My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing;

Author:Samantha Downing;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

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IN THE END, I didn’t lie to the kids. I said their grandparents died in a freak car accident and had been gone for many years.

I did not tell them everything, but it was close. That was because of Millicent. Together, we decided how much to say. To make it as official as possible, we called a family meeting. Rory and Jenna were so young. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but we did it anyway.

We sat in the living room. Jenna was already in her yellow pajamas with the balloons all over them. She loved balloons, and Rory loved to pop them. Jenna’s dark hair was cut to the chin, and she had bangs straight across her forehead. Her dark eyes peeked out from under them.

Rory was wearing a blue T-shirt and sweatpants. When he’d turned seven, he had declared himself too old for pajamas. Millicent and I decided we could live with that, and she stopped buying them.

It was hard to look at their tiny, trusting faces and tell them that sometimes people are better off not having kids.

“Not everyone should be a parent,” I said. “Just like not everyone is nice.”

Jenna was the first to speak. “I already know about strangers.”

“Not everyone in your family is nice. Or was nice.”

Scrunched-up faces. Confusion.

I spoke for ten minutes. That was all it took to tell my children their grandparents were not good parents.

The irony of what I had done hit me years later, after Holly and the others. Someday, Rory and Jenna might have a talk with their kids and say the same thing about Millicent and me.

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