The laundry room. I didn’t even know you could do that in a laundry room. I’ve since thought about it more than I care to admit, which probably says something about me I’m not ready to deal with.
He’s unemployed now. She’s blacklisted from every firm in a three-state radius. I got the house and I still haven’t fixed that screen door.
Not because I can’t because every time I walk past it, I feel something I don’t have a name for. Not quite satisfaction. Not quite grief.
Something in between that kind of sits in your chest like a stone that got warm. Okay, let me back up. My name is Nora.
Nora Ellen Callahan, which became Nora Ellen Whitfield for six years, and which is now Nora Ellen Callahan again because I paid the $62 to get it changed back. And it was the best $62 I have ever spent in my entire life. I was 31 when all of this started, 33 when it ended.
Those two years feel like a different life, like something that happened to someone I know well, but am not particularly fond of. I was pregnant, 7 months, the size of what my OB kept calling a watermelon, which I don’t know who started that comparison, but whoever it was clearly never had to ride in a sedan for 4 hours to visit their in-laws while retaining water in their ankles. I was also working remote, which I thought was going to be the best thing that ever happened to me and turned out to be the thing that let me see things I probably would have missed otherwise.
I’m a project coordinator for a midsize logistics company. It’s not glamorous. I spend most of my day on spreadsheets and calls and chasing people down for updates they should have sent me 3 days ago.
I’m good at it. I’m very, very good at finding things people think are hidden. I don’t say that to sound threatening.
It’s just true. My husband ex-husband, his name is Ryan. Ryan Thomas Whitfield.
He is to this day one of the most charming people I have ever met. He makes friends in grocery store checkout lines. He remembers the names of servers the second time he goes to a restaurant.
People genuinely love him. His mother still texts me sometimes. I don’t answer, but she texts.
I want to say that because I think it matters. He wasn’t some obvious monster. He was the guy at the party everyone gravitates toward.
He was funny. He coached youth soccer on weekends for 2 years completely voluntarily because he said he liked the kid’s energy. I believed him.
Maybe that was still true. I honestly don’t know. My best friend’s name is Tess.
Tess Maran Okafor. We met in college in a sociology class neither of us wanted to be in. She sat next to me and whispered something mean about the professor’s tie in the first 5 minutes and I laughed so hard the professor looked at me and we’ve been friends since.
Or I thought we had been. She is was the kind of beautiful that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Not in a jealous way or not only in a jealous way, more like you’re aware of her presence in a room in the way you’re aware of a ceiling fan that’s wobbling slightly.
You can’t stop tracking it. Ryan always said she was a lot. His word.
She’s a lot. Nor. I nodded.
I filed it away as mild discomfort. Maybe it was guilt. I’ll never know for sure.
It was a Tuesday. I remember because I was watching the tail end of a rerun of The Great British Baking Show, the episode with the bread sculpture challenge, and I was eating a bowl of cereal at 11:00 in the morning because I had just finished a call and hadn’t eaten real breakfast. And the baby was sitting on my bladder in a way that made the thought of getting off the couch feel genuinely difficult.
Ryan was supposed to be at work. He works worked in commercial real estate. His firm was downtown about 40 minutes away.
He left at 8:00 every morning, came home between 6:00 and 7:00. This was routine. This was 6 years of routine.
I heard his car in the driveway at 11:15. I didn’t think anything of it at first. People come home early sometimes.
He forgot something. He had a lunch nearby. Fine.
But then I heard two car doors. Two. I still don’t know why that was the thing that made my body go still.
Not my brain. My body. My hands stopped moving.
The cereal spoon just sat in the bowl. I got up slowly because getting up at seven months pregnant from a deep couch is an event. I walked to the front window and I looked through the gap in the curtains, the ones I’d bought at a HomeGoods on Route 9.
White linen. Ryan said they looked cheap. I kept them anyway and I saw Tess standing in my driveway looking at her phone.
Ryan was coming around the side of the car toward her. They weren’t touching. That was the first thing my brain noted.
They weren’t touching, so I could still explain this. She dropped by. He ran into her downtown.
They’re planning a surprise for me. We were having dinner with her that Friday anyway. This is fine.
And then Ryan put his hand on the small of her back and she turned toward him and it was such a small gesture and such a specific gesture. And I knew I knew before they went inside. I knew before I heard the front door open.
I knew before I heard their voices go quieter and then disappear. I stood at that window for a while. I don’t know how long.
Long enough that The Great British Baking Show moved into a new episode. I want to tell you what I did next, but I need to tell you something else first. I had been noticing things for maybe a month.
Small things. Ryan coming home smelling like a different soap. Not cologne.
Soap. That specific detail confused me because cologne would have been predictable. Soap seemed accidental, like he’d used someone else’s shower.
I had noticed that Tess had started texting me more, which sounds like nothing, but her texts were strange, too cheerful. How are you feeling? with two question marks.
Thinking about you today, which was not Tess’s vocabulary. Tess is dry. Tess is funny in a mean way.
She doesn’t use exclamation points unless she’s being sarcastic. I noticed that she’d stopped coming over the way she usually did. She used to drop by without really asking.
That stopped around month five of my pregnancy. I thought she was giving me space. Giving us space as a couple expecting our first baby.
I had not put these things together. I want to be honest about that. I am very good at finding things in spreadsheets.
I am apparently much worse at finding things that are right in front of me. Or maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe there’s no meaningful difference.
So, what did I do? I went to my car. I drove to the Panera on Waverly Avenue and I ordered a broccoli cheddar soup and a bread bowl, which is not what you would order if you were in a state of controlled calm.
And I sat in the booth by the window and I watched people walk by on the street and I ate the entire thing. Then I sat there for another 40 minutes. My phone buzzed.
A text from my coworker Diane that said, “Did you see the reply all email? I’m losing my mind. I did not reply.
The email sat unread for three days. I found out later it was about a vending machine dispute. The stakes feel very different in retrospect.
I drove back home at 1:30. Ryan’s car was there. Tess’s car was gone.
I walked in. Ryan was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He looked up and said, “Oh, hey.
I came home for a few hours. Figured I’d check on you.” “Where’d you go?” I said, “Panera.” He nodded. He asked how I was feeling.
I said fine. I said I was tired and I was going to lie down. I went upstairs.
===== PART 2 =====
I lay on top of the covers fully dressed and I stared at the ceiling and I thought I need to know how long this has been going on before I do anything. That was the decision I made in that moment. Not confrontation, not crying, just I need information first, which again probably says something about me.
It took me 11 days. I want to be clear that I’m not proud of how I got some of this information and I’m not going to go into all of it. I will say that when you are a project coordinator who works remotely and your husband uses the same email password he’s used since you met him because you can see it written in a post-it stuck inside his nightstand drawer and when his messages load in a browser and when you have a lunch break 11 days.
The first email from Tess in his inbox was dated 14 months earlier. 14 months. I was not pregnant yet when it started.
I was not even trying yet. We hadn’t started yet. He came to me 4 months after that first email and suggested we start trying.
He was enthusiastic about it. He talked about names. He talked about neighborhoods with good school districts.
He held my hand. I sat with that for a long time. I’m still sitting with it.
Honestly, the trying, the timing, whether the pregnancy was something that happened despite the affair or alongside it deliberately as some kind of I don’t know. I stop myself when I go too far down that road because I don’t think I’ll ever get an answer and I’m not sure I’d want it. The emails were not explicit mostly.
They were worse than explicit. They were comfortable. They used shortorthhand.
They referenced inside jokes I didn’t know. One of them referenced a trip to Philadelphia that Ryan told me was a work conference. Tess went to Philadelphia that same weekend.
I remembered it because she’d texted me from a cheese steak place and I’d said I was jealous. I had been jealous of the cheese steak. I had been jealous of my best friend eating a cheese steak with my husband in Philadelphia.
There was an email where Ryan called her the version of himself he hadn’t gotten to be. I read that one three times. I’m still not sure what it means.
I don’t think I want to know. The thing about being pregnant while your life is collapsing is that your body doesn’t know. Your body keeps doing its job.
I had a prenatal appointment at week 31 where my OB said everything looked great. The baby’s position was good. My blood pressure was good.
===== PART 3 =====
and I sat in that office and smiled and said thank you and drove home and just sat in the driveway for a while, not a long time, maybe 20 minutes. There was a podcast playing on the radio. I don’t know what it was about.
I didn’t change it. My sister called that night. Her name is Christine.
She lives in Portland. She has three kids and a very demanding job. And she is the kind of person who will say the exact wrong thing at the exact right moment.
And I love her in a way that gives me a headache sometimes. I didn’t tell her. Not yet.
I said I was tired. And she said, “Of course you’re tired. You’re growing a person.
go to sleep. I said, “Okay.” I did not go to sleep. Here’s the part I didn’t expect.
I didn’t cry for a long time. I mean, I cried, but not about Ryan and Tess. I cried once in a grocery store because they were out of the crackers I wanted, which the pregnancy gets partial credit for, but still.
I cried watching a dog food commercial. I did not cry about my husband sleeping with my best friend in my house for over a year. I think I was in a phase of my life where grief had nowhere to land because I was using all my energy to be careful, to not act, to collect information and wait and be methodical.
Looking back, that was probably not healthy. My therapist, who I started seeing later, said I’d entered a kind of operational mode and that it was a protective mechanism and that it was okay to also acknowledge it had costs. I said, “Okay.” I still don’t fully know what she meant.
Maybe I’m still in it. Ryan’s boss was a man named Paul Garrett, which is a very particular kind of name. The kind of name that belongs to a man who wears navy suits and has opinions about coffee.
He did wear navy suits. For the record, he was 53. He had been divorced for 4 years.
He ran the firm with a kind of focused competence that I found later genuinely impressive. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t charming in the way Ryan was charming.
He was just capable. He had the energy of someone who decided long ago not to waste time on things that weren’t worth it. I did not plan to meet Paul Garrett.
It happened like this. 3 weeks after the baby was born, I was at a postclosing reception for one of Ryan’s deals, the only one I’d ever attended because I’d been pregnant. And Ryan said I didn’t have to, but seemed pleased when I offered to come.
And Paul was there. And Ryan introduced us. And Paul shook my hand and said, “Ryan talks about you all the time.” And Ryan, standing right next to me said, “She’s the reason I’m any good.” Which was a very Ryan thing to say.
generous, public, slightly performed. I smiled. I said something.
Paul looked at me for a second with an expression I couldn’t fully read. And then someone called him away. And that was the whole conversation.
I didn’t think about him again for months. My daughter was born in February. She weighed 7 lb 4 oz.
She has Ryan’s eyes and what my mother keeps calling my stubborn jaw, which I choose to take as a compliment. Her name is Mave. She smelled like something I don’t have words for.
And I held her in that hospital room and I thought, I am going to get through this. Not for you, but because of you, because of what you are. Ryan was in the room when she was born.
He cried genuinely. I think he held her and he looked at her with something on his face that was real. And I know that because I’ve spent 6 years studying his face.
And I know the difference between his performed emotions and his actual ones. And I stood there watching him hold his daughter and thinking, “How do you have more than one thing at once? How do you sit in this room and be this person and also be the person who is doing what you are doing?
I never answered that. I don’t think there is one. I confronted him when Mave was 2 months old.
Not right away. I know. I know.
My sister when I told her later said Norah why. And the honest answer is I wasn’t ready. The baby wasn’t sleeping.
I wasn’t sleeping. The logistics of blowing up a marriage while you’re not sleeping and have a 2-month-old felt like more than I could manage. I also needed to know one more thing first.
I needed to know if Tess knew I was pregnant when it started. It started in November of the year before Mave was born. We announced the pregnancy in July, which meant the affair was already 7 months old when we told people we were having a baby.
And the emails continued after all the way through. There was an email from Tess in my th month of pregnancy. There was one the week Mave was born that I refused to describe in any detail because it would make me sound like I have less composure than I do.
She knew she had known for 7 months and kept going. That was the thing I needed to be sure of before I did anything because I think I needed it to be fully what it was before I let myself respond to it. I needed to not be able to talk myself out of it.
I needed to not be able to say, “Well, maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she felt bad. Maybe this was complicated.
It wasn’t complicated.” Or it was. Obviously, it was. People are always complicated.
But the shape of what happened was clear. The night I confronted Ryan, Mave was asleep. I had the monitor on the kitchen table.
Ryan was washing dishes. He always washed dishes after dinner. It was one of the things I genuinely loved about him.
I have to keep reminding myself of the full picture, the whole person. And I sat down at the table and I said, “I know about you and Tess.” He turned around. He still had the dish towel in his hand.
I watched his face do something complicated in the span of about 2 seconds. It cycled through about four different strategies before landing on something like resignation. He said, “How long have you known?” Not.
What are you talking about? Not that’s not what you think. Just how long?
I said long enough. He put the dish towel on the counter. He came and sat across from me and then he started talking.
And I want to be honest about this. Some of what he said made sense. Not in a way that excused anything, but in a way I hadn’t fully accounted for.
He said he’d been unhappy for a long time. Not with me exactly, with himself. With the version of his life he was living.
He said he felt like he’d made all the right choices on paper and couldn’t figure out why they didn’t add up to something that felt real. He said he knew that wasn’t my fault. He kept saying he knew and I believed him that he’d been unhappy.
I believed that part. What I couldn’t figure out and still can’t is whether that’s an explanation or just a description of a state that still chose to do what it did. I said, “Did you love her?” He looked at the table.
He said, “I don’t know what that means.” Which is not a no. Which I noted. I said, “I want you to leave.” He said, “Nora.” I said, “Not forever.
Just tonight. I need you to go somewhere and I need you to not be here right now.” He went to his brother’s. He texted me from the car.
I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t do anything. I didn’t reply.
May have made a sound through the monitor. I went upstairs and checked on her. She was fine, just shifting.
I stood in her doorway for a while in the dark. Here’s a thing I didn’t expect. When I finally told my sister Christine, her first reaction was not sympathetic.
She was quiet for a second and then she said, “Nora, did you was there anything?” And she stopped herself, “But I know my sister. I know what she was asking.” I said, “Say it.” She said, “Were you present? Like, I know you go somewhere when things get hard, you get very contained.” Was he?
Were you two? I said, “Christine.” She said, “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just I said, “Are you asking me if I drove my husband to sleep with my best friend by being too self-contained?” She said, “I’m asking if the marriage was struggling in a way you might not have.” I hung up.
We didn’t talk for 9 days. Then she called and apologized. I accepted it, but I sat with what she said.
I still sit with it sometimes in the uncomfortable way you sit with something because it has a splinter of truth in it. Even if the thing itself is wrong, I don’t know. I’m not a perfect narrator of my own life.
I know I pull back sometimes. I know I go quiet. Was the marriage struggling?
It wasn’t what it was in the beginning. What is after 6 years? I don’t know if that’s an answer or an excuse.
I can’t always tell the difference. The divorce process started and that’s when the house became the thing. Ryan wanted to sell and split.
I didn’t. I know the house sounds like it should be a symbol of everything terrible. And sometimes it is, but I had also spent a year of weekends repainting every room and refinishing the floors in the front hallway and planting tomatoes in the backyard that actually produced something for the first time that summer.
And I was not going to give up the tomatoes or the floors or the backyard. Ryan’s lawyer was aggressive about the house. Mine was sharper.
And here’s where Paul Garrett enters the story again. Except not in the way you might think. I saw Paul at a school fundraiser.
Not a school for our kids. Mave was barely four months old at this point, but for a nonprofit that my company sponsors every year. I go, it’s a dinner at a hotel ballroom downtown.
The kind of event where you drink the free wine and pretend to care about the raffle prizes and end up having a genuinely okay time because you’re talking to adults without having to think about the baby monitor. Paul was there because the nonprofit also worked with commercial real estate firms on some community development projects. He came over to say hello.
We stood near the bar. He asked about the baby. He asked how I was doing.
And the way he said it, it was the kind of how are you doing that actually wants an answer, which is rarer than it sounds. I said Ryan and I are separating. He didn’t look surprised.
He looked measured like he was deciding something. He said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” I said, “Are you?” He looked at me. He said, “No, probably not.” And something about that honesty was the most appealing thing anyone had said to me in months.
We talked for two hours. We were at various points slightly in the way of other people trying to get drinks. I did not care.
At the end of the night, he asked if he could give me his card and I said I already had his card and he laughed and I took it out of my purse and handed it back to him and he wrote his personal cell on the back. I want to be clear about what happened next and what didn’t happen next. What didn’t happen?
I ran immediately to Paul to get revenge on Ryan. What did happen? I drove home, paid the babysitter, checked on Mave, and put Paul’s card on my nightstand, and thought about whether I wanted to use it for about 3 weeks before I texted him.
The distinction matters to me. I don’t know if it matters to anyone else. We had coffee first and then dinner and then another dinner.
And I want to tell you that this was purely strategic, but it wasn’t. Or it wasn’t only strategic. Paul was interesting.
He was interested. He asked me questions and remembered the answers and referenced them weeks later. He was careful about Mave, not awkward about the fact that I had a four-month-old.
Not performatively enthusiastic about it either, just matter of fact in a way that made me feel like a whole person rather than a situation. He also at dinner number three told me something I didn’t expect. He said, “I need to tell you something because I think you’d want to know and because I think not telling you would feel dishonest.” He said that Ryan had been having performance issues at the firm for about a year, that he’d missed a few closings, been unreliable on follow-through, that there had been complaints from clients, that Paul had been planning to have a difficult conversation with him before all of this happened.
I said, “Before all of what?” He said, “Before I started seeing you.” I said, “We’re seeing each other.” He said, “Aren’t we?” I didn’t answer that, but I thought about it on the drive home. And then I thought about the timeline, Ryan’s performance slipping at work, the affair, the missed closings. What was he actually doing during those hours?
I filed that away. I didn’t need it, but I filed it. Ryan found out I was seeing Paul in the way most people find out things they’d rather not know from someone who thought they were being helpful.
One of Ryan’s co-workers saw Paul and me at a restaurant. And look, I still don’t know if this was malicious or genuinely thoughtless. People do thoughtless things constantly.
He texted Ryan that same night. Ryan called me. I let it go to voicemail.
I listened to it later. He was not. He didn’t yell.
He was quiet in the message, which was more unsettling than yelling. He said, “I know you’re hurt. I know I did this, but Nora, his boss, Nora, come on.” I played it twice.
I texted back, “Screen door still needs fixing.” He didn’t reply. What happened at work happened fast, faster than I expected, and in a way I want to be careful about how I describe because I didn’t cause it exactly. I don’t think Paul had already been building a file on Ryan’s performance issues before I was in the picture.
The missed closings were real. The client complaints were documented. The conversation was going to happen eventually that it happened 3 weeks after Ryan’s coworker spotted me at dinner with Paul.
I can’t tell you whether the timing was coincidental. I genuinely can’t. Paul said it was.
Paul said his feelings for me didn’t factor into professional decisions. I believe that he believed that. I’m slightly less sure it’s strictly true, but the case against Ryan was real.
The documentation was there before I ever texted Paul back. Ryan was asked to resign or be let go. He resigned.
He told his mother it was his choice. His mother texted me about it and I felt something I wasn’t expecting, which was grief. Not for Ryan, for her.
She was a good person. She is a good person. She sent me a birthday card every year, including the year I was divorcing her son.
He got 3 months severance. He is still, as far as I know, job searching. Commercial real estate is a small world.
People talk not about the affair, about the performance record. That’s what followed him. Tess.
Tess is the part I haven’t told yet. After I confronted Ryan, after the separation was official, Tess called me. I let it go to voicemail 11 times.
On the th call, I picked up. She said, “I need to talk to you.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “I know you know. I know you’ve known for a while.
I’ve been She stopped. I’ve been in a really bad place, Nora, and I need you to know that I hate myself for it.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “I don’t know how to explain it. It was like it just happened and then it kept happening and I kept telling myself it would stop and it didn’t.
And I know that’s not I know that doesn’t help you.” I said, “Did you know I was pregnant when it started?” She was quiet long enough that I knew. She said, “The announcement?” Yeah, I knew from the announcement. I said, “That’s 7 months.” She said, “I know.” I said, “I need to ask you something and I need you to just answer.” She said, “Okay.” I said, “My OB got a call during my pregnancy.” Anonymous about my blood pressure medication.
There was some confusion about my records, some question about whether I’d reported a symptom accurately. I had to do extra monitoring for 3 weeks. I always thought it was an administrative mixup.
Silence. I said, “Tess.” She said it wasn’t a mixup. I sat with that.
I’m still sitting with it. I don’t entirely know what she was trying to accomplish to make the pregnancy complicated to create a reason for me to be distracted to insert herself into the situation in some way that I still can’t fully map. I asked her why and she said she didn’t know and I think she was telling the truth and I think that almost makes it worse.
I said I have to go. She said Nora I hung up the blacklisting. Here is where I want to be precise because blacklisted is a word that sounds dramatic and intentional and the reality is more boring and more effective.
Tess worked in HR consulting. She worked with three firms as a contractor with a client roster that depended heavily on referrals and on her reputation for discretion. She had built that reputation over 8 years and it was legitimate.
She was good at her job. I want to say that she was good at her job. What she was not good at was keeping the parts of her life separate.
She told one person about her and Ryan, a colleague. She told that person in confidence and that person told two more people. And those two people each told someone.
And within about four weeks of my confrontation with Ryan, the relevant professional circles knew that Tess Okafor had been having a long-term affair with a client’s husband. In HR consulting, discretion is essentially the product you’re selling. When it comes out that you don’t practice it, she lost one firm first, then a second one terminated her contract.
The third one let it run out and didn’t renew. I did not spread this information. I want to be very clear.
I did not make a single call. I told Christine, who told no one who mattered. The information moved because Tess told someone herself, which suggests to me that some part of her needed it to come out.
I’m not a therapist. I could be completely wrong about that. But she told someone and it moved.
She sent me an email 8 months later. She said she was moving to Chicago. She said she hoped I was okay.
She said she hoped Mave was healthy. She said she still thought about the sociology class. I read it twice.
I didn’t write back. Maybe that was wrong. I don’t know.
My therapist suggested writing a response and not sending it, which I thought was the most therapist thing I’d ever heard. And also, I did it and it didn’t make me feel better or worse. It just made me feel finished with something.
The house. The settlement took 4 months. Ryan’s lawyer pushed hard on the house.
Mine pushed back harder. Ryan’s leverage was diminished somewhat by the fact that he no longer had an income, which made his financial position in the settlement less favorable. This was not something I planned, but I won’t pretend I didn’t notice.
I got the house. I also got primary custody of Mave with Ryan having her on weekends, which is the arrangement Mave will grow up inside of and which I think about every single day. Whether it’s right, whether she’ll understand it someday, whether she’ll ask me questions I won’t know how to answer.
She’s 14 months old now and mostly interested in pulling every book off the lowest shelf of the bookcase and examining each one with the seriousness of a small judge. But someday she’ll ask. Ryan is a good father.
I know how that sounds after everything. But he is. He shows up on weekends.
He’s present with her. He remembers things. He loves her in a way that is real and visible.
And I would not take that from her. I’ve had to work hard to separate those things. Ryan, the husband and Ryan the father.
They share a body. They’re not the same person. I’m still working on that.
Paul and I dated for 8 months. We ended things mutually, which is a phrase that usually means one person suggested it and the other agreed out of exhaustion. But in this case, it genuinely was mutual.
He was a good person in good company. And he was not the right shape for what I needed my life to look like. We were at different places, not in age exactly, or not only in age, but in what we wanted the next 10 years to look like.
He wanted to slow down. I’m 33 with a toddler. slowing down is not an option I currently have.
He was kind at the end. He said, “You’re going to be okay.” And I don’t mean that in a useless way. I mean, I’ve watched you operate for 8 months and I know it.
I said, “Thank you for telling me about the performance file.” He said, “I would have told you regardless.” I said, “I know. Maybe I do know. I still think about it sometimes whether he was fully honest with me about the timing.
I think people are rarely fully honest about their own motives. Not because they’re liars, but because motives are murkier than we pretend.” He was honest in the ways that mattered. I’ll give him that.
My sister and I talked it all out over a long weekend in March. She came down with her oldest, who is seven, and who spent most of the weekend running around my backyard while Mave watched from my arms with the focused attention of someone taking notes. Christine and I sat on the back porch with the broken screen door and drank coffee.
And she said, “I’m sorry for what I said on the phone.” I said, “You asked a fair question.” She said, “No, I didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.” I said, “I know. I do know.
And also, I have sat with the question she asked. I carry both things. That it wasn’t my fault and that I have a tendency to withdraw in ways that cost me.
Those two things are both true and they don’t cancel each other out. She looked at the screen door and said, “Do you want me to fix that?” I said, “I know how to fix it. I just haven’t.” She nodded like she understood something.
Maybe she did. Christine often understands things without explaining them, which drives me crazy. And also, I love her for it.
There’s one thing I’ve never figured out. In the emails, in the months of emails I read, there were three separate times where Tess seemed to be trying to end it. She’d say something like, “This has to stop.
We both know this has to stop.” And Ryan would reply, and she would reply, and it would stop being something that was stopping. What I wonder about is who wanted to keep going more. I don’t have a clean answer.
The emails don’t give me one. Maybe Ryan, maybe Tess, maybe they were equally invested in their own disaster. Maybe one of them wanted out from the beginning and didn’t know how.
I’ll never know that. There’s no email that tells me that. And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I wonder if she wanted to tell me if the overly cheerful texts, the two question marks were some part of her that was losing her mind and reaching toward me in the only way she could.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m looking for a way to make it make sense. People do that.
I stopped texting her number after her last email. I didn’t block it. I just stopped.
She’s in Chicago now, as far as I know. Mave is 14 months old and she said a thing last week that I think about in the middle of the night. We were in the kitchen and I was unloading the dishwasher and she was standing next to the cabinet holding the handle with both hands like she owned the place which she does and she looked up at me and said very seriously.
She calls Ryan Da when she sees him on weekends. This was in our kitchen on a Wednesday morning with no one else there. And I thought is she asking or telling or neither because she’s 14 months old and she’s learning the shapes of things and how they connect to the world.
I crouched down to her level. She let go of the cabinet and took one step, which she’s just started doing. And she patted my face with her open hand.
Not gentle. Kids that age are not gentle. It was a solid pat.
And she looked at me with Ryan’s eyes and my jaw. And whatever she is, that’s entirely her own. I said, “I know, Bug.
I know. The tomatoes came back this summer, second year in a row. I have no idea what I’m doing with tomatoes.
I Googled things at key moments and hoped for the best, but they came back. I made sauce twice, froze some of it. The first time Mave tasted it, she wrinkled her whole face in a way that made me laugh for the first time in what felt like weeks.
I fixed the screen door in April. I bought the part on a Sunday, watched two videos, and did it myself in about an hour. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.
It felt significant at the time. It might not be. It’s a screen door.
Ryan texted me last week. He said he had a second interview at a firm in Connecticut. He said he thought it might go well.
He asked how Mave was doing. I told him she was walking more. He sent back a photo of her from the weekend, the one where she’s wearing the yellow raincoat, and I looked at it for longer than I needed to.
I didn’t ask about the interview. He picks her up tomorrow morning. I’ve already packed her bag.
There’s a specific way he likes the sippy cup lid, tightened, and I tightened it the way he likes because Mave doesn’t need her parents’ mess anywhere near her sippy cup. I opened a bottle of wine last night, the good kind. The one I’d been saving for some undefined occasion, the occasion that was always 6 months away.
I poured a glass and sat on the back porch and the sun was going down in the way it goes down in September which is slower than in the summer and somehow sadder and I sat there and I thought this is my house. Not as triumph exactly, not his grief exactly either, just this is my house and the tomatoes are done for the season and Mave is asleep upstairs and the screen door closes all the way now. I sat there until it was full dark.
I did not go in until I was ready. Thank you for listening to my story. If it resonated with you, like, share, and subscribe if you’re new.
