Chapter 7 #3
The video was maybe thirteen seconds long, but I watched it three times before my brain could process what I was seeing.
This wasn't a business dinner that had gotten too friendly or a moment of weakness that meant nothing.
This was my husband in love with someone else, publicly and obviously and completely.
I set the phone on the bathroom counter and stared at myself in the mirror.
Same face I'd had this morning when Brett called and made me believe we might be okay.
Same hands that had picked out his ties and made his coffee and supported his dreams for over two decades.
Same woman who'd convinced herself that love could survive anything if both people wanted it badly enough.
Except apparently only one person had been wanting it.
The woman in the mirror looked exactly like what she was. A fifty-two-year-old wife whose husband was kissing someone else in VIP boxes while she sat at home making excuses for his absence and believing his lies about missing her.
I picked up the phone and typed back to Kimberly:
Thank you for sending this. I know it wasn't easy. I love you.
Then I flushed the toilet, ran water in the sink, and prepared to go back to my friends and pretend that my world hadn't just imploded in a stadium bathroom in Dallas.
"Now, where were we?" I said, settling back onto the couch with my wine glass and what I hoped was a normal expression. "Amy, you were telling us about your art teacher who looks like Leonardo..."
For the next hour, I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of being a woman having a normal girls' night with her best friends.
I laughed at appropriate moments, contributed to conversations about book recommendations and vacation plans, and refilled wine glasses like someone who wasn't slowly dying inside.
All I wanted was for them to leave so I could fall apart in private, but they seemed determined to solve every problem in our collective lives before going home.
Robin wanted to plan her Manhattan apartment shopping trip.
Amy needed to vent more about Richard's latest cruelties.
Both of them kept asking if I was okay, if I was sure everything was fine, and if I needed to talk about anything.
"I'm great," I kept saying. "Just tired from the family weekend."
By the time they finally left around eleven-thirty, my face hurt from smiling and my throat was raw from maintaining cheerful conversation while watching my marriage die in real time on my daughter's phone.
I cleaned up wine glasses and takeout containers, thankful for any task that kept my hands busy and my mind focused on something other than the video I couldn't stop thinking about.
Brett's face when he'd touched Alison's cheek.
The way she'd leaned into him like touching was natural between them, expected, cherished.
When the kitchen was spotless, I poured myself another glass of wine and sat at the island with my phone, watching the video again. And again. And again, until I'd memorized every detail of my husband's betrayal.
The way he looked at her wasn't just attraction or lust or even infatuation.
It was love. Real, deep, complicated love that made him look younger and happier and more alive than I'd seen him in years.
The way he used to look at me, back when we were building something together instead of just maintaining parallel lives in the same house.
Alison looked exactly like what she was.
A brilliant, beautiful woman in her thirties who made my successful husband feel like the most fascinating man in the world.
She had the kind of easy confidence that came from never doubting your place in someone's affections, never wondering if you were attractive enough or interesting enough or worthy of the attention you were receiving.
Everything I wasn't anymore.
I went upstairs and sat on our bed, looking around the master bedroom where I'd been sleeping alone even when Brett was home.
Twenty-three years of marriage, and we'd ended up as strangers who shared space but not intimacy, who coordinated schedules but not dreams, and who said they loved each other out of habit rather than feeling.
Maybe this was inevitable. Marriages like ours, built on practical considerations and social expectations rather than overwhelming passion, were always destined to dissolve when someone more exciting came along.
Perhaps I'd been the problem all along, and Brett had finally found someone who could give him what I'd never been able to provide.
The thought should have made me angry, but mostly I just felt empty. Hollowed out by years of trying to hold together something that had been slowly breaking without either of us acknowledging it was damaged beyond repair.
I stayed awake until almost three in the morning, replaying our entire marriage in my head like evidence in a trial where I was both prosecutor and defendant. All the signs I'd missed or explained away or chosen to ignore because facing the truth was more terrifying than living with lies.