Maybe I still did.
The absence of children made our eventual separation simpler legally.
It did not make our marriage less real.
For most of those ten years, Meredith had been the person I trusted most in the world.
She was intelligent, funny, fiercely social, and capable of making strangers feel included within minutes.
She remembered birthdays.
Sent handwritten thank-you cards.
Could turn a miserable airport delay into an excuse to find the best restaurant in the terminal.
I was more reserved.
More structured.
I liked plans.
Meredith liked stories that began with, “You’ll never believe what happened.”
For years, our differences balanced each other.
Then Callum Vance returned.
I already knew who he was.
Every marriage has ghosts.
Callum was one of Meredith’s.
They dated during college and for about a year afterward.
She told me about him when we first became serious.
“He was my great bad idea,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we were twenty-two and thought intensity was the same thing as love.”
“Did he break your heart?”
“We broke each other’s.”
That was all I knew.
I never felt threatened by the memory.
Callum moved to Chicago.
Meredith moved to Boston.
Life happened.
He married.
She married me.
For more than a decade, his name appeared perhaps three times.
Then seven months before the night she climbed into his car, Meredith came home from an alumni event almost glowing.
“You’ll never guess who I saw.”
I was opening mail at the kitchen island.
“Michelle Obama?”
She laughed.
“Callum.”
I looked up.
“College Callum?”
“The one and only.”
“How is he?”
“Good.”
She placed her purse down.
“Older.”
“That tends to happen.”
She smiled.
“He moved back to New Jersey.”
“For work?”
“His wife got a position at the university.”
That was the first time I heard Elowen’s name.
Meredith told me Callum was married to an art-history professor named Elowen and that they lived near Hopewell.
I asked whether it was strange seeing him.
“A little.”
“Good strange or bad strange?”
“Just strange.”
Then she kissed me.
The conversation ended.
Three days later, Callum followed Meredith on Instagram.
Then LinkedIn.
Then he appeared in a group chat involving several old college friends.
None of that seemed suspicious.
Adults are allowed to know people they once dated.
I believed that then.
I believe it now.
The problem was not that Meredith had an ex.
The problem was how quickly that ex began occupying our marriage.
At first, it was small.
“Callum said the funniest thing today.”
“Callum remembers that awful apartment I lived in junior year.”
“Callum still thinks Professor Lang hated him.”
Then came lunches.
Meredith told me before the first one.
“Would it bother you if I grabbed lunch with Callum?”
I appreciated that she asked.
“Just you two?”
“Probably.”
I considered it.
“Should it bother me?”
She smiled.
“No.”
“Then okay.”
That night, she told me everything about lunch.
The restaurant.
His consulting business.
Elowen’s job.
Friends from college.
It actually made me feel foolish for having wondered whether I should be concerned.
Then they had another lunch.
And another.
I learned about the third one only because Meredith mentioned it afterward.
“You went again?”
She looked at me.
“You said you didn’t care.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why does that sound like you care?”
“It was just a question.”
Meredith exhaled.