I waited. She looked toward the photographs on the hall wall. Most were pictures of family and trips, but there was one of us at a wedding years earlier, laughing because the photographer had caught us midconversation instead of posing. I hadn't been able to take it down. I also hadn't been able to look directly at it for weeks.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know that sounds small. It's the only honest place I know how to start."
She talked about her mother's basement first. The low ceiling, the boxes stacked around the old treadmill, the neighbor's dog barking at dawn. She was applying for jobs and doing temporary marketing work while trying to repair her finances. She'd begun speaking with someone professionally because she was frightened by how easily she'd believed James and how quickly she'd become someone she barely recognized. I heard the shame in her voice, but also the beginning of a willingness to name her own decisions without dressing them up as fate.
"I keep thinking about the night I left," she said. "I had everything scripted. I knew how I wanted you to react, what I wanted to say back, how I could tell myself you were controlling or cold if you got angry. You didn't give me any of that. You just stood there."
"And I was offended. Can you believe that? I was offended you wouldn't beg me to stay."
"I remember," I said.
"I told people you weren't romantic anymore. I said you cared more about work than me. There were times I felt lonely, Ethan, and I should have told you that. But I took real frustrations and used them to excuse something I knew was wrong. I made your good qualities sound like failures so I wouldn't have to face what I was doing."
I swallowed hard. I'd imagined hearing an apology like that during some sleepless nights, and now that it was happening it brought less relief than I expected. Her words were accurate, but accuracy did not repair what had happened. I wanted to ask where those words had been when she sat with James describing my inheritance. Instead I leaned against the wall and gave her time to continue.
She told me she'd received one message from James after the lobby. He wanted two thousand dollars for legal fees and implied that if she didn't help him, she was abandoning a business they had planned together. She laughed when she read it, she said, then cried on the basement stairs for an hour. The humiliation of being tricked had been bad, but admitting she'd exposed our marriage to him willingly was worse. For weeks she'd tried to separate herself from that responsibility by concentrating on all the things James had lied about.
"He lied about everything," she said. "But I didn't lie because he forced me to. I lied because I wanted what he promised, and I didn't care enough about who I hurt while I went after it. That's the part I can't hide from anymore."