Interlude
Sienna
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Here’s what nobody tells you about being the other woman: you’re never the other anything. You’re the main event—for about six weeks—and then you’re nothing, and the whole trick, the one I’ve gotten very good at, is to leave before the nothing arrives. To be the one who’s already gone.
I have a type, and I’ve said what it is: a man who’s forgotten he chose his life.
And I’ve got the speech about it, the one where married men are the easiest thing in the world because a wife is a person who’s stopped looking and I’m a person who looks.
It’s a good speech. I’ve polished it for years, on the back of a bike, on the road between one town that’s done with me and the next one that hasn’t started yet.
And it’s true, mostly. And it doesn’t help at all, because here’s the part that isn’t in the speech:
I have never once been the one somebody stayed for.
Not my father, who had a second family two states over that I found out about at his funeral, from a woman who turned out to be my half-sister and looked at me like I was the affair.
Not my mother, who treated me like luggage she’d agreed to carry and never stopped resenting the weight of.
Not one of the men—because you can’t be left by men who were never going to stay, and I only ever pick the ones who were always going to go home.
That’s the engine. I’m not stupid; I’ve had the back-of-the-bike years to work it out.
I pick men who belong to someone else because winning them, for six weeks, feels like proof.
Proof that I’m worth choosing over a wife, over kids, over a whole life somebody built with his own hands.
For six weeks I get to be the thing a man would burn his house down for.
And then I leave—before he can do to me what everyone has always done, which is realize I was never going to be the one they kept.
People envy me. The wives especially. The woman with no one waiting up, no recitals to miss, no weight to carry.
They have no idea. Free is just the word you use for a person nothing will hold.
A balloon is free. A balloon is also the loneliest thing at the party—up there against the ceiling, watching everyone else be tied to something.
I don’t say any of that out loud. I say the speech. The speech makes me the villain, and a villain at least is somebody. A villain gets remembered. The alternative—the balloon against the ceiling—doesn’t even get that.
I’m telling you this now, before the part you’re going to hate me for, because I want you to understand that I knew.
The whole time. I knew exactly what I was and exactly what I was doing—and that’s not a defense, it’s the opposite of one.
A person who doesn’t know is just lost. A person who knows and reaches for the next handhold anyway, even when the handhold is a child she has no business touching—that person isn’t lost. That person is drowning.
And the difference between drowning and lost is that the drowning one will pull you under to keep herself up, and won’t even hate herself for it until later, on the next road, in the dark, between this town and the one that hasn’t started yet.
I always leave before the nothing arrives.
I’m very good at it.
It’s the only thing anyone ever taught me how to be.