Home For The Holidays

I’m a nerd through and through. My brain is just wired that way. But I was born with mom’s exceptional beauty, my grandma’s gravity-defying tits, and my dad’s money. I’m a mean girls’ worst nightmare. I always used my smarts to make them look stupid whenever they came at me or for someone they found less fortunate than them. They hate to see me coming.

Anyhoo, because of my own experience with that ilk, I had seen the signs in Tess the mess the few times our paths have crossed, so I wasn’t buying this story. The thing that I could not understand while trying to read between the lines of mom’s missives to aunt Sharon is why there was no communication between Tom and Deidre.

Apparently, these two people who loved each other to the moon and back didn’t have it in them to sit down and talk like two rational beings. Tom believed the worst, including the thought that the twins weren’t his, something I’m sure Tessa had told him, and Deidre was just so hurt that he’d even believe her ex-friend’s lies that she wasn’t even trying.

I spent the next few weeks reading mom’s private messages to my aunt and trying to follow along on everyone else’s social media. Tessa had a lot to say about people cheating on their spouses and how just because you’re friends with someone, that doesn’t mean that you should condone their behavior. That was her bid for saint of the year. I barf!

My idiot brother wasn’t saying anything, but actions speak louder than words, and he was out of the house before the twins were even born. Deidre had deleted all social media profiles and chose instead to focus all of her energy on raising her kids the right way. The only thing I wanted to knock her head off for is the fact that she’s still in love with my brother, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, after I’d pieced the whole sordid mess together from mom’s messages and Tessa’s daily pick me rants on social media where she was doing her best not to have anyone look too closely at the fact that she was screwing her best friend’s soon to be ex-husband by painting said best friend as a cheat and a liar, I was left with a dilemma.

I couldn’t tell my family how I found out the big secret, which I’d learned everyone had decided to keep from me at dad’s request because he didn’t want his baby stressing while hundreds of miles away from everyone and everything that was going on. Dad knows me so well; he knew that I’d forsake everything else and pick at this thing like the scab on a festering wound.

So I had to keep my knowledge a secret and pretend not to know but still find subtle ways to get to the truth. I started with Deidre. For some reason, it never entered my mind to believe the story of her cheating. I’ve seen her with my brother, and she loves that idiot something fierce. I think she was more heartbroken that he’d believed the lie than about him cheating.

I picked away at her bit by bit until she finally broke down and told me what really happened the night that she went out with Tessa. According to Deidre, they ran into an old flame of hers at the restaurant they’d gone to, and Tessa had asked him to join their table. Deidre didn’t think too much of it since they’d all been friends back in high school, so though she wasn’t exactly comfortable with it, she didn’t fight it.

This guy, Troy, was her last boyfriend before she met my brother, and the two of them had ended on not so good terms when he cheated on her. Apparently, he had tried getting back with her up until the day before she married my brother but had seemingly moved on after she shut him down.

She hadn’t seen or heard from him in years, so running into him that night had been a bit of a surprise. She doesn’t know what or how it happened, but she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she came out, he was standing outside the door waiting for her. She started to ask what he was doing when he just leaned in and kissed her. She pushed him away and lit into him, but the damage was already done.

She had no idea that anyone had seen, but someone did, and word got back to Tom along with a snapshot of that kiss. I wonder who the hell took it. I’d looked at my sister in law that day like she’d just fallen off a turnip truck. It was so glaringly obvious that she’d been set up, but she still didn’t see it even after all that had transpired since.