Chapter 24
Except this time, we were grieving us.
Mark whispered into my hair.
“I’m sorry.”
I did not say it was okay.
It wasn’t.
I simply let him be sorry.
When we stepped apart, his face was wet.
“I’ll call before I come back for anything.”
“Thank you.”
He took the suitcases.
At the door, he stopped.
“Claire?”
“Yes?”
He looked at me for a long time.
“I should have come home.”
I swallowed.
“Yes.”
Then he left.
The door closed.
I listened to his footsteps.
The garage opened.
His car started.
For the first time in twenty-two years, I stood inside our house and listened to Mark leave without wondering when he would return.
The strange thing was, I did not collapse.
I expected to.
I expected my body to understand his departure before my mind did and simply give up.
Instead, I went into the kitchen.
There were two coffee mugs in the sink.
I washed them.
I dried them.
I put them away.
Then I looked at the little lamp.
It was still burning.
I switched it off.
Not angrily.
I simply did not need it.
The weeks after Mark moved out were not beautiful.
Healing is rarely as cinematic as people want it to be.
Some mornings I woke relieved.
Other mornings I forgot for half a second and reached toward his side of the bed.
I cried while folding laundry.
I became furious at supermarkets.
I discovered that certain songs could make twenty-two years return in less than three minutes.
Mark called occasionally.
At first, every call tightened my chest.
He did not beg after that first week.
I think he finally understood that begging would turn his pain into another thing I had to manage.
He told me he was trying to understand himself.
I told him I hoped he did.
He told me again that the affair was over.
I told him I believed him.
He asked once whether that changed anything.
I said no.
A month after he left, he came to collect more clothes.
He looked thinner.
Older.
Not destroyed.
Just changed.
We stood in the hallway.
“I found something,” he said.
He held out a small folded piece of paper.
I recognized it immediately.
The napkin from the bookstore.
I must have left it in the pocket of an old coat.
Dates covered both sides.
The Saturday golf game.
The perfume.