Chapter Nine

      If there’s ever a person who tells you in all their years of marriage they’ve never wondered what it would be like to walk out, you’re talking to a liar. I’d thought it before, when the girls were infants and Ross traveled so much and worked such long hours that I was made a single parent by default. He’d embraced fatherhood with the enthusiasm he had for his golf game. He loved his daughters with everything he had. He simply wasn’t there.

      Things got better, as they do when children get older and the constant stream of diapers and feedings eases. Ross was still gone a lot, but the girls and I found our rhythm and routine. I was the taskmaster, he was the guy who came around and treated them to ice cream instead of dinner and brought exotic souvenirs for them to squeal over. It wasn’t so different from the lives of most of our friends. It worked.

      My children are grown, getting ready to graduate from college, moving on to jobs and internships and adult lives. The house that had seemed perfect for the four of us now seems too big, too quiet. Too empty. My husband still travels, still works long hours, still spends his leisure time in pursuits that have nothing to do with me. And...what have I done?

      I fucked another man. Without a second thought and, so far, without remorse. I’d have done it again, if Will hadn’t so ungracefully extricated himself from the future possibilities.

      I’d thought about leaving my husband before. But am I thinking about it now? Sitting at my kitchen table and staring out at my perfectly manicured yard, then around the room at the nearly new appliances, the cabinets we’d just had redone, the pictures of fruit on the walls, I don’t think so.

      Ross slides a mug of coffee in front of me. He takes his black, and that’s how he always serves mine even though I don’t. “Morning. What are you up to today?”

      “Work.” I’ve worked for over ten years, and he still asks me—when he remembers. As if I have a long social calendar full of mani-pedi appointments and tennis lessons instead of a job.

      “Here or the city?”

      “Philadelphia’s a city, too, you know,” I tell him.