The Exes

Chapter 1 Now

Now

What they don’t tell you about betrayal is that it eats you slowly.

Long after the raised voices and slammed doors, after the tears—if there are any—it makes a home where your Good Feelings live and begins to gnaw at fond memories, trust, intimacy.

Gnaw until you’re full of holes, nothing left untouched but paranoia and the distinct sense of having loved a stranger.

Paranoia and loneliness are what I’m left clinging to as my husband cries in the room next door.

I think about banging on the wall, telling him to quiet down.

There is still music and laughter vibrating up through the floorboards from the party downstairs, but I’m worried that people will hear him.

I’ve already been humiliated enough; I don’t need our guests to hear our marriage going to shit, too.

A hollow wail pierces the room and my hands curl into tight fists.

I close my eyes, breathe evenly. I’m not sure how or why he’s the one in pieces when it’s him who’s destroyed our relationship, but here we are.

Once I would have gone and furled myself around him.

Made myself soft, pliable. A petal around a wasp.

That might be how my mother raised me, but I’ve long since grown tired of watching women like her try to sweep dust from men’s eyes while they have planks in their own. Planks the men usually put there.

Downstairs, someone changes the track to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” A dull pain begins to throb through my thumb, and I realize that the kitchen knife is still gripped in my hand.

The fleshy tip is pressing into the blunt edge of the steel above the handle.

I will myself to let the knife go. For a moment, it feels like I can’t.

I won’t. But then I remember the blood already on my hands, still unclean after all these years.

The violent rages I can’t clearly remember.

And with the ghost of that darkness haunting me anew, I tuck the knife beneath the crisp, cold underside of the pillow on the guest bed.

I can’t let that white-hot rage loose. Not again.