"He's someone I met at a wine tasting downtown," she said. "It was supposed to be a networking thing. He's an entrepreneur, and he's opening a wine bar on Fourth Street. We started talking about business and how people get stuck in routines, and we just connected. It wasn't planned."
I had been married long enough to know that "it wasn't planned" seldom meant nobody had made decisions. It meant the speaker didn't like tracing those decisions backward. I looked at her suitcases, one blue and one gray, both bought for a vacation we'd taken to Maine, and asked how long she'd been seeing him. She folded her arms tighter across her chest, then unfolded them, as though she realized that pose made her look defensive.
"Five months," she said. "I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like five months," I answered.
A red flush crept along her neck, but she didn't apologize. Instead she began talking faster, explaining that she'd felt invisible, that our life had become too predictable, that I was always at work or thinking about work. She wanted passion and adventure, words she pronounced as if they'd become necessities that I had refused to provide. James understood her ambition, she said, and encouraged her to imagine a future beyond the office she'd spent years managing. He had plans, connections, and the kind of confidence that made every ordinary Tuesday feel like the beginning of something.
"He's passionate and spontaneous," she told me. "He actually has dreams, Ethan. Actual dreams. Not just lawn contracts and fuel receipts."
That one hurt enough to change my breathing. I could understand being bored with my schedule, though I wished she'd said so before finding relief in somebody else's attention. I couldn't understand how she could look at the business that had paid our mortgage, covered our vacations, and supported her decision to leave her job, and reduce it to receipts. I'd spent years building a company with men who depended on me to make payroll. Apparently that looked like an absence of dreams to the woman I'd once promised a cottage beside a lake.
"Did you ever tell me you were this unhappy?" I asked.
"I tried. You were always busy."
I thought about the evenings she'd said nothing was wrong when I asked, and the vacations I'd offered to arrange when she complained we never went anywhere. I thought about the way she'd stop talking whenever a difficult conversation threatened to become specific. There were things I could have done differently, and I would eventually examine them without much mercy. But the idea that five months of secret meetings were the inevitable result of my having to finish estimates after dinner did not sit easily with me.