“Are you going to be able to sleep?” I ask him.
“Better odds now.” He picks up my hand, interlaces our fingers. I feel the pull of something again, the thing that connects us, tugging. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
I nod. He will, of course he will. I live here now.
He hovers there, right next to me. I think that maybe he’s going to kiss me, but he just squeezes my hand once, twice, and gets out to open my door.
We walk up the steps in silence.
“Bonnie loved you so much,” I say. “You were hers in every sense of the word.”
He nods. A tear escapes down his cheek. “Fuck,” he says.
I press my face to his, hold my cheek against his cheek, and then he opens the door, and all at once I’m inside, and Stone isn’t.
I take a deep breath. I put my hands on my abdomen and exhale. But they come, anyway. The sharp pains. They arrive with such intensity that it’s everything I can do not to scream and wake the house.
I feel the night like a knife. It cuts through me.
Bonnie is gone, and I have betrayed Leo.
What have I done?
I think about Stone’s hands on my stomach, the naked curve of his shoulders, so familiar to me, even after all this time. I shut my eyes and shake my head to clear the images.
I pull my phone out of my bag. I have a missed call from Leo. I click on the voicemail.
Hey, babe, just finishing up, I know it’s late. Shooting starts tomorrow. I’m sorry I’ve been so MIA…
There’s a pause in his message. I hold my breath.
I miss you, baby.
I click the phone off before the message ends. I can’t catch mybreath. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack right here in the living room.
I can’t do this. I can’t bear it. I’m not this woman. I cannot have had an affair. I cannot have cheated. This cannot be my reality.
I race up the stairs. I feel the blood in my fingers, throbbing pinpricks, like insects are stinging every surface of my skin.
Oh God oh God oh God.
Leo. My husband. Who has gone with me to fertility appointments and held my hair back when I’ve been sick from supermarket sushi. Who has made the bed haphazardly in the morning because he knows it’s important to me and puts my shoes away when I leave them by the door. We have memories, too. We have a kaleidoscope of them. But they are mundane memories, everyday memories. It’s not just the last IVF or the engagement or the wedding. It’s all the moments in between. The ones that are hard to remember because they fade into the fabric of a marriage.
What is it about distance that lends itself so easily to fantasy? What is it about familiarity that doesn’t?
I don’t make the decision to do it, the moment chooses for me. Our rabbi, every Yom Kippur, would talk about readiness. How we are never ready for life’s big moments—the moments that choose us, is how she’d put it—but that we must trust God in those moments to show up. That we are not alone.
But I don’t need God. At least, not tonight. I have something better.
One moment I’m wringing my hands at the top of the stairs, and the next I’m crouched next to the safe in the guest room—the one that has been an office and a painting studio and is now filled with various odds and ends—a dust-covered Peloton bike, boxes of itemized photos, old outdoor couch cushions, suitcases.
It swings open, same code.
Inside are our birth certificates, some jewelry—a string of pearls my mother gifted me that I never wear, small diamond hoops, a jade amulet—and, of course, my ticket.
I take it out. I hold it in my hands. It’s not smaller or lighter or heavier than I remember. It’s exactly as I’ve always pictured it to be. I try to think about the last time I looked at it. Years ago, maybe even a decade. I was always too afraid to touch it, too afraid that my brain might betray me and I’d find myself somewhere I didn’t need to be, having squandered it.
This, I think.
