Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Marilyn
A few days after I moved out, our son called to see if I needed help moving furniture. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he’d grabbed lunch with Michael after one of his therapy appointments.
I stopped him. “Therapy?”
“Yeah. He’s going every week,” our son said. “Didn’t he tell you?”
I shook my head, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “No. He didn’t.”
“He told us not to mention it. Said he didn’t want to use therapy as an argument for getting back together.”
I almost laughed at the irony—Michael finally respecting a boundary, and doing it so thoroughly he’d hidden the work even from me.
“Is it helping?” I asked.
“He’s…quieter. Less defensive. He says it’s hard, but he doesn’t miss sessions. That’s something, right?”
It was. It really was.
For the first time, I wondered what it would look like to forgive a man who wasn’t just apologizing to win me back, but actually trying to become someone worth loving again.
A week later, I booked my own therapy appointment.
The first session, I told the therapist that I wasn’t interested in saving the marriage or learning to forgive a cheater. I said I just wanted to wake up in the morning and not have my mood dictated by Michael’s existence.
The therapist listened, nodded, and said, “So we’ll focus on what you want, once the anger isn’t the first thing in the room.”
I almost cried, but didn’t.
We spent the next weeks peeling away the layers of my life, one session at a time.
I talked about Michael’s betrayal, of course, but also about the man he used to be: the guy who once sent me three dozen doughnuts to my grad-school office, just because he remembered me saying I’d never gotten Valentine’s roses as a kid.
The man who planned elaborate birthday scavenger hunts for our daughter, who volunteered for every school fundraiser, who once drove five hours to rescue me from a flat tire.
I talked about the twenty-six good years, and the bad year, and the single night that changed everything.
I realized, slowly, that even if I never wanted Michael back, I still wanted to be the kind of person who could recognize love when it happened.
And that, the therapist said, was a start.
A month into therapy, my therapist asked, “Do you want to divorce him?”
I opened my mouth and realized I had no idea what the answer was. I’d spent weeks thinking about everything except that.
I knew only what I didn’t want: I couldn’t go back to our old house, couldn’t hang the wedding photo in the bedroom and pretend the confession was just a nightmare we’d both survived. I couldn’t be the wife who forgave because it was easier than starting over.
I needed more time. I needed to live a life that wasn’t just a response to Michael’s mistake. I wanted to see if the world would keep spinning without him at the center.
I left therapy that day with a new sense of direction. I texted Michael, Can we meet? and then waited, heart pounding, for the moment when I would finally ask for what I needed:
Real distance.
Enough space to decide if I wanted to be married to him, or if I just couldn’t bear to lose the version of myself that had existed for so long as his wife.