ashleigh asked.

Suzanne’s smile was wry. “Modern technology. Eric had gone out for a run. I was doing the laundry and found his phone in the pocket of his pants. As I was putting it on the counter, it pinged, and I saw he’d gotten a text. Darby was at soccer practice, and she was supposed to text one of us to let us know she was on her way home. I just assumed the text would be from her, so I read it. It wasn’t from Darby. It was from her.”

“The other woman?” Camryn asked.

“Yup. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty. Let’s just say she was suggesting a time and place for their next assignation. ‘Come horny,’ the text said, so that let me know I wasn’t overreacting. Just to be sure, I scrolled down the other texts from her. They were all just as graphic, if not more so. And it had been going on for months.”

“Did you confront him?” Grace asked.

“No.” Suzanne’s hands shook as she uncapped the bottle of water she’d been clutching all evening. “I … I guess a part of me still didn’t want to believe it was true. But another part of me, the cold, analytical researcher, needed data. While I was going through his phone, reading the texts, I found texts from other people, women, but I had no idea who they were.”

“He had more than one girlfriend?” Camryn asked. “Just like my cheating husband.”

“It gets better, or worse,” Suzanne said sadly. “I went online and found something called keystroke software. It’s a program you can surreptitiously load onto somebody’s computer, and once it’s activated, everything that person does on their computer, every e-mail they write or receive, every Web site they visit, you have access to.”

“You became your own private detective,” Camryn said. “That’s so smart!”

“Not really,” Suzanne said. “Remember, Camryn, when you said you wished you could take Scopolamine, to forget about your daughter catching Dexter in bed with her roommate? Well, I learned so much about Eric’s secret life, I wish the data bank in my head could be wiped clean. But I’m afraid now it’s hardwired into my brain.”

She took a sip of water. “Those other women? He was meeting them on Craigslist! For hookups.”

“Dear God,” Grace muttered.

“Exactly,” Suzanne said. “He was meeting strange women in sleazy motel rooms for casual sex. And when he wasn’t meeting them in person, they were sexting back and forth. It had been going for years.”

“That’s just nasty,” Ashleigh said. “At least Boyce…”

Camryn reached over and grabbed Ashleigh’s arm. “Let Suzanne get through this without editorializing. Okay? Otherwise, I will have to pinch your head off of your scrawny little neck.” Ashleigh jerked her arm away.

“Camryn?” Paula’s voice had a warning note.

Camryn glared at Paula. “I am dead-dog serious. I will hurt her if you do not make her be quiet.”

“And I’ll help,” Grace offered, glaring, in turn, at Ashleigh.

“Everybody?” Suzanne looked amused. “I’m fine. Really. I’ve been living with this for months and months now. Now? I don’t want this slime taking up any more room in my brain. You know?”

They all nodded in unison. They all did know.

“You wouldn’t think this could get worse,” Suzanne said with a self-conscious laugh. “But it does! Not long after I found out about Eric, I had a regular check-up with my gynecologist, and I had an abnormal pap test.”

She looked at Wyatt and blushed. “I’m sorry you have to hear such personal stuff. About my lady parts. But there’s just no way to get around this.”

“I’ll survive,” he said, his voice gruff.

Suzanne took a gulp of water. And then the words came tumbling out in an unstoppable torrent. “I had HPV. I didn’t even know what it was. My doctor—the same doctor who delivered Darby, who’s known me since I was a teenager, had to explain it to me. It was an STD. A sexually transmitted disease.”

Grace had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from gasping aloud.

“Eric … having unprotected sex with those women. He’d given me an STD. I thought I would die of humiliation, the day my doctor told me. Of course, he was as embarrassed as I was. Long story short, I had cervical cancer.

“I had a total hysterectomy, because my husband gave me a sexually transmitted virus. Which, incidentally, could still come back, as something like anal cancer. My doctor had been quietly urging me to tell Eric what was going on, so he could at least notify the women he’d had sex with. You know, so they could see a doctor. I was so calm on the outside, it was frightening. I scared myself. One day, a week before I was scheduled for surgery, I went on Craigslist. I posted a picture of Eric and advised that any woman who’d ever had a hookup with him should get themselves checked. Because he had an