By the time our anniversary arrived, I had written eleven versions of an apology. The first eight were bargains disguised as remorse. They explained the stress at work, the old feelings Julian had awakened, the pressure of social media, and the ways Nolan and I had both allowed romance to fade. I threw those drafts away. On the ninth, I finally wrote the words I had avoided: I chose to kiss him, and I chose to laugh at your pain. On the eleventh, I stopped asking Nolan to reassure me that we would recover.
I mailed the letter to Daniel's house because Nolan had not offered another address. I told him everything about the messages and the private meetings, including the coffee and the rainy afternoon in Julian's car. I admitted that I had called those encounters harmless to avoid seeing them as decisions. I wrote that I did not expect forgiveness and that I would accept whatever distance he needed. The last paragraph said I would be willing to speak with a counselor, together or separately, if he ever wanted to. I sealed the envelope before I could add a sentence about how lonely I was.
He replied three days later by email. He thanked me for telling him more of the truth and said he wished I had done it before he had to make a decision about what kind of life he could trust. He had found an apartment in a converted building on the edge of town and planned to sign a short-term lease. He thought we should live separately for the foreseeable future. He said he wasn't ready for couples counseling, and he asked me not to contact his coworkers or his family to find out how he was doing.
I read that message over and over, looking for phrases that might be interpreted as temporary. Foreseeable future was not forever, I told myself. Not ready wasn't never. I started searching for stories about spouses reconciling after public infidelity, and I held on to the ones with surprising happy endings while dismissing all the stories that ended differently. What I could not make myself see was that hope for reconciliation and respect for his wishes had become opposites in the way I was behaving. I wanted Nolan back badly enough to keep ignoring the very boundaries he had finally learned to draw.
That afternoon, I went to his office. I knew his usual lunch hour and carried a thermos of the soup he liked, a ridiculous gesture in late July heat. His coworker Iris met me near the reception desk and said he was out inspecting a drainage site. Her eyes flicked toward the soup and away again. I asked whether he'd be back soon, but she said she didn't know. It may have been true. Either way, she was protecting a colleague who had probably spent the past month fielding questions he never wanted to answer.