Chapter Four
MOLLY LEAVES FOR NATALIE’S at six on Saturday.
She’s got her overnight bag and her calc textbook and the half-guilty expression she wears when she’s planning to study for twenty minutes then watch horror movies until two a.m. I tell her to have fun, lock the door behind her, and text me when she gets there. Then the house empties.
Grey is in the kitchen opening a beer. He’s showered and changed into the weekend version of himself, in a polo shirt, bare feet on the tile, scrolling his phone with his thumb while the bottle cap sits on the counter next to the recycling bin he might put it in later but probably won’t.
I sit down at the kitchen table. I don’t get a drink. I don’t lean against the counter the way I usually do when we’re talking in the kitchen. I sit in a chair and put my phone facedown on the table, and the small formality of it makes him look up.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Sit down.”
He sets the beer on the counter and sits across from me. Annoyance flickers across his face, then concern. He can tell this is a conversation he didn’t schedule and doesn’t want.
“Last Friday I dropped your demo case at the Huebner office,” I say. “On the way back I took Fredericksburg because 1604 was construction. Your car was in the garage at the Eilan Hotel.”
He doesn’t move. His hands stay on the table. The beer sweats on the counter behind him.
“Sharon’s scarf was on your dashboard.”
“Joan—”
“I pulled the phone records. Sixteen months of calls and texts to Sharon’s number.
The longest was fifty-two minutes, on November Fifteenth, which was Molly’s birthday.
You told me a client had a device malfunction.
You sat in the parking lot at Rosario’s and talked to her while your daughter ate birthday cake. ”
His mouth opens, closes. He pushes his chair back two inches from the table, not standing, just making space.
“I found the Ostra charge. $146.20 on the Amex. October, a Friday night when you told me you had a client dinner in the Medical Center. I found the Uber charge from the same night. $22.40, the Eilan to here, ten-fifty p.m. And I checked your mileage on the Acura app. Your Friday routes don’t match your calendar. They match Sharon’s.”
“How long have you—”
“I’ve had a week.”
He puts both hands on the table and looks at them, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything. The kitchen gets so quiet that the refrigerator hum becomes the loudest sound in the room.
“I was going to tell you,” he says.
I don’t respond to that. There’s no version of that sentence that’s true, and we both know it.
“It’s not what you’re making it sound like,” he says. “Sharon and I, we didn’t plan for this to happen. It started at a vendor event, and we connected. We’d both been in situations where we felt—”
“Don’t do that.”
He stops.
“Don’t tell me how it started. Don’t tell me about connection. I’m asking you a direct question. How long?”
“About sixteen months.”
The number I already had. He gives it to me without flinching, which means he’s moved past denial and into the part of the conversation where he thinks honesty will buy him something.
“Joan, I know how bad this looks. I know I should’ve told you. I wanted to. I tried to figure out how.”
“You tried to figure out how to tell me you were sleeping with my supervising physician.”
“I didn’t think about it that way.”
“Which way did you think about it?”
“I didn’t think it would affect your work. Sharon said it wouldn’t change anything at the clinic. She said she could keep the professional and the personal separate.”
“Sharon said that.”
“She did.”
“And you believed her?”
“We’d grown apart.” He says it the way he’d deliver a slide deck, measured and practiced. “You know we had. Your schedule, my schedule, the kids, the clinic... We stopped being us a long time ago. I’m not blaming you. I’m saying we both let it happen.”
“We didn’t both let anything happen. I let the marriage get quiet. You let another woman into it. Those are different things, and you don’t get to fold them together.”
He picks up the beer. Sets it back down without drinking. The label is starting to peel where his thumb pressed it.
“I love you,” he says. “I know that sounds—”
“It sounds like a sentence you’re putting between us and the next sentence, which is the one where you tell me what you’re planning to do.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Fifteen seconds, maybe twenty. In sales training they call it a pregnant silence, the gap where you let the client fill the space because whoever talks first loses leverage. Grey knows the technique. I know he knows it. I don’t fill the space either.
“Sharon and I have talked about what comes next,” he says finally. “She knows that things between you and me are ending. We’ve discussed it.”
Grey and Sharon have been planning a future that doesn’t include me.
Sharon, who knows this marriage is ending, is the same Sharon who signs my prescriptive authority agreement.
She holds the document that lets me practice, and she’s been discussing my husband’s departure from my life while she holds it.
“You discussed it,” I say. “You and Sharon discussed the end of our marriage.”
“We talked about it, yes. I wanted to be honest with her about where things were headed.”
“You were honest with her.”
“I’m trying to be honest with you now.”
“No. You’re managing me. You’ve been managing me for sixteen months, and now you’re managing this conversation, and I need you to hear what I’m about to say, because I’m only going to say it once.
” I lean forward in the chair. “You didn’t drift.
You didn’t disconnect. You made a choice every Friday for five months to drive to a hotel and be with a woman who controls whether I can work.
You chose the person who signs my prescriptive authority.
You put my career in the hands of the woman you’re sleeping with, and you did it without telling me.
Now you’re sitting in my kitchen telling me you discussed it. ”
He opens his mouth.
“I don’t need you to respond to that,” I say. “I need you to sleep in the guest room tonight, and I need you to not talk to Molly about any of this until I’ve decided how to handle it. Those are the only two things I’m asking you for right now.”
He picks up the beer. He drinks. He nods once, slowly, and carries the bottle to the guest room without saying anything else, and I sit at the kitchen table in the still house and listen to the door close down the hall.
Sharon knows things are ending. Sharon has been planning. Sharon holds my prescriptive authority agreement, my husband’s future, and apparently the timeline for when I find out about both. The only thing she doesn’t hold is my next move.
That part is mine.