She bites her lip harder, her breath quickening in a final attempt not to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry that I did this to you. It was selfish and wrong . . . And part of me wants to say . . . that maybe someday we can be together . . . maybe someday things will be different. . . but saying that would be just as selfish . . . a false promise . . . a way to hold you on the line while I try to fix what I’ve done at home.”
“You should fix it,” she says, wondering whether she means it and why she’s saying it if she doesn’t.
He nods, looking grave and grief-stricken. “I’m going to try.”
“That’s all you can do,” she says, wondering what that entails. Wondering if he will make love to his wife tonight. Whether he already has since last Friday night.
“Is there another doctor? Another doctor we can see?” Her voice cracks, but she manages to keep it together. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for Charlie to keep seeing you . . .”
He nods in agreement, then reaches into his pocket for a business card, sliding it across the table.
She glances down at it, her vision growing blurry, only half hearing his words of praise for another surgeon. “Dr. Wolfenden is wonderful,” he says. “I learned much of what I know from her. You’ll love her. Charlie will love her.”
“Thank you,” she says, blinking back tears.
Nick nods, blinking in unison.
She picks up the card and says, “I have to go.”
He grabs her wrist and says her name. “Val. Wait. Please.”
She shakes her head, telling him there is nothing left for him to say. The conversation is over. They are over.
“Good-bye, Nick,” she says. Then she stands and walks away from him, back into the bitter cold.
37
Tessa
As the days pass, and the countdown to Christmas begins, I feel as if I’m stuck in a bad dream, watching myself from afar, watching someone else’s marriage implode with all the clichéd benchmarks of depression. I drink too much. I have trouble falling asleep at night and even more difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. I can’t satisfy my deep, ravenous hunger, no matter how many comforting white carbs I down. I am lonely, yet avoid my friends, even Cate, and especially April, who has left me multiple messages. I lie to my family, shooting them chatty updates, snapshots of the kids on Santa’s lap, and uplifting YouTube clips with notes such as This is cute! or You’ll love!, always with exclamation points, sometimes with emoticons. I overcompensate with my children, a fake smile plastered on my face as I hum Christmas carols and punch open days of our Advent calendar with wild enthusiasm. I lie to Nick, curling against him every night, wearing his favorite perfume, pretending that I had another productive, festive day. Most of all, I lie to myself, telling myself that if I keep pretending, I can change the course of my life.
But I cannot escape her. I cannot escape the obsession with a woman I’ve never laid eyes on. I am not sure of the details. I do not know if the text I saw was from her, or if Nick was with her the night I was in New York. I do not know what, exactly, Romy saw in the parking lot. Whether it was innocent or not. I do not know whether he made love to her or kissed her or held her hand or simply stared longingly into her eyes, thinking about any of the above. I don’t know if he told her about our problems or has otherwise betrayed me.
I do know one thing, though. I know that my husband is in love with Valerie Anderson, the only woman he’s ever befriended, other than me. The woman for whom he left work, in the middle of the day, in order to drive over to a school that I’ve wanted him to visit for months, whispering with her in a parking lot, for Romy and all the world to see, risking his career, his reputation, his family. The woman he met on our anniversary, the starry night it all began, the night he first saw her face and her child’s face, the one he has since fixed and memorized and maybe even come to love. I know this by the way Nick opens the refrigerator and stares inside, as if he forgets what he was looking for in the first place. I know by the way he pretends to be asleep when I whisper his name in the dark. I know by the mournful way he tucks the kids in at night, as if contemplating what it would be like if he were separated from them. I know with a deep-to-the-bone certainty that comes with the impending loss of something you desperately don’t want to lose. I know because I just know.
And then one cold, cloudless, blue-sky afternoon, ten days before Christmas, when I can’t stand it another second, he walks in the door with a look that tells me that he can’t stand it another second, either. His face is chafed, his nose red, his hair windblown. He shivers as I go to him and unwrap the scarf from his neck.
“Where have you been?” I ask, hoping he was out Christmas shopping for the kids. For me.
“In the Common,” he says.
“What were you doing there?” I ask.
“Walking,” he says.