It didn't start with anything I could have named at the time. It started with a project deadline and a man who asked follow-up questions.
At home I was a logistics department. Who's getting the kids, did you pay the thing, why is the garage still like that. At work I was interesting. He remembered what I'd said three weeks earlier. He laughed at the way I said things. Nothing happened for almost a year, and I used that year as proof of my own innocence.
What actually happened in that year is that I moved my inner life across the street. I told him about my father before I told my husband. I checked my phone at red lights. I started narrating my marriage to him in a way that made me sympathetic, and every time I did it the marriage got a little smaller.
My husband wasn't cruel. He was tired, and he trusted me, and those two things together made me feel unwatched. I mistook being unwatched for being unloved.
When it finally became physical, it lasted six weeks. Six weeks. That's what I traded a decade for. And the strangest part is that the physical part is not what haunts me. What haunts me is a Tuesday afternoon in his apartment, sitting on a couch that wasn't mine, realizing that if I actually moved in, in a year I'd be asking him about the garage.
He wasn't a better man. He was a stranger with better manners, because strangers can afford manners. Nobody has to be patient with someone they only see for two hours at a time.
I told my husband. Not gracefully. We are still in it, three counselors deep, and some days it's a marriage and some days it's a project. I don't get to complain about that. I built it.
The stories currently featured in this collection are fictional accounts created to explore common relationship patterns, decisions, and consequences. They are not presented as accounts from identifiable individuals. As real reader stories are submitted with permission, they'll be clearly identified. These fictional accounts are illustrative, not clinical guidance. They are not therapy, legal advice or a substitute for professional help.