I ate it all up, even though it stung. The sting was the point, because it confirmed something was still alive in there. That I hadn't gone completely numb beneath my being functional.
I knew it wasn't all real. I'm a lawyer. I understand performance. But underneath the performance was something I believed was true: theimpulse, theconsideration, thewantingto celebrate and love on someone. The basic orientation of:you matter to me.
I’d convincedmyself that I didn’t have a good enough reason to end my marriage. That’s the thing about being unhappy in a situation where the bleeding is slow. You have no language for it. Malik worked. He contributed. He came home at night. He didn't hit me, didn’t yell, wasn’t overtly mean. There was food in the fridge, and the lights stayed on, and our son Micah had everything he needed.
He doesn't see mesounds like something a woman says in a movie. It didn’t seem like enough admissible evidence to justify throwing a marriage away.
So I stayed and I got smaller. No longer mentioning things that excited me because the response from him would be indifference. Stopped reaching for him at night because preemptive rejection was not as bad as the kind said out loud. Stopped expecting him to ask about my day, and when he occasionally did, I gave short answers because the full ones felt like too much to offer someone who was already looking at his phone.
I never complained. I didn't nag him, or make him sit through a hard conversation about how overwhelmed and alone I was. I told myself that was strength. That a weaker woman would complain, and I was not weak. I could carry it all.
So I ignored the mirror that kept catching me off guard. This was the life I'd chosen. I should simplyexpectless andwantless andbeless and that would make the crumbs I was given feel like… enough.
And then I found out about the women.
That’s when the thing opened its mouth and screamed in my face. Because it’s one thing to make peace with a life and a man who has nothing more to give you. You canalmostsurvive that. You canalmosttell yourself,“that’s just how he is.”
But he did have it to give. He had presence and pursuit and desire and attention and all of the things he had been starving me of. He had it and was giving it elsewhere. Repeatedly. To women who were not me.
He looked at me every day and decided I wasn't worth the effort, and I had spent years agreeing with him. And now I had nothing but the knowledge that somewhere in this life I'd chosen, I’d lost the version of myself who would have known she deserved better.
The moment I knew I had to start looking for her was the moment everything fell apart.
part one
FALLING
1/
who the (bleep) did i marry?
alyssa
five years ago
Dinner was ready.I’d made Malik’s favorite: jerk chicken, rice and peas. Micah sat in his booster chair eating apple slices, while I reminded myself that marriages took effort. That maybe if I stopped waiting for Malik to show up and showed up myself, something might shift.
Men need to feel wanted,my mother told me.You can’t sit back and expect them to come to you.
So I cooked. Packed it into containers, loaded Micah into his car seat with his stuffed tiger, and drove twenty minutes to Malik’s office. This was me trying. That's what I told myself on the Garden State Parkway with the smell of jerk filling the car. But I knew it was a lie. I wasn't bringing him dinner. I was bringing myself areason.A wife with a warm plate on the seat isn't checking up on her husband… she's being sweet. The dinner was the alibi. I'd cooked two hours of cover so I could show up at his office and see for myself, and still get to call it an act of love if I was wrong.
I’d known for a while that I wouldn’t like what I found. Two weeks earlier I realized his location had gone dark on the app we’d shared for years. I didn’t know how long that was the case; I didn't normally check it. Then I noticed the little dot that lived at his office in the afternoons just wasn’t there anymore. Turned off.
I'd spent the time since trying to convince myself there was a reasonable explanation, and hating myself a little more each day for the woman I'd become. The night prior, Malik was asleep, dead to the world, and I took his phone off the nightstand and turned his location sharing back on. There I was, a lawyer reduced to gathering evidence onher own husband for a case she didn't want to win. It was beneath me. I knew it was beneath me. I did it anyway, because I needed to know.
I'd checked it once, while cooking. His dot sat right where he'd texted me he was, at his office, working late. I closed the app and didn't check it again.
The receptionist looked up with that careful expression. "Oh… Mrs. Cham—" She caught herself. "Mrs. Carter. Mr. Chambers left maybe an hour ago. I think he had a dinner meeting?"
Six years and people still reached forChambersfirst, like a woman keeping her own name was a typo they were being polite about. I'd stopped correcting most of them.
“Of course.” I smiled. I don’t know why I smiled. “Thank you.”
I sat in my car with the dinner going cold on the seat. He'd been at his desk an hour ago. I'dwatchedhim be there. I opened the app again and his dot wasn't headed home. It wasn't at any restaurant either. It sat three buildings over, and it hadn't moved.
The Meridian Hotel.
In the backseat, Micah held up his stuffed tiger to me like an offering. "Thank you, baby," I said, took it, and gave it a squeeze, as if the thing could give me the nerve for what I was about to go do.
