Chapter 8
Andi
TWO WEEKS SINCE THE confession. The Greenfield onboarding is on track.
The Whitaker site visit went well. Robin submitted social media content for three clients, and I approved it with clean edits.
Tessa closed a small referral account without my involvement, so the business is growing beyond my hands, which is what I built it to do.
My company doesn’t require me to be intact.
It requires me to be present, and I’ve been present every day since the confession, sitting at my desk doing work that matters in a room full of people who don’t know I cried two weeks ago and have a few times since.
At home, the house runs. Elliot is in the guest room.
He makes coffee in the mornings now and has since the week after the confession.
He sets out cereal bowls. He’s started doing his own laundry, badly.
Too much detergent. His shirts come out smelling chemically, but he hangs them in the guest room closet without comment.
He takes Sadie for her evening walk, which used to be my job.
He picks up the dog waste bags without being told where they are, which means he looked under the kitchen sink and found them himself.
He also sometimes makes lunches. The first time, he cut Alex’s sandwich straight across instead of diagonally. Alex corrected him at the table. Hope’s lunchbox was missing the note. He hasn’t made those mistakes again.
I don’t acknowledge any of it. I don’t praise effort.
He’s doing things I’ve done for fourteen years without recognition, and the idea that two weeks of participation earns a response is something I don’t have room for.
If I start acknowledging the coffee, the cereal bowls, the laundry, or the dog walk, if I start treating basic household tasks as accomplishments, then I’m rewarding a man for arriving at the minimum, and I’ve spent too many years living at the minimum to celebrate it now.
JILL TAKES ME TO LUNCH on Friday. She picks the place, a Vietnamese restaurant on Robinson Street where nobody from the school community eats, which tells me she already knows this conversation needs privacy.
We order. She gets the pho. I get the banh mi because I need something I can hold in my hands. The restaurant is warm, noisy, and full of people who don’t know me, which is exactly what I need right now. Anonymity, the comfort of being unknown.
When the food arrives, Jill puts her spoon in the pho, stirs it once, and eats a bite before setting down her spoon. “Tell me.”
“Elliot had an affair.”
She doesn’t flinch but gives me a sympathetic look. “Who?”
“A fellow at the hospital. Younger. Six weeks of lunches and texting. Physical once.”
“Once?” She sounds skeptical.
“That’s what he says.” I shrug.
“Do you believe him?”
“Yes.” I take a bite of the sandwich, chew, and swallow.
I’m eating a sandwich in a restaurant while telling my best friend my husband cheated on me, and the sandwich is good, while the strangeness of eating while your life is falling apart is the most honest thing about grief.
The body keeps going. “He confessed. I didn’t find out. He ended it then told me.”
Jill wipes her mouth. “Okay. That changes things.”
“Does it?”
“It doesn’t fix it. It changes the situation though.” She leans back. “How long has he been in the guest room?”
“Two weeks.”
“Is he being decent?”
“He’s making coffee and doing laundry.”
“Is he talking to someone?”
“He booked a therapist.” Ellen, my mother-in-law, told me when she called to offer support last week. If we divorce, I might try to get custody of her in the divorce. The thought makes me smile briefly.
“Good.” She picks up her spoon. “File. Take the house. Take everything.”
I expected this. Jill’s first instinct is always strategic. She’s an insurance adjuster, and we met when I worked in Claims. She thinks in terms of advantage, value, and position. She loves me, so she wants me armed.
“I’m not ready,” I say.
“You don’t have to be ready to file. You have to be ready to know your options. Have you talked to an attorney?”
“I have an appointment.” I don’t tell her I’ve rescheduled it twice already.
“Good.” She eats. I eat. For a few minutes, we’re just two women having lunch, and the food is good. The restaurant is warm, and nobody is looking at us.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I’m managing.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I know.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand on my wrist. She doesn’t squeeze or rub or do anything performative. She just rests it there for three seconds and then pulls it back. “You call me if you need anything. Two in the morning. Three in the morning. I don’t care.”
“I know.”
“Ben and I will take the kids any weekend you need a night. He’ll do it without asking questions.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t disappear into your own head, Andi. I know you. You’ll manage this so efficiently you’ll forget to feel it.”
She’s not wrong. I’ve been managing so efficiently that some mornings, I forget what happened until I see the guest room door closed and Elliot’s shoes by the stairs instead of by the bed, and the remembering is a small, sharp adjustment. Then I keep walking.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Anything.”
“If it was Ben, would you stay?”
Jill puts down her spoon. She thinks about it before answering. “If Ben cheated once and told me himself and was doing the work? I’d stay long enough to see if the work was real. If he got caught, or if it was going on for months, or if he blamed me for it? I’d take the house and his golf clubs.”
“That’s specific.”
“I’ve thought about it. Every married woman has thought about it.” She picks up her spoon again. “Have you told Laurel?”
“No, but she knows something is wrong and has before the affair.” The word is hard to say.
“What did she say?”
“She asked if he’s good to me. I said he’s not bad to me. She said that wasn’t the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“I know.”
Jill eats her pho for a minute. Then she sets the spoon down again.
“Here’s what I’ll tell you that Laurel won’t, because Laurel loves you too much to say it.
You’re not going to know what you want for a while.
You’re going to wake up some mornings and want to stay, and other mornings, you’ll want to leave.
Some mornings, you’re going to want both at the same time.
That’s normal. That’s what this is. You don’t have to decide today. ”
“I know.”
“You know it in your head. The rest of you hasn’t caught up yet. You don’t have to decide today.”
She’s probably right. I’ve been treating the confession the way I’d treat a client emergency. Frist, assess the damage, contain the fallout, and then develop a strategy. The strategy is working. The feelings are in still suppressed except in the moments they overwhelm me.
We split the check. She hugs me in the parking lot, hard, without talking. Then she gets in her car as I get in mine and drive back to the office and work until pick-up.
The afternoon passes. I handle two client calls, review Robin’s content calendar, and respond to Gretchen Whitaker’s email about the site visit follow-up.
At 2:30, I pick up Alex. At 3:00 I pick up Hope.
We drive home, and I make dinner. We eat and are finishing up when Elliot comes home.
My first impulse is to look for evidence he cheated again and hate that instinct.
How am I supposed to ever trust him again?
Elliot eats at the counter, standing, after the kids have gone upstairs. He rinses his plate and puts it in the rack. We exchange four sentences about tomorrow’s schedule before he goes to the guest room. He looks tired, but I refuse to worry about him.
The house settles. The kids are in bed. Sadie is on the couch, waiting for me. She sleeps with me most nights now, ensuring I’m not alone when the tears come. The dishwasher hums.
I should call Laurel. I haven’t spoken to her since he confessed. I should do what women do when their marriages are falling apart, which is talk, cry, drink wine, and process.
Instead I sit on the master bed with a notebook and a pen. Not my phone. Not my laptop. Pen and paper, because some things need to exist physically. They need a page that can be held, folded, and put in a drawer.
I write across the top: Pros and Cons of Divorce.
The pro side fills faster than I expected.
Financial independence, I have it. Monroe PR covers everything.
I write that first because it’s the most important. The math is simple. I pay my own salary. I own my own company. I’m not trapped. Whatever I decide, it won’t be because I can’t afford to leave.
I’m already the primary parent. Shared custody wouldn’t change my daily life.
Also true. I manage every morning, every pickup, every doctor’s appointment, every permission slip, every bath, and every bedtime story.
Shared custody would mean Elliot takes the kids every other weekend and one evening midweek, which is roughly the amount of time he spends with them now except with a court order attached.
I could move closer to Laurel.
Two hours is too far for a sister who usually calls every week and worries about me from Charlottesville. I could be thirty minutes away instead. The kids could see their aunt on weekends.
I’d stop being the woman without credentials at hospital events. I’d stop being anyone’s wife at all, and the relief of that is something I haven’t let myself think about until now.
I could stop pretending a cheek kiss counts as intimacy.
I could stop saving dinner plates for a man who doesn’t come home half the time.
I could own a cat again.
The last one stops me. I put the pen down and look at it.
I grew up with cats. Three at a time, usually.
Rescues Mom brought home from the shelter where she volunteered on weekends.
Orange tabbies, calicos, and one ancient black cat named Harold who slept on my bed for eleven years and purred when I cried into his fur after Dad left.
I loved cats the way some people love gardens, with attention, my hands, and the daily work of feeding, brushing, and cleaning litter boxes and carrying a purring animal to the window so it could watch the birds.
When Elliot moved in, Harold was still alive.
Elliot sneezed constantly. His eyes watered.
He took Benadryl that made him fall asleep at the kitchen table.
I watched him struggle through it for two months without complaining because he knew Harold was mine and he wasn’t going to ask me to choose.
When Harold died that winter, I buried him in the backyard while Elliot held the shovel and didn’t say anything about the allergies.
He just stood there in the cold while I cried.
I didn’t get another cat. I didn’t discuss it.
I looked at the man I was building a life with, a man who held a shovel in January because I was crying, and I decided his comfort mattered more than my need.
Fourteen years later, the shovel man is sleeping in the guest room because he slept with a thirty-one-year-old surgeon, and I’m writing “owning a cat again” on a divorce list because the small griefs are the ones that stay.
I pick up the pen. The con side.
The kids love their father. He’s not a bad parent. He’s an absent one, and those are different things, but the kids are young enough that the difference still matters to them.
Alex asked Elliot to come to his soccer game three times last week. He showed up. Alex waved with both hands. The grin on his face was worth more to him than any dinner Elliot has cooked since the confession, and I can’t take that away from my son because his father failed me.
Fourteen years of shared history. Not all of it was bad. Most of it was fine. Fine is not a reason to stay, but it’s a reason to pause.
I don’t want to date. I don’t want to be single. I don’t want to explain to new people why my marriage ended while they’re deciding whether to order the fish or the steak.
I don’t want to start over.
At the bottom, under the con side, I write something I almost don’t write. The pen hovers for a long time.
I still remember who he was.
I stare at it. Past tense. Not who he is.
Who he was. The man who called me from the hospital between cases just to hear my voice.
The man who cried when Hope was born and couldn’t stop apologizing for being forty minutes late because he’d been in the OR and couldn’t leave.
The man who drove to three stores on Christmas Eve to find the exact kitchen timer I wanted because I’d mentioned it once in September and he’d written it down.
That man has been gone for years. I can’t find the date he left. I’m not sure he left all at once. He just diminished, gradually, until what remained was a man repeating old gestures without remembering why they mattered.
The pro side is longer. The pro side has more items, more detail, and more pointed pain. The con side is shorter, and the last line is written smaller than the rest. I don’t know what that means except that the truth I’m most afraid of is the one I wrote the softest.
I close the notebook. I put it in the nightstand drawer on my side of the bed. I don’t hide it. If Elliot finds it, he finds it. The list is honest. I’m not ashamed of honesty.
Sadie jumps onto the bed and settles against my leg.
The cat part of the list is still in my head.
I put my hand on Sadie’s back and think about Harold, and Juniper the calico who slept on my feet, and all the years I traded for a man who traded me for a woman who thinks I was once pretty enough to keep.