Free The Comfort of Lies by Randy Susan Meyers

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    Juliette’s experience at Emerson doing theatrical makeup, plus the fashion column she’d once written for Boston magazine, combined with Gwynne’s eye for art and head for business, had come together in such a perfect storm of success that they’d recently moved from selling their products only at their shop to selling the juliette&gwynne makeup and skin care line regionally.
    In the last three years, they’d both purchased homes in the town where they’d opened their shop, the town they’d originally chosen because it was so far above their economic stations. Juliette had made their first skin creams in her Waltham kitchen; now a small manufacturing plant produced their products. Recently, every exclusive women’s store that Juliette visited displayed the matte black slashed with deep pansy-purple that signified a juliette&gwynne product.
    That letter threatened every bit of the happiness Juliette had earned.
    Leaving Gwynne to deal with the shop, Juliette slipped into the bathroom and locked the door. She sat on the black restroom chair and again slid out the photos and letter. She studied the child’s face and memorized the adoptive mother’s name before zipping them into the deepest compartment of her purse. Then she stood before the mirror, applied another coat of lipstick, and readied to give her usual morning greeting to the staff as they arrived.
    Helena and Jai were first to show up after Juliette and Gwynne. Not only did they work together, they were roommates who drove in together, left together, and spent the weekends together at bars made for women wrapped in dresses as tight as bandages and the men who wanted them.
    The two young women were the juliette&gwynne brow specialists.Brows, the women of Boston’s western suburbs knew, could make or break your face, so there were definite Helena and Jai camps.
    Helena, the designated sophisticate, arched women into minor-league versions of Catherine Zeta-Jones. She could thin a brow into submission, dye it to resemble mink, or teach a client how to make her anemic brow resemble Brooke Shields wings if she so wished.
    Juliette preferred Jai’s minimalist approach, making a woman’s brows just clean enough to pop her eyes. One time she’d made the mistake of saying this at dinner, which sent Lucas, Max, and Nathan into hysteria. Max, then eight, took to telling gory stories of women’s eyes popping out, strings of eyeballs hanging from bloody sockets.
    As she went from room to room, Juliette considered her options. The plans she’d begun formulating would sound crazy if she gave them voice—not that she intended to talk about them. But she needed information. Acting in a play where she didn’t know the lines would never happen to her again.
    Six years ago, after Nathan engraved the words I had an affair on her, she hadn’t known how to look at him. For too long, she hadn’t been able to ask anything except why.
    “Why, Nathan? Were you unsatisfied?” she’d ask. “Bored? Tired of me? What did you need that I didn’t provide?”
    Those questions never elicited a satisfying answer. What could he say that would help her understand? “I was restless”? “Being around the kids and you bored me”? “I missed your adoration”?
    At some point, she accepted that it was all that and more, and that it didn’t matter why he did it, but that he’d done it.
    It wasn’t his answer that mattered, but hers.
    She had to find out not only if she could stay with him but also how to do it without punishing him every day. He implored her to go to couples therapy with him, but she refused. Every time she pictured herself sitting with Nathan and some faceless shrink, she panicked. In these imaginary sessions, she was picked over, criticized, analyzed, and found wanting.
    For weeks she’d shut herself away with the computer. One site, complete with audio, screamed Heal Yourself! The next began witha warning that their chances of staying together were