I was helping my daughter practice her spelling words at the kitchen table when she looked up and said, “Mommy, why does Aunt Tara tell me SECRETS about you?”
My daughter is seven. She’s the kind of kid who still believes in the tooth fairy and tells me everything. The idea that someone was feeding her secrets about me made my chest go tight.
Tara Kessler has been my best friend since college. Fifteen years. She’s godmother to my daughter, Bree. She comes over twice a week, sometimes more.
I asked Bree what kind of secrets.
She shrugged. “Like that you used to be sad all the time. And that Daddy almost didn’t marry you.”
I put the spelling list down.
That night I asked my husband, Doug, if he’d ever said anything like that to Tara. He looked confused. Said no.
I let it go.
Then I started paying attention.
The next week, Tara came over for dinner. I watched her with Bree. She was normal at first. But when I went to refill the water pitcher, I stopped in the hallway and listened.
“Your mom’s lucky she has me,” Tara said. “I’m the one who got your parents together. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Bree said, “Really?”
“Really. But don’t bring it up. It makes her feel bad.”
My hands were shaking.
I walked back in and Tara smiled at me like nothing happened.
A few days later, Bree asked me if it was true that I didn’t have any other friends before Tara. I said that wasn’t true. Bree looked relieved but also confused.
I checked my phone. Tara had been texting Bree on the iPad I let her use for games. I didn’t even know Bree had Tara’s number saved.
There were FORTY-SIX MESSAGES.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
The messages went back three months. Tara telling my seven-year-old that I was fragile. That I needed Tara. That without Tara, things would “go back to how they were.” She told Bree not to tell me about their talks.
She was turning my daughter into her ally. Against me.
I screenshot everything. Every single message.
The next morning, I called Tara and told her Bree had a school project and wanted to interview her godmother on Saturday. Tara said she’d love to.
Doug came up behind me after I hung up. He’d read the screenshots.
“What are you going to do Saturday?” he said.
I pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and opened my laptop. “Tara’s not the only one who can plan ahead.”
Doug sat down across from me and said, “There’s something else. I didn’t want to say it until I was sure.” He pulled out his phone and slid it across the table. “Look what she sent me LAST NIGHT.”
What She Sent Doug
The message was a photo.
It was me, from maybe four years ago. I was sitting on the floor of our old apartment hallway, knees up, head down. I remembered that night. It was after a miscarriage. The one we’d never told anyone about. The one that happened before Bree.
Tara had been there. She’d come over. She’d sat with me on that floor.
She’d apparently taken a photo of me on it.
The message she sent Doug with that picture said: She’s going to that place again. I can see it. You should call me.
Doug’s face when I looked up at him. He wasn’t angry. He was scared.
“When did she send this?” I said.
“Eleven forty-seven. Last night.”
I had been asleep at eleven forty-seven. I was fine at eleven forty-seven. I had made us both tea at ten-thirty and we’d watched half a documentary about penguins and I’d fallen asleep before it ended.
She just made that up. She fabricated a crisis, sent my husband a private photo of one of the worst nights of my life, and told him to call her.
I sat with that for a minute.
“Did you?” I said.
“No.” He put his hand flat on the table. “I texted back and said I didn’t know what she was talking about and she never replied.”
I looked at the photo again. The hallway floor of the old apartment had this ugly linoleum, tan with flecks of brown. I remembered the cold of it through my pajama pants. I remembered Tara handing me a glass of water and rubbing my back.
I remembered thinking she was one of the best people I’d ever known.
Fifteen Years Is a Long Time to Miss Something
Here’s what I keep getting stuck on.
Tara has been in my life since I was twenty-two. She was there when I failed my grad school entrance exam and cried in a Panera for an hour. She was there when my dad got sick. She threw my bridal shower. She was in the delivery room.
But I started going back through things. Not looking for problems, just looking.
There was the time she told Doug, casually, at a birthday party, that I’d had a “thing” with someone before we started dating. She’d described it as complicated. It wasn’t complicated. It was two dates that went nowhere. But she’d planted something, and Doug had asked me about it that night with this careful voice, like he was defusing something.
There was the time she told my mother-in-law, Karen, that I found the holidays stressful. Which, okay, I do. But Tara had phrased it as: she has a hard time with family stuff. Karen had been walking on eggshells around me for a year after that.
There was the time she told my friend Gina that I’d said Gina’s new boyfriend was boring. I hadn’t said that. Gina and I had drifted apart. I’d always thought it was just life.
I wasn’t looking for a pattern. The pattern found me.
Saturday
I sent Bree to my mom’s Friday night. Told her it was a sleepover, which she loved. She packed her own little bag, pink with a unicorn on it, and was out the door before dinner.
The house felt very quiet after that.
Tara showed up at eleven Saturday morning with a coffee for me, oat milk, exactly how I like it. She was wearing a yellow linen shirt and she looked happy. She looked completely fine.
I let her in.
Doug was in the kitchen. I’d told him to stay there, stay calm, let me do this.
We sat in the living room. I had my own coffee. I had my phone on the cushion next to me, face down.
Tara started talking about Bree’s school project, asking what the questions were, laughing about how cute it was going to be. She was warm and relaxed and she smelled like the same perfume she’s worn since 2011.
I waited until she finished her coffee.
Then I said, “I want to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”
She tilted her head. Concerned face. “Of course. What’s wrong?”
“Why have you been telling Bree secrets about me?”
Something moved across her face. Fast. Gone.
“What do you mean?”
I picked up my phone and turned it over and pulled up the screenshots. I set it on the coffee table between us.
She looked at the screen. She didn’t pick it up.
“Bree showed me those,” she said. “I’ve been worried about you. I was trying to help her understand – “
“She’s seven.”
“I know, but – “
“She’s seven, Tara. She doesn’t need to understand anything about my mental health history. She needs to think her mom is okay. Which I am.”
Tara sat back. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them. “I care about her. I was preparing her.”
“For what.”
Silence.
“For what?” I said again.
What She Actually Said
“For if you get bad again.” Her voice went soft. “I’ve seen it before. I know what it looks like. I just wanted Bree to have someone to come to.”
She meant herself. She wanted Bree to come to her.
“And the photo you sent Doug?”
Her jaw moved. “I was worried.”
“I was asleep.”
“You don’t know what you look like to other people.”
I stared at her. “What does that mean?”
She looked at her hands. “It means I’ve been watching out for you for fifteen years and sometimes you don’t see yourself clearly and someone has to.”
Doug walked in from the kitchen. I hadn’t called him. He’d just heard enough.
He stood in the doorway and he said, “You took a picture of her on the worst night of her life and you kept it. And then you used it to make me think she was falling apart. Why would you do that?”
Tara looked at him. Then at me. Then at the floor.
She said, “I just don’t want to lose you.”
And I think she meant it. I think that was the truest thing she said all morning. This whole thing, the messages to Bree, the photo, the slow drip of stories she’d been feeding to everyone around me for years. I think it was all just her trying to make herself necessary.
Make herself the only one who really knew me. The only one who could translate me to my own family.
I think she’d been doing it so long she didn’t know she was doing it anymore.
That didn’t make it okay.
After She Left
She cried. She apologized. She said she’d never meant to hurt Bree.
I told her I needed space and I’d be in touch.
She picked up her bag and her empty coffee cup, which I thought was a strange thing to carry out with her, and she left.
Doug and I stood in the living room. The yellow linen of her shirt had left a small impression on the couch cushion.
“You okay?” he said.
I didn’t answer right away. I was thinking about the miscarriage. About that hallway floor. About how I’d actually been glad she was there. How I’d squeezed her hand and felt less alone.
She’d taken a photo of that.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
I called my mom and asked to talk to Bree. Bree told me about the pancakes they’d had for breakfast, blueberry, and about a cartoon she’d watched, and about a bug she’d found in the garden that she was pretty sure was rare.
She didn’t mention Tara once.
I told her I loved her and I’d pick her up at three.
After I hung up I stood in the kitchen for a while. The spelling list from earlier in the week was still on the counter. Bree had gotten seventeen out of twenty right. The three she’d missed were neighbor, enough, and believe.
I picked up the list and put it on the fridge with a magnet.
—
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