Lie in Plain Sight by Maggie Barbieri

grocery store, that on certain nights she worked late. Rather than drive the one mile home to his gorgeous, spacious Tudor, complete with adorable toddler and gorgeous wife, he had elected to stay to wait for his daughter, diving into the bottle of Falanghina that Maeve had opened up for herself and had planned to finish. She was three-quarters of the way through it, her senses pleasantly dulled, when he arrived, telling her things she didn’t want to hear. Gabriela didn’t love him. It wasn’t working. He needed a change. It was all stuff she had heard before, and it bored her, but that night, delicious white wine running through her veins, she felt loose. And he felt familiar. So she had let him kiss her once, and then kiss her again, knowing it was a mistake, understanding that it could never happen again but powerless to stop it. Before she knew it, it was more than she had bargained for, a cry leaving her lungs that she hadn’t heard herself utter since her marriage had ended.
    She had awoken the next morning with a pounding headache, and had leaned over the sink while filling her palm with water and drinking it down, the thought of what she had done not eliciting the feelings she had expected upon awaking. There was no shame, there was no guilt. There was one strange, unfamiliar feeling, a feeling she shouldn’t have had.
    Satisfaction.
    He had left her so unceremoniously years earlier, and that wound, she had come to find, had never closed. Now, the morning after, the feeling of his chest and his cheek and his mouth all coming back to her, she remembered when it had been good before it had become bad. It wasn’t her; it wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive enough, or adventurous enough, or sexy enough. It was him and what he needed and wanted. And what he wanted right now was her, and that was enough.
    She had looked at herself in the mirror the next morning. She looked the same; she smelled the same, with maybe a little more cinnamon about her than a normal woman. She was exactly the same except that now, she was no longer the dowdy ex-wife, the junker that had been traded in for a new model, but the shiny new thing that her ex-husband—him with his self-diagnosed adult-onset ADHD—couldn’t get enough of.
    â€œWe’re done with this, Cal,” she said, pushing him away now. “I was just about to have some leftovers, and you’re welcome to join me. But if you’re not hungry, then you should go home. To your wife. ” She pulled the leftover chicken out of the refrigerator, the containers with the mashed potatoes and gravy, the plastic-covered bowl of string beans. She knew that at his house, carbs were never on the menu and gravy was something of an urban legend, served at the local Greek diner but never in the Tudor. Beside her in the small kitchen, she could practically feel Cal salivating over the feast that she was about to prepare, even though it was two days old.
    â€œWhere’s Devon?” she asked.
    â€œWith Gabriela. She’s making an effort to get home earlier so she can spend time with him.”
    â€œReally?” Maeve asked. In the child’s short life, Maeve had never seen his mother hold him. “Why the change of heart?”
    â€œShe doesn’t like the baby stage. Now that he’s a toddler, she’s bonding with him more. He can talk now. Interact. She likes that.”
    Maeve prepared two plates of leftovers and put one at a time in the microwave. “And where does she think you are tonight, Cal?”
    â€œBible study at church.”
    â€œI don’t know whether to laugh or gag.”
    â€œYou can do both.” He came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. “I’m really bad,” he whispered. “I probably should go to Bible study.”
    â€œYou probably should. You should throw in a couple of stints in the confessional as well.” Maeve pulled his plate out of the