To my surprise, I did.
“I watched your face at that dinner.”
She nodded as tears slid down.
“I’m not going to tell you I forgive you,” I said. “Not today. Maybe I don’t have to. But I’ll tell you this. You told me three days too late, and the man who lied to you told me three months too late. That’s a very different kind of late.”
I paused.
“You came here anyway. That took something.”
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
Such a plain, human question.
It nearly undid me.
“Yes,” I said. “Not because of today. Because of me.”
She almost smiled.
“I think I believe that.”
“Take care of your son,” I said, standing. “Teach him what you told me. That the brave thing is fixing what you can.”
I walked into the winter light with the envelope in my coat pocket.
Something loosened behind my ribs.
The next morning, I took that $1,240 and donated it to a women’s legal aid clinic on the West Side.
In no one’s name.
It felt right that money spent on a secret should help other women find out where they stood.
Two evenings later, I asked Daniel to sit at the kitchen table.
He entered like a man walking into a hospital room.
He had lost weight in two weeks.
Shadows sat beneath his eyes.
He kept clasping and unclasping his hands, a nervous habit I hadn’t seen since his father’s heart scare years earlier.
“I’ve made my decision,” I said. “I’m going to file for divorce.”
