Chapter 2
NIA
S omething doesn’t feel right.
My husband always greets me after a Saturday shift, without fail. It’s a routine: I walk into the house, he’s at the stove either finishing dinner or reheating it for me, and Katie is either at the table doing an activity or tucked into bed, depending on what time it is that I finally make it home.
Tonight, none of that is happening. Katie is at my mom’s house, but where the hell is my husband?
Trying to shake off the rising fear in my gut, I set down my purse and kick off my surgical clogs. “Daniel?” I call out to him, but he doesn’t answer. “Honey, where are you?”
I reach for the closest thing that I can find which could be used as a weapon – the small pot to an artificial plant near our television – and I clutch it to my chest as I creep up the stairs in search of my husband.
As I round the corner into our bedroom, my grip falters, sending the pot clattering to the ground as I stare at the scene in front of me.
My husband is on his knees dressed in nothing but his underwear, bent forward with his hands clasped behind his back as he kisses the leather boot of a woman standing in front of him.
Her other boot is pressed firmly between his shoulder blades and he groans under the touch; and I can’t tell if that’s from agony or from pleasure.
“Get away from him!” I shout, now reaching for a framed photo on the dresser next to me, which I hurl at the woman. It flies across the room, knocking into her shoulder before clattering to the ground behind her.
“Alright, rutabaga,” the woman says with an annoyed curl of her lip as she pulls her boot from Daniel’s back. “I did not agree to this.”
“Wait!” My husband shouts at her as he stands.
It’s as if he doesn’t even see me. His focus is on that woman . I watch in horror as he drops once again to his knees and grabs tightly to her waist as if he’s begging her for… forgiveness .
“Daniel,” I choke around the tightening of my throat. “What the hell is this?”
“So not my problem,” the woman grouses as she reaches for a leather bag behind her and shoulders her way past me. “Call me when you sort this shit out, pet.”
I stare at my husband, gaping, as he seems to finally realize that I’m in the room with him, and I watch as shame and guilt etch themselves into his features.
I should be crying. I should be screaming at him. I should feel anything other than the icy calm that washes over me as I walk toward the closet that I’ve shared with him for the last six years of my life.
I pull two suitcases from the back of the closet and lay them on the floor in front of me before stripping pieces of my clothing from their hangers and dropping them inside. I don’t bother to fold them. I don’t think I care. I don’t think I can care.
“Nia,” my husband whispers, “what are you doing?”
“Katie and I will be staying with my parents,” I tell him more calmly than I expect to. “I would ask how long you’ve been sleeping with that woman, but I don’t think I want to know the answer.”
“It isn’t—”
“I don’t want to know, Dan.” Flipping the lid of the first suitcase, I pull the zipper closed and start toward our daughter’s room. “I hope it goes without saying that you’re not welcome to visit us.”
“Nia, please,” he begs, following me. “Talk to me about this.”
“I think I saw plenty,” I tell him. “I really don’t need to hear you talk about it.”
My legs carry me through the house on muscle memory alone as I collect the things that I can’t live without, the things that Katie can’t live without, and enough clothing to last her through the next couple of weeks.
I ignore Daniel’s pleading as he follows me through the house. I ignore the sounds of him sniffling as snot runs out of his nose. I ignore the way that he grabs onto my hips and begs me not to leave him. I ignore all of it.
Until I’m in my car.
As soon as I pull my car out of the garage and turn down the street, headed for my mom, tears force themselves from my eyes and every breath saws its way out of my chest.
I let myself cry and scream and beat my hands against my steering wheel for the entire length of the drive, thinking about every day of the life we spent together. About him sharing our bed with another woman.
About the possibility of him telling her that he loves her before turning around and saying the same thing to me.
As the front wheels of my car make contact with the driveway, I open up the lockbox that I keep in my heart and I stuff my feelings inside of it just like I do every day at work, then I close it up tight once again.
I try not to think about the fact that my daughter’s life has just done a one-eighty as I roll the suitcases up to the front door and use the knocker in the center of their welcome wreath to announce my presence.
“Oh,” my mom says as she pulls open the door. She has a kitchen towel draped over her shoulder and a blue apron secured around her waist, covered in flour. “I thought we were keeping her until tomorrow?” As her eyes drift to the suitcases sitting at my left, concern etches itself into her features. “Why do you have luggage?”
“Because my husband has been cheating on me and I left him,” I answer her, trying as hard as I can to hold my composure. As my daughter rushes toward us, I slap a wide smile onto my face and reach my arms out to hug her. “There’s my girl!”
“Mommy! Me and Grammy are making nuffins for tomorrow!”
“It’s muffins , Katie-cat,” I tell her with a smile. “I can’t wait to try them.”
“Nia…”
I shake my head at my mom as I move to kiss my daughter on her head. “If Grammy says it’s okay, we’re gonna have a sleepover here for a few days.”
“Of course you can,” Mom tells me, pressing a hand against my back.
After checking in on the muffins and the handful of other projects that Katie did earlier in the evening, I pour myself a glass of wine and trudge through the house toward the shower.
I stand with my back to the wall, letting the water beat down on me from the showerhead, which I’ve set to massage. I sip on my wine as I fight back more tears that beg me to let them fall, in case my daughter decides to let herself into the room. The door frame is damaged and the door hasn’t been able to close all the way as a result since I last lived here.
I don’t know what to do now. My life was everything that I wanted. I had the hard-working husband, the beautiful daughter who lights up every day of my life, the dream home that I’d wanted since I was a little girl, the perfect job…but now, everything feels wrong.
My marriage has been a lie for who knows how long. My job breaks my heart nearly every day. My dream home just became my worst nightmare.
The only thing that is still good is my Katie, and now I have to tear her life apart.
What on Earth was he letting that woman do to him?
Why was it worth throwing everything away?
After finishing my wine, I set the glass on the edge of the bathtub and finish my shower, dreading the moment that I have to face my parents. I wrap myself in a fleece bathrobe and pat down the hall to the room that Katie and I will be staying in.
I lived in this room from the time that I was sixteen, right after Mom and Keith got married, up until the night that Daniel proposed to me and we decided to move in together.
The walls are still painted the same pale periwinkle blue, and a few of my butterfly decals are still stuck to the ceiling, just above the fan blades. The furniture is almost all new, replaced in the last three years.
Even still, this is the room where I had my first sip of alcohol, the room where I cried over my first boyfriend, the room I slept in the night before my wedding so that we wouldn’t have bad luck.
This room is a part of my life that I thought I’d left behind.
As I kiss my daughter on her head and tuck her blankets tightly under her chin, I reach for my suitcase and pull out my laptop. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with the laptop resting on my legs, I type in search after search. For an hour, I deep dive into website after website until I land on a blog.
“Kink Kings?” I whisper to myself as I click to open the site.
My screen is immediately flooded with symbols, photos, and articles with titles like ‘How to Train Your Submissive’ and ‘Safe Words: Do They Really Matter?’
I slap the laptop’s screen closed and toss it away from me with a shudder.
Who in the hell was I married to?
My phone rings all through breakfast with calls from my husband that I won’t answer. I stayed up for hours on the Kink Kings website, reading about all of the depraved and disgusting things people like him do.
Like the leather-bound woman who was with him.
The more that I read, the more sick I felt. He was doing those things under our roof; in our bed and just down the hall from where our five-year-old daughter sleeps.
“They’re good, huh, Mommy?”
“What?” My eyes move to the plate in front of me, stacked high with Katie’s homemade muffins. “Oh. Yes, Katie-cat, they’re perfect.”
“Know what?” Keith says with a nudge to Katie’s shoulder. “Let’s see if we can’t go dig up some critters in the yard.”
“Ewww! Okay!” Katie laughs, pushing her seat away from the table before running full-speed toward the back door.
As my stepdad follows her outside, closing the door behind them, my head drops into my hands and I let out a loud sob. My mom’s hand is rubbing circles against my back before I even have time to reach for a napkin, and the sound of her gentle humming fills my ears while I cry.
“I wish I could take your pain away,” she tells me.
I know it’s the truth. I’ve thought that plenty of times for my own daughter, and I know how much it hurts that we can’t soak up every ounce of what hurts or scares or upsets them so that they don’t ever have to feel it.
So I cry for my mom, too, because I know that she’s taking on my pain as her own as much as she can.
“Shoot,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I have a double today. Dan was gonna—”
“It’s okay,” Mom assures me, “we’ve got Katie.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’ll find us a place as soon as I can.”
“I don’t want to hear another word. You’re family.” As she plucks my untouched plate from the table, she adds, “I can never get too much time with my grandbaby, anyway.”
I help my mom clear the table, not unlike I did when I was still living here, and I give her a tight hug before trailing out the back door to find Katie on her hands and knees in the backyard with her grandpa.
The two of them have found a wet patch of dirt and are clawing through it with their bare hands, seemingly looking for the ‘critters’ that Keith had mentioned earlier.
I give my muddy, wonderful mess of a daughter a tight squeeze and a kiss on her cheek before I tell her goodbye. The last thing that I want to do right now is leave her.
Even if she has no idea that her entire world is changing, I know it, and it makes every fiber of my being want to cling to her as if this hug is the last I’ll ever give her.
If I let go, I worry that she’ll fly away and I’ll never see her again.