Chapter 18 - Monsters Would Be Easier
Christopher survived, and a week later signed our final divorce papers from a hospital bed with an officer stationed at his door.
As the notary stepped out, he said my name, and I turned, and he told me that if he could go back three years, he would do everything differently, and that he hoped, someday, I might remember one good thing about him.
And standing at that window, I did remember.
I remembered him walking me home through the rain so I would not have to walk from the subway alone.
I remembered a first summer by the coast, quiet weekend nights cooking together in our kitchen.
And that memory was the single most devastating part of the entire ordeal, and it taught me the truest and hardest thing I know about evil.
Monsters would be so much easier if they were monsters all the time.
If Christopher had only ever been cold, only ever been cruel, I could have filed him neatly away and healed cleanly.
But he wasn’t.
He had been warm, and funny, and tender; he had held my hand and made me laugh; and he was also the same man who stood in a hallway and let a lock click shut while I lay helpless in the dark.
Both were real.
That is the thing no one warns you about — that the people who do terrible things are almost never monsters in a costume you can spot across a room.
They are people with real warmth and real kindness who, when the moment comes, choose wrongly, and keep choosing wrongly, while telling themselves the warmth still makes them good.
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“I’ll remember,” I told him, “that you had every opportunity to be a good man.
And I’ll remember that you chose, too many times, not to be one.” It was the last thing I ever said to him as his wife.
