Could she respect David again? Attraction had not returned. Ease had not returned. But respect, she knew from hard observation, was the structural beam most marriages rely on once youth and novelty have long burned off.
David was trying. He had become reliable with Cam in a way he had never been when secrecy allowed him to drift. He was paying support on time. He was speaking more honestly in therapy.
He was no longer asking Linda to soothe his guilt. These were not small things. But did effort after exposure equal character? Or was it simply the minimum cost of being caught?
In June, almost a year after the fair, Linda asked David to meet her at the state fairgrounds while the grounds were empty for offseason maintenance.
She chose the place on purpose. If the beginning had happened there, then any verdict had a right to visit the site. The fairgrounds in daylight and silence looked smaller than memory.
Without crowds and lights, the buildings were just metal sheds, concrete walkways, and faded paint. A maintenance worker drove past in a utility cart and paid them no attention. David stood beside the closed exhibition hall where he had first met Nia and looked as if he expected sentencing.
Linda did not waste time.
“I needed to see whether being here changed anything in me,” she said. “Whether I still felt like all our years got replaced by one ugly fairground week.” David listened without interrupting. She told him she no longer believed in the marriage they had before, because that marriage had depended on a version of him who thought concealment could coexist with commitment. “If anything survives,” she said, “it has to be something built after the truth, not before it.”
He nodded slowly. “I know.”