Chapter 19
Susan
Friday
Heat floods my body as the implication hits.
But wait. Wait. Maybe it’s for me? A present?
It doesn’t feel like a present. It feels like something lost. Something lost by someone else.
And “happy one-month anniversary” is not what you say to your wife of six years.
No box, no bag, no bow. It’s not a present, and it’s not mine.
I sit for the longest time on the side of the bed, staring at the bangle, wondering what to do.
Confront him? Get peace of mind? But what if I don’t like the answer or the outcome…
? What if he’s been building up to tell me something?
What if this—me confronting him—is the impetus he needs to break away, to leave us?
I sit, thinking. He’s working late more than he used to, and there have been overnight trips, like the one to New York.
And he’s taken up running…which, when you think about it, is the perfect cover.
A solo activity you can do any time—late in the evening after work, weekend afternoons, early mornings.
It’s a much better alibi than saying you’ve joined a book club or a football team, because those involve other people, and your partner might bump into someone who blows your cover.
Not so running. You arrive home sweaty and tired and get straight in the shower.
And Jon, who has never run for a bus in his life, has taken to it with gusto.
But surely he wouldn’t do this to me? Jon loves me; I know he loves me. There has to be some other reason. Some explanation. My brain scrambles, trying desperately to find it. But I keep coming back to the bangle. The inscription. The running. The late nights. The distance between us. Oh Jon.
I feel like I might cave in, collapse. I want to turn back the clock, I want my only worries to be stupid embarrassing messages and broken windows. Jesus. What do I do? Do I tell Greta and Leesa?
Leesa would tell me to leave him immediately.
She loves Jon, but she loves me more. Greta would be more circumspect.
I can already hear her in my head. Think about Bella.
Think about the cost of divorce. Think about the house; you’d have to move.
She’s not wrong. Jon is the big earner—head of legal in GS Bank. My teacher salary doesn’t come close.
My phone beeps with a text from Leesa to say her daughters, Maeve and Aoife, will be over this evening too.
There it is, normal life going on. My fingers hover over a reply.
But I can’t. There is no world in which I can imagine telling her what I’ve just found.
If I tell them, I can’t untell them. And I’d have to deal with it, confront him.
No. I need time to process without noise from my well-meaning sisters.
I text a reply: Sure, looking forward to it, and hot tears roll down my face.
I don’t know how long I sit there. A babble from the crib pulls me back to reality.
God, Bella’s facing being raised by separated parents…
then again, she’s so young, it would always feel normal to her, like it did to me.
My dad left when I was a newborn; I don’t remember him at all.
And it’s fine, I don’t miss him, my mother was more than enough, but I never wanted this for Bella…
Wait. I sit up straighter. Would Jon want custody?
Knowing what he knows, would he want Bella with him?
He’s fully aware it was never real; I was never actually going to hurt her.
But once you admit something like that—the fear that you might hurt your child—you can’t unsay it.
The only people who know are Jon, my GP, my counselor and the other anonymous members of the parenting forum—the ones who gave me the support and advice I needed when I couldn’t admit any of it to people I knew in real life.
They’re the ones who sent me to my GP, who in turn got me medication, counseling, and encouraged me to tell Jon.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Greta and Leesa, and three months on, with the intrusive thoughts mostly gone, there’s no need.
But Jon knows. And up until this morning, I trusted Jon with my life.
Only in the very far recesses of my mind did I ever think, “He could really use this against me if we ever broke up.” The merest whisper of a half-thought. Until now.