I did not read the agreement as closely as I should have. That's a sentence people say when they want their negligence to sound passive, like rain arriving unexpectedly. The truth is that I had learned to skim any page Ryan placed in front of me because I had decided that checking his work would be an insult to our friendship. He had asked for access to information, and I had granted it without showing Ethan the documents. A week later he told me we should keep our discussions private until we could present a complete vision.
"Ethan's going to hear pressure where you intend possibility," he explained. "Let me give you something so good he can't turn it down."
I told myself he was helping us. Some evenings I even pictured the three of us celebrating a successful sale, with Ethan finally free to work on music he loved and me free to open a larger office. The vision was attractive because it had no awkward conversations in it and no injured feelings. Nobody had to disagree, and nobody had to admit that I was moving decisions out of my marriage and into private meetings with a man who was beginning to touch me when he spoke.
The first time Ryan placed his hand at the small of my back, we were leaving a fundraising event near Music Row. I told myself it was the polite touch of a longtime friend guiding me through a doorway. The next time, in a parking garage, I let his hand stay there longer. By the time he kissed me outside a late dinner, I had already crossed enough smaller boundaries that the kiss felt less like a new decision than the inevitable conclusion of decisions I had made for weeks.
I could give you my excuses in chronological order. Ethan was always tired. Ryan paid attention. Our marriage had become practical and dull. I had worked hard and deserved to feel desirable.
Each excuse contains a grain of a real feeling, which is why excuses are so useful, but none of them is the truth about what I chose to do. I wanted the excitement without surrendering the stability of home, and for a while I thought I could have both.
Ryan was patient in the way someone is patient when he wants something very specific. He never demanded that I leave Ethan immediately. He merely asked questions that made staying sound humiliating: Why was I waiting for permission to be happy? Why did I continue letting my husband set the terms of our future? Why did I apologize whenever I wanted something different? He made each question sound like liberation, and because he was saying exactly what I wanted to hear, I failed to notice how little he asked about what I actually needed.