The arm of the couch, a couch they sometimes sat on, each on their own electronic devices, not talking. But always with their feet touching.
Comfortable, happy memories.
For her.
“I want you to be happy,” she said slowly. “I want you to have the life I thought we had. The happiness I thought we had. I want to have it too, but I can’t… I can’t be happy if you aren’t. As much as I want to just pretend this didn’t happen, I realize I can’t.”
You have two choices…
Say no.
Say yes.
She didn’t want to say yes. She didn’t want to say no. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
She wanted to close the door on it, and she knew they couldn’t. Because whatever she might say about their life, their happiness, from the past few years it was clear she had somehow closed a door on him.
She had never asked if he was happy, she’d just assumed.
In the way he’d assumed—hoped—she wasn’t happy.
She had two choices.
Unless she could figure out what the third one was. Somewhere between solving the problem and closing a door.
She looked at him and felt something calm wash through her. She’d been with him for twenty-four years. Married for twenty-two. They were bigger than this. Than his feelings, his doubts, than this conversation.
It was why she couldn’t just flip the table and say forget it all.
But this moment was also too big to solve in a conversation, and maybe if part of her even secretly wanted it, it would have been different. Exciting, like Whitney had said it could be.
She didn’t want to share her husband. She didn’t want her life to change.
What do you want besides that?
She’d wanted to travel. In that way, she had wanted freedom. He wanted to have what he wanted, without her stopping him.
She wanted to have what she wanted.
Option three was starting to look obvious. But that didn’t make it easy.
They weren’t who she thought they were.
“I care so much about your happiness,” she said. “We don’t have a happy marriage if you aren’t happy, and as much as I don’t want to accept that…you aren’t happy. I know you wouldn’t have told me all this if you were.”
“Sam…”
“But I can’t watch you do this. I can’t talk to you about your…sexual experiences with other women. I can’t go to bed with you at night knowing you’ve been with someone else, I can’t. I also can’t go back to what we were, because now I know you don’t love this life.” A sob rose in her chest. “I do. I love this life, so much.”
He reached across the table, but stopped an inch short of touching her hand, and she was glad he didn’t touch her. For the first time, she was glad he didn’t touch her. “I love parts of it. I just want to rearrange some things.”
Just the things that felt immovable to her. The things that had felt like foundational supports.
“We got this…we got this summer we didn’t expect. Ethan was supposed to come back and now he’s not, and…what if…we have a summer vacation?” she said, and just thinking about it hurt. It hurt. She hadn’t been away from Will for more than a week, and now she was talking about separating for more than three months. “What if we…put our marriage on pause for the summer?”
He wanted to test out what he thought he’d missed. She didn’t think any of that—bars and dating and random sex—was better than what they had. But why not? Why not let him see that?Knowthat?
Let him do it and have her not…watch.
