Chapter 3
“After eight months, you were *relieved*?”
“I was relieved it was over. I still wasn’t brave enough to tell you it had happened at all.”
He opened the laptop. An email sat on the screen — a withdrawal notice from a senior transfer position in another city, dated nine days earlier.
“You applied for a transfer? When?”
“During the affair.”
“Was she going with you?”
“No. I wanted an exit. Not from her — from all of it. Work, home, who I’d become. I thought if I moved somewhere else, I’d somehow become someone different without having to actually change anything.”
“And now?”
“Now I withdrew it. Because running away stopped feeling like an answer the second Courtney ended things and I had to actually look at what I’d done instead of where I could go to avoid it.”
“I want you to read the letter,” he said. “Just not with me watching your face while you do it.”
I took the envelope. I didn’t open it that night.
I drove to my sister Bianca’s townhouse instead, a bag I’d half-packed three different times over the past two weeks sitting in my trunk, and she opened the door in pajama pants and asked no questions until the kettle had boiled.
“Terrible?” she asked finally, handing me tea.
“Complicated terrible,” I said. “The worst kind.”
“Those are always the worst kind,” she said, sitting across from me. “The clean ones are almost a relief.”
“This isn’t clean.”
“No,” she agreed. “It never is when there’s a version of them you still love standing right next to the version who hurt you.”
That night, in her guest room, a message came from Julian.
*Home. We talked. I checked into a hotel. Need some space before I decide anything.*
A few minutes later: *Courtney said something else. She says she was already planning to tell me this weekend. Before the party.*
I sat up in the dark, staring at the sealed envelope on the nightstand.
I called him.
“What exactly did she say?” I asked, when he picked up.
“That ending it wasn’t enough. That keeping it secret, even after it was over, meant she was still protecting herself instead of protecting me.”
“Trevor wrote me a letter nine days ago,” I said. “It’s still sitting unopened on the nightstand.”
“Read it?”
“Not yet.”
“Naomi.” His voice dropped. “I think we’ve been asking the wrong question tonight.”
“What question.”
“We keep asking what made them start this. I think we should be asking what happened eleven days ago that made them both decide, independently, that it had to end.”
I looked at the envelope like it had just gotten heavier.
“Read it,” Julian said quietly. “I think you’re the one who’s going to find the answer first.”
I opened it.
Four pages, his handwriting upright and slightly uneven where he’d clearly written faster than he could think. No excuses dressed up as explanations. He named what he’d done in the first line, before trying to soften any of it.
Then, halfway down the second page, one paragraph stopped me cold.
*She ended it because of something Julian said to her last Thursday. Not about us — he doesn’t know, I don’t think. He told her he’d driven past Sullivan’s, the diner where they got caught in that storm their first year together, and it made him realize how much he’d been missing her lately, even standing in the same room.*
No accusation. No confrontation. Just a husband telling his wife, with no idea what she was carrying, that he’d noticed the distance between them and it hurt.
Courtney had cried after Trevor told her that part, according to the letter. She said Julian had just described exactly what she’d been feeling for months, and instead of saying it to him, she’d turned to someone else entirely.
She ended it that day.
Trevor wrote that he’d gone home that same evening and stood in our kitchen doorway a beat too long while I made dinner, and I’d asked what was wrong, and he’d said *nothing*.
I remembered that night. Pasta. A dropped jar of oregano. I remembered thinking he seemed far away and deciding not to push it.
*I realized I’d done the same thing,* he wrote. *I’d spent months telling Courtney things I should have told you. Not because you wouldn’t have listened. Because talking to you meant I might hear what you were unhappy about too, and that frightened me more than losing you eventually did.*
May you like
I called Julian back.
“It was you,” I said. “One sentence at a diner, and she ended it the next morning.”
