He was her everything.
And she wasn’t enough.
It killed her to know that being with her in a way that satisfied her was destroying something in him.
“I can’t ever forget that this is what you want,” she said slowly. “I can’t forget and go back to what we had, knowing that the life I love is making you feel suffocated. Knowing that you were keeping up with the Joneses while I washappy.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked so sorry.Soreally and truly sorry and like this was tearing him up from the inside, and she didn’t understand why he couldn’t do her a favor and scream at her. Call her ugly or say she was boring in bed or something so her anger had something to grab hold of. “I love you, and that’s why I wanted to figure out how to navigate this together.”
She looked past him, out the window over the kitchen sink. How many times had she stood there washing dishes and looking out at the driveway, waiting for his car to pull in…
“Maybe we should…maybe we…should do this separate for a while.”
“I don’t want a divorce, Sam.”
“Neither do I.”
The house looked like a sitcom set all of a sudden. Like it wasn’t real. The house she carefully organized every week, that she worked so hard to make theirs. It was her haven, and his prison.
They’d raised three boys here. Ethan had taken his first steps here. They’d measured their heights on the wall by the kitchen. They’d bought the house when Will had started being successful in real estate and her freelance writing jobs had picked up.
They’d celebrated their kids’ high school graduations here. Mourned the loss of her mother here. Laughed, cried, made love.
It didn’t seem real now.
She was angry, and she was sad, and they’d had such a smooth marriage up until this point that she didn’t know how to have conflict like this.
“I need to go to bed,” she said.
“Sam…”
“Alone.”
They hadneverdone this. Never had the kind of schism that made her feel like they couldn’t go to sleep beside each other. Sometimes theydidgo to bed mad, because he was right about her.
She didn’t like fighting, and sometimes she just shut down. Shut the door for a while and marinated by herself. Then they’d go to sleep silently beside each other, and in the morning it would be a much more amiable disagreement, rather than a fight that had built anger on top of anger.
She hoped that was true now.
In the morning maybe she’d wake up and this would be a weird dream. Or Will would forget he’d ever said anything.
The problem was, though, she would never be able to forget he’d said it.
So she had to figure out what she was going to do.
TWO
I can’t begin to explain this via text. We need to get coffee.
She fired off the message to her group text with Whitney and Elysia before the sun was up, and before Will, who had slept in one of the boys’ old rooms, she assumed, was up.
She hated running with an all-consuming passion, though she often made herself do it anyway, but this morning it wasn’t for her health. It functioned as an escape.
She put earbuds in, music on. She hated to hear herself gasping for breath when she ran. It was just demoralizing.
Her thoughts followed the rhythm of her feet as she ran down the sidewalk, toward the coffeehouse she always met her friends at. She supposed she’d find out once she got there if they had time to meet.
She had to leave her house either way.
