Read Online Acts of Contrition by Jennifer Handford - Free Book Online

private we can talk?
I had asked, and then followed Landon up to his tenth-floor room.
    “But we were just
talking
. There’s got to be some way to prove that we were just talking.”
    “That’s beside the point,” Landon says. “What matters is how it looks.”
    “I don’t get it,” I say. “Why was someone taking a photo of you? You weren’t even the attorney general then.”
    “They weren’t after me,” he says. “The photographer was a snoop PI hired by the wife of one of my firm’s partners. Shesuspected him of running around and using the room at the Mayflower to meet his ‘friend.’ We just got caught in the crossfire.”
    For a moment neither of us says anything. Then I ask, “Have I been identified in the photo as your ex-girlfriend? Or whatever it was that I was to you.”
    “If it’s any consolation, you can’t entirely see your face. Your head is down and your hair is everywhere.”
    I reach up and grab a handful of said hair. A wave of relief floods over me. “So maybe it’ll be okay.”
    “Let’s hope. I don’t know what this guy intends to do with the photo.”
    “Can’t you make a deal—buy it from him?”
    “If I make him an offer, he’ll know it’s worth something. It’s better to give him the impression that it’s worthless.”
    “Can
you
tell that it’s me?”
    “I can, of course. There’s a slice of your profile that you can see, plus if you know what you look like, you’d be able to tell.”
    “So my husband will know?”
    “I don’t know,” he says.
    “God!” I say, squeezing the steering wheel. “How will you explain who I am, why we were together?”
    “I don’t know. I’ll just say you were an old friend and we happened to run into each other. I’ll explain that you were holding a baby carrier. That I invited you up to my room so that you could nurse. Yeah, that’s it. That’ll make me sound very pro-women, pro-nursing.”
    “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it!” I seethe. “What about me? What am I going to tell Tom?”
    “Tell him the same story I’m going to tell. That you happened to run into me.”
    “In the lobby of the Mayflower? He’ll want to know what I was doing downtown. I had just had a baby. It’s not like I was working then.”
    “I don’t know, Mary! Make up some goddamned story. Say you met a girlfriend for lunch to show off your new baby and you happened to run into me.”
    “You can’t let this hurt me, Landon.”
    “I’ve got my eye on a US Senate seat. You think I want a scandal on my hands?”
    There is a pause across the phone lines. I listen to Landon breathe. I lift my chin to slide the impending tears back into place, exhale slowly.
    “The last thing in the world I want is to hurt you, Mary,” Landon says in a tone I heard only occasionally throughout our relationship, a tone that soothed me, like crawling into his arms after days of not hearing from him. “God knows I’ve hurt you enough.”
    I look down and watch two fat teardrops fall onto my thighs.
    “What am I supposed to do?” I ask because I have no clue.
    “Just go about your normal life,” Landon says. “There’s a chance this photo will never see the light of day.”
    In the grocery store I walk through the fluorescent-lit aisles in an equally fluorescent daze, buying two dozen cupcakes I don’t need. At home I check on the kids and then crawl into bed with Tom. I curl into my husband, and instead of paying attention to our
Seinfeld
rerun, I pray for forgiveness for my decade of sins, and try to breathe through lungs that are too small for this crisis.
    That day at the Mayflower, the day the photo was taken, I went into DC to meet Landon.
    We settled into two overstuffed floral chairs in the lobby.
    “I can’t believe you called,” he said, struggling to cross his long legs in the too-soft chair.
    “I wouldn’t have, obviously,” I answered, rocking Sally’s carrier with my foot, a mom skill I had already acquired in