She listens to me cry for the longest time, murmuring her support, cursing Nick’s name, and finally asking me if I want to share any of the details. “It’s fine if you don’t. . . If you’re not ready . . .”
“There’s not much to tell,” I say, struggling to get my words out. “He came home this evening. Said he had just gone for a walk in the Common with her.”
“Her?” Cate presses gently.
“The one we suspected. The one Romy saw him with.” I am unable to say her name, vowing never to say her name again—suddenly understanding exactly how my mother has felt for all of these years.
“And he just told you . . . that he was having an affair?”
“He didn’t call it that. I don’t know what you would call it . . . He said it only happened once. He had sex with her once,” I say, the words a knife in my heart, my tears still coming in streams. “He said he ended things today. And that’s his story. As if his word means anything”
“Okay. Okay!” She interrupts me with optimism I find confusing.
“Okay what?” I ask.
“So he’s not. . . leaving?”
“Oh, he left,” I scoff, anger resurfacing, temporarily halting my tears. “He’s gone. I told him to get out.”
“But I mean—he’s not leaving you. He doesn’t want to . . . be with her?”
“Well, clearly he wanted to be with her,” I say. “Pretty damn badly.”
“Once,”she says. “And now he’s sorry. He regrets it. Right?”
“Cate,” I say. “Are you trying to tell me that this is no big deal?”
“No. Not at all . . . I’m just feeling somewhat hopeful that he confessed. As opposed to getting caught. . .”
“What difference does that make? He did it. He did it! He screwed another woman,” I say, becoming hysterical.
Cate must hear it, too, because she says, “I know. I know, Tess . . . I am not minimizing it—at all . . . But at least he told you. And at least he ended things with her.”
“Or so he says. He could be doing it again right now. This very second,” I say, the sickening images beginning to materialize in my head. I picture a blonde, then a brunette, then a redhead. I picture large, full breasts, then small, high ones, then perfect in-between ones. I don’t want to know what she looks like—and at the same time, I desperately want to know everything about her. I want her to be like me; I want her to be nothing like me. I no longer know what I want, apparently any more than I know the man I married.
“He’s not with her,” Cate says. “No way.”
“How do you know?” I ask, wanting her to reassure me despite how hard I am resisting her positive spin.
“Because he’s sorry. Because he loves you, Tessa.”
“Bullshit,” I say, blowing my nose. “He loves himself. He loves that damn hospital. He loves his patients and apparently their mothers.”
Cate sighs, her background noise suddenly disappearing as if she just stepped off the street or got in a cab. Then she says, “What are you going to do?”
For a few seconds, her question empowers me, in the same way that telling Nick to leave empowered me. But the feeling quickly vanishes, crystallizing in fear. “You mean am I leaving him?” I say.
It is the million-dollar, until-now-theoretical “what would you do if” question.
“Yeah,” Cate says softly.
“I don’t know,” I say, recognizing that I probably might have a choice. I could take him back, and live a sham of a life. Or I could do the thing I always said I would do—I could leave him. I could sit the kids down and give them the news that would change the face of their childhood, and color every major, important event of their adulthood. Graduations, weddings, the births of their children. I imagine Nick and me standing apart, either by ourselves or with someone new; either way, the distance between us creating unspoken tension during a time that should only be about joy.
“I don’t know,” I say, realizing with anger and grief and panic and fear that I have no good option left. That there is no possibility of happily ever after.
***