"It was easier." "For who?"
Claire almost laughed again. "Apparently for Ethan. Everything seems to be easier for Ethan when the truth isn't involved."
Ethan looked at her. "I know I messed up."
"Messed up? You forgot an appointment. You scratched the car. You did not accidentally maintain another relationship for six months."
"I know." "Do you?" "Yes." "Then tell me why."
That was the question he had feared more than any accusation because every answer was both selfish and inadequate. He could not blame Claire without lying. He could not blame grief because she had lived through the same loss. He could not claim loneliness when she had reached for him repeatedly. He could not call the affair an accident after six months of messages, hotel rooms, lunches, invented meetings, and carefully timed phone calls.
"I don't know," he said. Claire's face crumpled for the first time. "That's worse." "Claire, I was unhappy."
"So was I." He stopped.
"You think you were the only person in this marriage who felt lonely?" she asked. "You think I didn't notice you disappearing while sitting right beside me? I kept asking if work was too much. I asked if you wanted counseling.
I asked if we should go away for a weekend. I kept trying to find the door you were closing, Ethan. You knew I was trying."
He looked down.
"And when I couldn't figure out what was wrong," she continued, "I decided it must be me. I thought maybe I had become too sad after the baby. I thought maybe I worked too much. I thought maybe I stopped being fun. Do you understand that? I spent six months competing with a woman I didn't know existed."
Vanessa's eyes dropped. Claire looked at her, but her anger was no longer simple enough to aim at one person.
"And you," she said. "You knew there was a wife somewhere. Whatever he told you, you knew I existed."
Vanessa nodded once, slowly. "I did." "Then don't stand in my house and act shocked that I turned out to be real." Vanessa absorbed the words without arguing.
"You're right," she said. Ethan looked at her. "Vanessa." She turned on him. "Don't."
The balance of the room shifted again. Ethan was no longer standing between two women who wanted competing versions of him. He was standing between two women discovering, at different depths, that he had made each of them participate in a story the other had not been allowed to read.
Margaret took a step toward Claire. "Honey, sit down." Claire shook her head. "I don't want to sit down."