Jason was charged with one count of rape, and one count of attempted offensive physical touching for whatever happened in his office with Rachel Sutton. The one surprise was the date of the alleged incident with Kerry Lynch. It wasn’t the week before, when he drove to her house in Long Island. It was supposedly on April 10, nearly two months earlier. I found myself wondering how she had chosen which of the many times she had fucked my husband to use for her false allegation.
His bail was set at $100,000. I watched helplessly as deputies placed him back in handcuffs and escorted him out of the courtroom. I had panicked, but Olivia explained that his bail only required $10,000 cash. Once I covered it, we were down to a four-digit balance, more than I ever had in savings before I met Jason, but still, I was worried.
By the time Jason got back to our place, it was after midnight. I was sitting on the sofa, flipping channels aimlessly, when I heard a key in the door.
I rushed to the door and gave him a hug. “I had no idea where you were.” He smelled dank, and his eyes were bloodshot.
“I was wondering where you were,” he said.
“What? I’ve been sitting here, waiting.”
“My battery was dead, and I couldn’t find a cab. I finally gave some guy forty bucks cash to order an Uber from the detention center.”
We spent a few minutes blaming the police, corrections officials, and Olivia for the mix-up before he asked if Spencer had called.
I felt a tug in my chest. I had forced Colin to tell me what Jason would have been subjected to over the last twenty-four hours. He tried to gloss over the specifics, but I now knew that my husband, among other things, had to “squat and spread” for a full-body search to prepare for a jail cell. It was one glaring degradation among the smaller ones of handcuffs, transport, fingerprinting, photographing, churning him through the system like a widget in a factory. But despite all of that, Jason had remembered that tonight was supposed to be Spencer’s first phone call.
The rule of thumb for Spencer’s camp was that the kids could call home every two days to check in. “He called. He sounded great. Happy.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
I shook my head. “That was the whole point of sending him there, right? And I spoke specifically to the camp counselor to make sure she hadn’t heard a single whisper about it among the kids. It sounds like they run a really tight ship. No gadgets, no computers. I told him that you had something on campus tonight.”
I didn’t mention that Spencer hadn’t asked about him.
“I’m sorry I doubted you about the camp. You made the right call. The thought of him seeing me . . .”
He looked exhausted.
“Are you okay, Jason?”
Without saying anything, he pulled me into his arms. I felt him shaking but by the time he released his grip, there was no sign of tears. “I’m so tired. I need a shower—”
“Of course.”
As I heard the water run, I put on a black cotton tank top and a pair of black bikini panties. I brushed my teeth, climbed into bed, and dimmed my nightstand light to its lowest setting.
I could feel the steam from our bathroom when he walked out ten minutes later, a bath towel wrapped around his waist as he roughly dried his hair with a hand towel. “Damn, that felt good. Um, do you want me to go to Spencer’s room or something?”
“No, I want you here.” I folded the covers down on his side of the bed.
He dropped both towels to the floor and climbed in, rolling away from me, so I was facing his back. “Thank you for being there. Olivia thinks it helped with the bail.”
I moved closer to him, draping my top arm across his waist. “We should talk about this, Jason. I’m still here for you.”
He didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. I placed one hand on his stomach. When he didn’t respond, I moved my palm down two inches. He sat up. “What are you doing, Angela?”
“I’m—I’m trying to be your wife.”
“You are my wife.”
“I’m trying to be close to you.”
“Now? After I spent a day in jail? When I was sure I’d come home and find you gone?”
“I’m not going anywhere, Jason.”
He jumped out of bed, picked up the bath towel from the floor, and wrapped it around his waist. He still looked so tired. “No. No, this is not how this is happening, Angela. Three years ago, you made it pretty damn clear you were through with this part of our marriage. And it took me getting accused of—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word. “No, I’m not doing this.”
“Is this my fault?” I asked quietly, before realizing the words were coming out of my mouth. “I mean, I knew—or suspected, at least—that you weren’t always at the office. You didn’t always have a faculty meeting. You could go out with Zack. Flirt at a bar. Maybe more. I figured it was part of a deal, because of me, because it was a fair trade.”
He was looking at the door, like he’d rather be back in whatever cell he slept in the previous night.
“I didn’t know we were that far apart, Jason. The police were here. They told me about the woman who was in the car when you had that fender-bender in the Subaru. I saw the date. It was a couple of months after that night, when we were still in the old apartment. I’m not sure what’s worse: the hooker or Kerry—you were never supposed to care about them.”
“The police talked to you?”
“That prostitute remembered everything she did with you.”
He was starting to cry. “Try to remember that you know me,” he continued. “You’re finding out every horrible thing I’ve done during our entire marriage, all at once. And I know it’s terrible, but I’m still me. I’m still in—a hundred percent with you—if you are. I don’t expect you to believe me, but that was the only time that happened. With a person like that, I mean. After that night—that fucking awful night that changed everything—I didn’t know how to approach you that way again. I’d hold you, walk in while you were showering, all the old ways we used to get started. And you were . . . just . . . gone. And I missed you. And I felt so guilty for what I did to you, about how I must have made you feel that night. But I was angry, too. How many times had I suggested therapy? You could go alone, or with me, or with your mother. But you didn’t. And I could see that you were still scarred. Of course you were. I’ve pretended to understand the decision your parents made, but—I’m sorry, Angela—it’s totally whacko.”
“I don’t like to dwell on it. I thought you understood.”
“I tried to, I really did. But before I knew it, we had that terrible night, and we were . . . broken. That’s how fast it felt to me. Like we were perfect, and together, and then someone dropped us to the floor and we shattered like glass. And then I’m coming back from a meeting in Long Island and see this woman, and I just know why she’s on the street. And, I swear, Angela, in my mind I justified it. I didn’t want to cheat. I didn’t want to connect emotionally to any other woman but you. It seemed like a way to do something empty and meaningless, without really crossing that line. The next thing I know, a taxi’s sideswiping the car with this stranger in the passenger seat. I should have insisted right then and there that you and I make it right. That we fix the break. But instead, I kept making bad choices.”
I remembered him, after that night, trying to convince me to go to therapy. It was the last time we ever spoke about the possibility until all this happened. But at the time, I didn’t think it was my problem, or even his. It was just something that happened. It was us. We’d deal with it.
And then, about a year later, I rode by Cyril’s and saw him flirting with that girl, and he came home with a filled-in tan line on his ring finger and the need to take a shower.
So I knew. He crossed that line, and I crossed it with him. That’s how we dealt with it.
We both thought we had our secret, and we’d go on. But now the dangers of an “unspoken understanding” were clear. There had been no understanding at all. We had no meeting of the minds.
I didn’t want to connect emotionally to any other woman but you. That’s how he had felt when he picked up that hooker, but that’s not how he felt after he met Kerry.
“So it is my fault,” I said, trying to maintain my composure. “I’m the reason this is happening.”