Some days I hated him.
Not loudly. Not constantly. But in flashes. When I found a hotel pen in an old jacket pocket. When a song from our anniversary dinner played in the grocery store. When he laughed at something on television and for one irrational second I wanted to ask if Natalie had thought he was funny too. When friends invited us to a cookout and I realized I did not know how to stand beside him publicly without feeling like a woman holding damaged goods.
Other days, I remembered him.
The real him, or at least the part that had been real. The man who stayed up all night with my mother after her surgery because I finally fell asleep in a chair. The man who drove through a snowstorm to pick up my prescription. The man who cried, quietly and with embarrassment, when our old dog died. The man who had not been invented by betrayal, though betrayal had revealed the cowardice he was capable of.
Holding both truths was exhausting.
But adulthood, I learned, is often the refusal to simplify what is complicated simply because pain wants one clear villain and one clean ending.
In September, nearly six months after the hotel, Mr. Whitcomb called me.
I do not know how he got my number. He said only that he had asked one careful question at the front desk and then sent a note through someone who knew someone at Daniel’s company until it found its way. He apologized for the intrusion.
His voice was old, dry, formal.
“Mrs. Carter,” he said, “I wanted to know whether the envelope reached the person it needed to reach.”
“It did.”
A pause.
“Did I make things worse?”
I looked out my office window at a row of maple trees beginning to yellow.
