“I know.”
For the next few minutes, we keep mum. The silence is familiar, comforting even. This is how we’ve spent the last four months, with silences, occasional conversations. Yet, I know this moment is more. Something is coming; I can feel it in my bones, in my soul, even.
“I need to leave, Thomas,” Hadley says, after a little while. We both haven’t touched the food, but we’re both gripping the white plastic fork. For what? I don’t know.
But at her words, my grip tightens. My fists are shaking. It’s not as if this was unexpected. It’s not as if…we’ve been happy. With a sigh, I unfurl my palm and let the fork go.
“Right,” I say, robotically.
“I need to leave. At least, for a little while.”
“What about Nicky?” I repeat the question from long ago. But there is no heat in it. Maybe I’m going through the motions.
Her face crumples slightly and she squeezes my hand on the table. Hadley has always been good at hiding her emotions. She is soft and subtle, everything opposite of who I used to be. But now I can read her easily. I can see emotions playing on her beautiful face, like her porcelain skin has turned transparent and suddenly I can look inside.
She sighs, as if bracing herself for something big, and I’m on alert.
“He has you.” She smiles. “And Layla.”
The dulled embers inside my gut heat up at the mention of her name. The fire in my blood fans. My mind goes to the piece of paper tucked in my pocket—her poem from long ago. The poem she wrote for me, in another lifetime maybe. I carry it everywhere with me. I carry her everywhere with me, like a forgotten penny in my wallet. Most days I don’t even clap my eyes on it, but it’s there, safely buried.
It’s been four months, four long months since I saw her at the hospital, since I left her with one, pathetic line: It’s not your fault. I wasn’t even man enough to stay back and say it to her face. I ran. I couldn’t see her broken. I couldn’t see that I’d finally managed to push her too far.
“Hadley…”
My entire body is trembling. Fuck. I’m not prepared for it. I’m not prepared for talking about this. I’m not prepared to talk about Layla with Hadley.
“I-I… If I could go back, I’d—”
“I’d want you to have that all over again.” Shocked, my gaze flies up to her. “You fell in love. I’d never begrudge you that.”
Love. I fell in love with Layla Robinson.
In the frenzy of the last few months, I never got the chance to tell Hadley myself. She heard the rumors though. She heard why I quit my job, why we moved back to New York, other than for her and Nicky’s treatment.
I had an affair with my student.
It’s true that I ended up falling in love with her, but I never confessed this to Hadley. It feels foreign to hear it from my wife’s mouth. It feels…like relief. I haven’t felt it in a long, long time.
“I should’ve told you,” I rasp. I want to look away but I won’t. I’ll at least give her the courtesy of looking directly into her eyes when I confess.
“Yes.” She nods. “But I wasn’t there.”
“I should’ve waited for you to come back. We should’ve…should’ve talked about things.”
“Yes, but honestly, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to face what I was going through. I didn’t want to face anything. I-I thought that if I left for a few days, things would be better, but they weren’t. And I missed you so much when I was gone, but when I came back, I felt even worse.”
It’s not easy listening to it. It’s not easy listening to how by forcing her to be with me, I almost destroyed her, how she lied to me. She never went to Beth’s. She simply ran away, lived at a motel someplace upstate.
“Susan… She told me. She kept saying something was wrong but I never…I never thought… My mind never even went there. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it. I felt…”
“What did you feel?”
For this, I don’t have the guts to look at her. “I felt relieved.”
I felt lighter when she left, like I didn’t have to tiptoe around her anymore. I didn’t have to pretend things were okay. I was angry at Hadley for so many things, for hiding the pregnancy, for not loving me, and when she left, I felt better. I felt like I could breathe, and that’s the worst thing I could’ve done. Worse than cheating. Worse than breaking our vows.
I look back at her to find her eyes wet. She sniffs as she continues, “Me too. The moment I stepped out the door, I felt like everything would be okay. Like I didn’t have to see how much I was killing you. I didn’t have to get up every morning and be there. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to…to even look at Nicholas.”
Both our hands jerk at his name, like the hold is the only thing keeping our bodies together. If we let go, bones and skin will fall apart.
“And I thought that if I could just stay like that for even a day, I could be happy. I wouldn’t feel so…so down all the time. Every time I looked at him and he looked at me, I thought he was judging me, like he was saying I couldn’t be a good mom to him. I couldn’t take care of him.”
I want to reach out and wipe the tears off her face, but I can’t. I can’t let go of her hand.
“His cries.” She bites her lip, to keep herself from sobbing, I suppose. “The way he’d break down, screaming. Red-faced. His fists clenched. Oh God, I couldn’t take it. I’d ask myself Why doesn’t he stop? Just make him stop. And at the same time, I’d be terrified of picking him up and…and soothing him.”
“What if…we never had him?” It seems sacrilegious to say it, to say that the only way to prevent Hadley’s depression was to never have our son. What if I never forced her to keep him? What if I hadn’t been so afraid of being alone like my father? What if I had let her go the night she told me she wanted a divorce?
I swivel my gaze to Nicky. He has abandoned the blanket and now, he’s playing with his firetruck. These days, he never stops talking or rather muttering. He’s always saying something, crawling all over the place, laughing. He is living. I hate it when he goes to sleep because I can’t hear him then. I can’t hear the signs of his life. And I have to touch his chest or listen to him breathe just so I can breathe myself.
I bring my gaze back to Hadley. She’s watching me watch our son.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” she says softly, putting me at ease. I wouldn’t trade my son for anything either.