Chapter 3 - THREE DAYS TO CHOOSE HIS WIFE OR HIS MISTRESS
“I haven’t been happy,” he finally said.
The words struck harder than the affair.
Because unhappiness was something we might have discussed.
Something we might have fought for.
Instead, he had turned it into a secret justification.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
“Months.”
“And when were you planning to tell me?”
“I was going to.”
“When?”
He stood.
“I don’t know, Bianca. Everything with us is bills, schedules, repairs, responsibilities. I don’t even feel like myself anymore.”
For several seconds, I couldn’t speak.
Then I laughed.
Quietly.
“You’re blaming the responsibilities?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Who do you think has been handling most of them?”
“That is exactly what I mean. Everything becomes practical with you.”
“Because somebody has to be practical.”
“Caroline remembers who I used to be.”
There it was.
The cruelest sentence of the night.
Not because Caroline knew a younger Steven.
Because he was comparing the woman who had shared his mortgage, losses, family emergencies, bills, disappointments, illnesses, repairs, funerals, and ordinary Tuesdays with a woman whose relationship with him existed in restaurants and hotel rooms.
Caroline got the version of Steven with no laundry.
No overdue insurance.
No leaking roof.
No exhausted Wednesday night.
And somehow, I was being punished for knowing the whole man.
“Does she make you happy?”
He lowered his voice.
“She makes me feel seen.”
I looked at him.
“I see you more clearly than anybody on earth.”
He said nothing.
“And I think that’s the problem.”
He flinched.
I closed the laptop.
“Do you love her?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer destroyed something a yes might have spared.
Because he wasn’t confused about betraying me.
He was confused about whether the betrayal was worth continuing.
The next morning, he told me he needed three days.
We were standing in our kitchen.
His suitcase was by the door.
I stared at it.
“Three days for what?”
“To think.”
“Where?”
He looked away.
“With Caroline.”
There are sentences so outrageous that your mind refuses to process them immediately.
I waited for him to correct himself.
He didn’t.
“You are leaving this house to spend three days with the woman you’ve been sleeping with so you can decide whether you still want your wife.”
“That’s not how I would put it.”
“How would you put it?”
“I need space.”
“With her.”
He exhaled sharply.
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I come home and we talk.”
The confidence of that sentence stunned me.
He comes home.
We talk.
I wait.
Steven had already assigned me my role in his crisis.
I was the wife who remained exactly where he left her while he went away to evaluate whether his first love made him feel more alive.
“Are you coming back because you choose me?” I asked.
He froze.
“Bianca.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I don’t know.”
I looked at his suitcase.
Then at him.
“Okay.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
He seemed unsettled by my calm.
“I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to hurt you.”
I almost smiled.
“Then what exactly are you trying to do?”
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
A minute later, the front door closed behind him.
I stood in the kitchen listening to his SUV disappear down the street.
For eight years, Steven had walked away from problems knowing I would still be there when he was ready to deal with them.
But something changed in me while I listened to that engine fade.
He had three days to decide whether he wanted his marriage.
May you like
I did not intend to spend those same three days waiting for his answer.
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