Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Marilyn
At my next therapy appointment, I told the therapist about Michael considering signing the papers.
“I thought I’d feel free,” I said, “but mostly I just felt…punched.”
She nodded. “Sometimes, being given what you want isn’t satisfying. It’s just a new kind of uncertainty.”
I stared at the ceiling, not wanting to meet her eyes. “He let me go. After all that.”
“Does it make you want him back?”
I shook my head. “No. But I think I’m starting to forgive him.”
It was the first time I’d said it out loud.
The word frightened me, so I rushed to qualify it: “It doesn’t mean I’m okay with what happened. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to move on, or that I don’t still hate the woman he slept with, or that any of it is less horrible than it was a month ago. But—”
“But what?” the therapist prompted.
“But it doesn’t hurt as much,” I said. “Not every minute. Some days, it almost doesn’t hurt at all.”
She smiled, the small, private smile she used when I’d stumbled onto something important.
“Maybe you’re learning to forgive yourself, too,” she said.
I didn’t answer, but it stuck with me the rest of the week.
For months, I’d measured Michael’s progress like a scorecard: Had he apologized enough, suffered enough, changed enough? Was he doing the work, or just performing the motions to win me back?
But sitting in my therapist’s office, I realized the only question that mattered was this:
Did I, knowing I could leave and be perfectly fine, actually want to try again with him?
It was a question nobody else could answer, not the therapist, not our kids, not even Michael.
I drove home that day, the old wedding photo in my passenger seat, and tried to see my life as a blank page instead of a rerun.
For the first time, I wanted to write something new.
I spent three days in the Tiburon house doing nothing but imagining the future.
The first version: just me. I pictured myself working, volunteering, spending long weekends with friends in the wine country, traveling to places I’d never been because nobody else was there to veto my choices.
I saw our kids, grown and thriving, coming home for holidays and laughing at my newfound quirks.
I even imagined dating someone new—someone who wouldn’t be haunted by the Ashford legacy or the shadow of infidelity, a man who might never need forgiveness because he’d never had the power to break my heart in the first place.
The more I fleshed out this scenario, the less it frightened me. It felt like a warm, sunlit room, full of possibility.
The second version was less clear.
I tried to picture a life with Michael. Not the man I’d married, or the man who’d hurt me, but the one who was struggling to become something better.
This version of Michael wasn’t perfect, or even comfortable to be around half the time, but he was honest about his failings.
He kept going to therapy, even when I wasn’t watching.
He admitted his mistakes, respected my boundaries, and never again expected the universe to reward him for trying.
In that version, our marriage was smaller and simpler, stripped of its old mythology. We wouldn’t get back what was lost, but we could build something different, if I wanted to.
That thought scared me more than being alone. Because it meant choosing Michael again, this time with open eyes, and risking another round of heartbreak.
But the more I let myself imagine both futures, the more certain I became that the choice was really mine.
Not a fallback.
Not an obligation.
A choice.
I picked up my phone, took a deep breath, and texted Michael.
Dinner? Just to talk.
There was no part of me that believed this would fix anything.
But for the first time, I wanted to see what came next.