Tryst Six Venom by Penelope Douglas

women aren’t.”
My grandfather cheated on Mimi? I guess I’m not shocked. I didn’t know
the man well. He passed when I was seven. But Mimi wears it like a badge—
the fact that she was his wife.
She goes on. “You will never regret keeping your chin up and making the
sacrifices it takes to maintain the life you have spent years building. She will
come into your home, not because he loves her, but because he misses you
and can’t be alone. Once a man becomes used to being taken care of, he can
only live that way. He’ll replace you out of necessity, not desire.”
She. My father’s mistress.
“She will come into your home,” Mimi continues, “and parent your child
and spend your money and drive your cars. Fix it.”
My chest rises and falls with shallow breaths. Everything’s changing.
I back away from the patio, heading back into the house and ball my fists.
I knew about the other woman. I even thought there might be more than
one. Who could blame him? My mother was a bitch and made the house
unbearable, trying to control everyone and everything, and we were all
suffocating under the clothes and the makeup and the standards, but…
Is he actually leaving her? Is he making a new life without us?
Is he leaving me with her?
Or is she leaving him? It sounded like my grandmother was trying to talk
her out of something.
Where do I go when I come home for holidays? They don’t know me
anymore. Do they even want me around—my mother forced to keep up
appearances, and my father forced to support a family he no longer wants?
Jesus, do they even know I’m still here?
I rub my hands up and down my face, drifting down the hallway, past all
our photos that my grandmother will keep up, because we look like a happy
family, and my grandfather looks like a doting husband.
I drift, until I find my way upstairs and in my grandmother’s room,
veering straight for the hidden cubby drawer in the mantel of her fireplace.
Reaching inside, I dig out the stack of letters I’d found there when I was
eight that now make a lot more sense since Macon told me about Two Locks
—the old, abandoned farm on Harley Creek my family owns where he said
my grandmother hid her affair.
I stare at the stack—more than fifty letters probably—yellowed with age
and secured with a white ribbon. At the time, I’d thought it was adult stuff.