The night my husband told me he wanted a divorce, I was elbow-deep in soap bubbles washing dishes while he stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets and his face doing something I had never seen it do before.
He said her name was Cassandra.
I remember the soap bubbles sliding off my hands when I turned around. I remember the kitchen light being slightly too bright, the way it always was at night, something about the angle. I remember thinking, with the specific irrelevance of a mind trying to avoid the immediate, that I had been meaning to change that bulb for two years.
He said it had been going on for seven months. He said he was sorry. He said the word sorry three times and none of them filled the space the word was supposed to fill.
We had been married for nine years.
The next morning, while he was at work and the house had the particular silence of something that has been altered without the furniture being moved, I sat at the kitchen table and discovered something about myself that I was not prepared for. I did not know what was in our bank accounts. I did not know what was in our retirement accounts. I did not know what we paid for the utilities or what the mortgage balance was or whether we had more saved or more owed on the credit cards he had always managed.
I had a good job. I was a pediatric nurse with twelve years of experience, a salary I was proud of, and a professional competence I had never once doubted. I had direct-deposited my paycheck into a joint account every month for nine years and trusted that someone was watching the architecture of what we built together.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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