“What?” I said. I made him look at me. Held his face in my hands. Stared at him. Because it was…a bit much.
“I fell in love with him. I almost left. I wanted to, so many times. And I tried to tell the boys and explain it to them, and I wanted…I wanted him so badly. I just wanted to be free and allow myself to not feel so…”
“Peter.”
“She got unwell a few weeks later. And I cut all contact with him. Never saw him again, and then things… They were never the same again.”
“I see,” I said.
“I wanted things, and instead I lost everything. It felt like a suitable punishment.”
“And then you went about whipping yourself all bloody for something you had no control over. You absolute idiot.”
I was only being honest. He had said honest.
“I did.”
I was still holding his face. Making him look at me.
“She knew I would fall into a deep, dark hole when she’d gone. She wanted me to go find him. She wanted…me to leave. She knew early on that she wouldn’t make it, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t…”
“You can’t control everything.”
“No.”
“And then, in the midst of all that, Mary’s book came out. And all my…our entire private life was suddenly out in the open. My indiscretions, and hers, every little secret and lie. Everything was there for the world to read.”
We stood there. Just looking at each other.
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d told me. She’d given me the manuscript to read. I could have…had things removed. But I was too wound up, too scared and too heartbroken. She was unwell. We didn’t have time, and it became too much. I refused to read it and she was angry and things were so unbearable.”
“Not your…” I started.
“Let me finish.”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when two people break each other. When you build this glass castle and you think it will last forever. But both of you are kicking at the foundations, and at some point?”
“Everything fractures.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not perfect,” he said, in a voice that was so low I could barely make it out. “And neither was she. But we could have stopped. At some point, we should have. We’d both had enough of everything, and yet…we just kept going. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t sane. But we had the boys, and I kept thinking I could…”
“We all do. We think we’re invincible. That we can deal with everything and still just live.”
“We can’t. The book came out, and the backlash was immense. There were excerpts in every newspaper. Parts being read out loud on TV. My patients started being funny with me. Some walked away. People I had known professionally no longer spoke to me. My tennis partner called me…”
“That must have been difficult.”
“It was hell. The hate was immense. We received very credible threats, letters through the door, online trolls everywhere. We had to move the boys out of school, and there was a police car outside here at all times. It…it changed me. I got…just so…”
“Oh, Peter.” I had to say it.
“And in the middle of that, Mary got admitted to hospital. I was so pushed in a corner I couldn’t see a way out. The boys were angry. I was… It was hell. Oliver, it was absolute hell. I felt like I couldn’t breathe anywhere.”
