Chapter 18
“Neither do I.”
“Then we figure it out together.”
I looked around our living room.
Framed pictures.
Books.
The lamp we bought on vacation fifteen years earlier.
The couch we argued over because I wanted blue and he wanted gray.
A life built through thousands of ordinary decisions.
I loved that room.
I loved that house.
I even loved parts of the man sitting in front of me.
That was why this was difficult.
If Mark had always been cruel, leaving would have been easy.
But he had not.
He was the man who drove four hours overnight when my mother had surgery.
He was the man who once spent an entire Sunday trying to fix a leaking faucet because I joked that calling a plumber would destroy his pride.
He had danced with me barefoot in our kitchen.
He had held my hand through funerals.
He had sat beside me through ordinary illnesses and ordinary disappointments.
He had made me laugh until I cried.
And he had lied to me for a year.
Both things were true.
People like simple stories because simple stories make choices easy.
Good person.
Bad person.
Loving marriage.
Broken marriage.
Faithful spouse.
Cheating spouse.
But real life is crueler.
Sometimes the person who hurts you most is also the person who once made you feel safest.
Sometimes twenty-one good years do not erase one terrible year.
And one terrible year does not magically erase every good memory.
It simply changes what those memories can guarantee about the future.
“I need time,” I said.
“How much?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to leave?”
“I don’t know.”
His face tightened.
“Are you going to ask me to?”
“I don’t know.”
He stood.
“I can’t live like this.”
For a second, I could only stare.
Then I said, very quietly, “You have been living like this for a week.”
He froze.
“I lived like this for eighteen months.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No. It isn’t.”
My voice began shaking.
“You knew the truth.”
He looked away.
“That’s the difference. You knew why you were distant. You knew where you were going. You knew why your phone was locked. You knew why you stopped touching me. You knew why dinners changed. You knew why you came home smelling different.”
“Claire.”
“I didn’t.”
Tears blurred my eyes.
“I had to wake up every morning not knowing whether the problem was you or me.”