The excitement of our new apartment had quickly been overshadowed by the shadow of Lily’s ex, Sarah. My insistence that Sarah not come to our housewarming had blown up, leaving Lily fuming and me questioning if my jealousy was truly out of line. I genuinely believed my feelings were valid, that Sarah’s constant presence crossed a boundary, but Lily’s anger made me feel like the unreasonable one.
The day of the housewarming arrived, a bright, sunny Saturday, but the atmosphere inside was still a bit frosty between Lily and me. I’d reluctantly agreed to invite Sarah, hoping she would just make a brief appearance and then leave. Lily was bustling around, setting up food, while I awkwardly arranged drinks. The doorbell rang, and Lily’s face lit up. “She’s here!” she chirped, almost too brightly.
Sarah walked in, a beautifully wrapped houseplant in her hand. She greeted Lily with a warm hug, then turned to me, her smile a little too wide, a little too knowing. My stomach churned. This was going to be a long night.
As the party got into full swing, my anxiety about Sarah only grew. She seemed to be everywhere Lily was, whispering jokes, sharing glances, a constant, subtle reminder of their shared past. I tried to ignore it, to focus on our friends, but I felt like an outsider in my own home.
Then, about an hour into the party, Lily’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, her eyes widening. “Oh, no,” she mumbled, her face paling.
“What is it?” I asked, a fresh wave of dread washing over me.
“It’s… it’s my mom,” Lily stammered, looking at Sarah with a panicked expression. “She said she just saw Mark and David pull up outside.”
My brows furrowed. Mark and David? Who were they? And why did the mention of them make Lily and Sarah look like they’d just seen a ghost?
Sarah quickly grabbed Lily’s arm. “They can’t come in! Not here, not now!”
Just then, there was a loud, insistent knock on the door, followed by a booming voice. “Lily! It’s your long-lost brothers! Open up!”
Lily froze. “My… brothers?” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
Sarah stepped forward, her usual composed demeanor crumbling. “Lily, we need to tell her. Now.”
Lily took a shaky breath and turned to me, her eyes filled with a mixture of fear and something else I couldn’t quite decipher. “Remember how I told you Sarah and I dated for two years?”
I nodded, confused.
“Well,” Lily continued, her voice trembling, “we… we didn’t just date. We were actually married. For a year, before we broke up. My family, they were incredibly against it. Especially my older brothers, Mark and David. They threatened to disown me, to cut me off financially, if I didn’t leave Sarah. They made it clear they never wanted to see her again. So, when we divorced, we agreed to keep the marriage a complete secret from everyone except my mom, to avoid further conflict and to protect my relationship with my brothers and the family money that I needed for college.”
Sarah stepped in, her voice gentler now. “We decided it was easier to just pretend we were ‘ex-girlfriends’ who were still ‘close friends.’ We never wanted you to think we were hiding anything, but we also didn’t want to jeopardize Lily’s relationship with her family, or cause more drama. And her brothers, Mark and David, they’ve been relentless. They’ve been trying to ‘catch’ us doing anything that looks like more than friendship for years, to prove we’re still ‘together,’ so they can get Lily cut off. They even tried to follow her once when she was meeting me for coffee. They’re obsessed with protecting the family’s ‘image’ and traditional values.”
The housewarming party, meant to celebrate our new beginning, had become the stage for a family drama I never knew existed. My “jealousy” hadn’t been about Sarah still being in love with Lily. It was an unwitting intuition about a hidden, intense history, a secret marriage, and a looming threat from Lily’s family that had shaped her entire relationship with Sarah, and now, threatened to overshadow our own. The problem wasn’t Sarah’s lingering feelings; it was the unspoken truth of their past, driven by a family’s controlling grip.