“Because I thought I could make it less serious by making it general.” She swallowed. “I'd been talking to two men online. One was someone I'd met at a conference, and the other was a friend of a friend. I arranged to see them during the trip. I told myself if I made it about questioning the marriage, not about Ryan, you'd be angry but eventually let me come back.”
“Did you expect me to approve?”
“No. I expected you to protest. I knew you would.”
“Then what was the point?”
She covered her mouth for a moment. “I wanted to be able to say I'd told you. I wanted to stop feeling like I was sneaking around without actually accepting what honesty required.”
I felt a fresh wave of anger, but it was quieter than the anger of discovery. She had described precisely what I had sensed in the kitchen: disclosure being used not to give me a choice, but to relieve herself of guilt while continuing the behavior. For months I'd wondered whether I'd misread the conversation. Hearing her explain it confirmed that I hadn't.
“Ryan told you I wouldn't leave,” I said.
She nodded. “He said you were too loyal, that if I came back and showed you I wanted the marriage, you'd forgive me.”
“And you believed him.”
“I wanted to.”
I looked at the closed door. Behind it, our attorneys were probably reviewing account statements while we sat inside a room trying to name the thing that had destroyed our marriage. “When you called on the tenth night, what had you decided?”
“That I wanted to come home.”
“Why?”
Natalie breathed in slowly. “The first few days were exciting. Not even in the way I expected. It was the attention. I didn't have to be anybody's wife or be reminded that I was almost forty and still unsure what I wanted. But by the middle of the trip I felt ridiculous. The dates weren't what I imagined. Some of the men were perfectly nice. Some weren't. I found myself comparing everything to you.”
“And Ryan?”
She looked away. “He came to Nashville. For a little while, it felt like proof that what we had meant something. But then he spent half the time on calls about Westbridge. He wanted to know whether I'd spoken to you about selling the house, whether you sounded upset enough to consider a fresh start somewhere else.”