“You must be so proud of Marcus – he’s been amazing with the kids since the move.”
I didn’t know what move she was talking about.
My wife Diane had been at the same company for six years, and this was the first work event she’d ever let me come to. I was standing next to the VP of marketing, holding a drink I hadn’t touched, while she smiled at me like she’d said something obvious.
“Sorry,” I said. “Which move?”
She blinked. “To Riverside. When he transferred from the Austin office.”
I told her I must have the details mixed up. She laughed and walked away.
Diane found me ten minutes later.
“You look pale,” she said.
“Who’s Marcus?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “He’s on my team. Why?”
“Karen just told me he’s been great with the kids.”
Diane laughed. “She’s probably confusing us with someone else.”
My stomach dropped.
I excused myself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink scrolling her location history on our shared family account. She’d told me she was in Denver last month for a conference. The pin said Riverside. Three nights.
I went back out and watched her across the room.
She was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. Tall, dark jacket. She touched his arm twice in thirty seconds.
I walked over.
“Hey,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Diane’s husband, Troy.”
The man looked at me. Then at Diane. Something moved across his face.
“Marcus,” he said, and shook my hand.
Diane said, “Troy, why don’t you go grab us some food – “
“How do your kids like the new school?” I said.
Marcus went completely still.
“I should find my wife,” he said, and walked away fast.
I turned to Diane. Her face had gone the color of the wall behind her.
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“THEN TELL ME WHAT IT IS.”
She looked at the floor for a long time.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and her face changed into something I’d never seen before.
“Troy,” she said. “His wife is here.”
The Room Gets Smaller
I didn’t say anything.
Diane’s eyes were moving around the party like she was doing math. Counting exits, maybe. Counting seconds. Her hand closed around her phone and she slid it into her clutch.
“We should go somewhere quiet,” she said.
“Who is she?”
“Troy – “
“What’s her name?”
Diane closed her mouth. Opened it. “Sandra.”
I looked across the room. I’d been doing it automatically since Marcus walked away, trying to figure out which woman was watching her husband the way I’d been watching mine. There were maybe sixty people in the room. A hotel ballroom in downtown, too much lighting, a bar along the far wall. Someone had strung up a banner that said Q3 WINS.
I spotted her by the banner. She was standing alone, holding a glass of white wine, looking at Marcus’s back as he crossed the room toward her. She was shorter than Diane. Brown hair. She had the look of someone who’d been told this was a casual work thing and dressed accordingly, and now felt slightly underdressed, and was trying not to show it.
She didn’t look like a woman who’d just been handed a grenade.
Not yet.
Marcus reached her. He touched her elbow, said something close to her ear. She turned to look in our direction.
Her eyes found mine first. Then Diane.
She knew. Or she suspected. Or she’d been suspecting for months and this was just the moment the room confirmed it.
“Diane.” My voice came out flat. “How long.”
“Please. Not here.”
“How long.”
She looked at her shoes. They were the heels she bought for my brother’s wedding four years ago. I remembered because she’d complained they hurt and I’d carried her on my back from the parking lot to the hotel and we’d both laughed the whole way.
“Eight months,” she said.
What Eight Months Means
Eight months ago was October.
October was when I got laid off from the firm and spent six weeks unemployed and Diane told me every night that it was fine, we were fine, she believed in me. October was when our daughter Becca turned seven and we threw her a birthday party in the backyard and Diane made the cake from scratch because the bakery screwed up the order. October was when I thought we were closer than we’d been in years, because hard things have a way of doing that, I thought, have a way of pulling people together.
Eight months.
I put my drink down on a high-top table. Didn’t throw it. Didn’t make a scene. Just set it down very carefully, like it mattered where it landed.
“The kids,” I said.
“What?”
“Karen said Marcus was great with the kids. Our kids. He’s been around our kids.”
Diane’s face shifted. “Just once. It wasn’t planned. He stopped by when – “
“He was in my house.”
She didn’t answer.
“He was in my house with my kids and I didn’t know who he was.”
Across the room, Sandra was still watching us. Marcus had his hand on her arm now, the same way Diane had touched his arm earlier, and I thought: that’s a gesture. That’s a specific gesture this man does when he’s trying to manage a situation. Hand on the arm. Calm down. Let me handle it.
Sandra pulled her arm away.
Good for her, some part of me thought. Completely automatic.
The Part I Didn’t Expect
Sandra walked toward us.
Not fast. Not storming. Just walking, steady, like she’d made a decision and was following through on it before she could talk herself out of it.
Marcus said her name behind her. She didn’t stop.
She stopped about three feet from Diane. She was maybe forty, forty-two. She had the kind of face that looked like it had been pretty in a specific way when she was younger and was still pretty now but differently, with more in it.
“How long,” Sandra said. Not to me. To Diane.
Diane said nothing.
Sandra looked at me. “Do you know?”
“Eight months,” I said.
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’ve been saying fourteen.”
Diane said, “Sandra – “
“Don’t.” Short. Clean. “Don’t say my name.”
Marcus had caught up. He put his hand on Sandra’s shoulder and she stepped sideways out from under it without looking at him. Just a small step. Like she’d practiced it without knowing she was practicing it.
“We should all go somewhere – ” Marcus started.
“If you say ‘somewhere quiet,'” I said, “I will lose my mind.”
He stopped talking.
The four of us stood there. Sixty people in the room, someone laughing too loud by the bar, the banner saying Q3 WINS behind Sandra’s head, and the four of us in a circle that everyone nearby was starting to notice without quite knowing why.
Sandra looked at me for a long second. “Do you have kids?”
“Two,” I said. “Becca’s seven. Liam’s four.”
Her eyes did something. “We have a boy. He’s five.”
I looked at Marcus. He was staring at the floor.
“He doesn’t know,” Sandra said. “About any of it. In case you were wondering.”
I wasn’t wondering. But I was now.
What Diane Said in the Car
We left before Sandra did. I don’t know what happened after we walked out. I’ve thought about it. I haven’t let myself look Sandra up.
The drive home was twenty-two minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the dash the whole way. Diane talked for most of it. I let her.
She said it started because they were on the same project, the Riverside account, the one that had her working late for three months last spring. She said it wasn’t about me. She said she knew that sounded like a line but she meant it. She said she’d been trying to end it for two months. She said she was scared. She said she didn’t know how to – I said, “Did he eat dinner with my kids.”
Long pause.
“Once,” she said. “He brought pizza. The kids didn’t know who he was. They thought he was a work friend.”
“What did Becca call him?”
“Troy – “
“What did she call him.”
“She called him Marcus.”
I pulled into the driveway and sat there with the engine running.
Becca knew his name. Liam probably did too. They’d sat at the kitchen table I built from a kit when we moved into this house, the one that wobbles slightly on the left side because I got the Allen key wrong, and they’d eaten pizza with this man and called him by his first name and gone to bed and never mentioned it to me because why would they. He was just a work friend.
I turned the engine off.
“I need you to go inside,” I said. “I need ten minutes.”
Diane went inside.
I sat in the driveway in the dark.
The neighborhood was quiet. Thursday night, late enough that most of the houses had their lights off. Someone down the street still had their Christmas lights up, even though it was March. I’d noticed that for months and always meant to find it funny.
I found it funny now, for some reason. Just for a second.
Then I didn’t.
Where We Are Now
That was eleven weeks ago.
Diane is still in the house. We haven’t told the kids anything. We haven’t decided anything. I sleep in the guest room and she sleeps in our room and in the mornings we make breakfast together and help Becca find her shoes and remind Liam to brush his teeth and it looks completely normal from the outside.
It looks completely normal from the inside too, which is the part that gets me sometimes.
I started seeing a therapist named Dr. Carol Pruitt, who has an office above a dry cleaner on Route 9 and a way of asking questions that makes me feel like I’m the one who thought of the answer. She told me I don’t have to decide anything right now. I told her I know that. She said knowing it and feeling it are different. I told her I know that too.
I don’t know about Marcus and Sandra. I genuinely don’t. I’ve thought about looking him up and I’ve thought about what I would even do with whatever I found and I keep coming back to the same place, which is: not yet. Maybe not ever.
What I keep thinking about is Karen.
The VP of marketing. The one who started all of this with one sentence at a work party because she thought I already knew. She has no idea. She went home that night and probably made a drink and watched something on TV and has no idea that she handed me a thread and I pulled it and the whole thing came apart in my hands.
I almost want to thank her.
I don’t know what for. But almost.
—
If this one stayed with you, share it. Someone else out there might need to know they’re not the only one standing in a driveway at night, making sense of something that doesn’t.
If you’re looking for more wild tales, you won’t believe what happened when my district manager called a customer a “bitch” or when another writer found her name on her husband’s other family’s lease.
