He had met Nia at the state fair two years earlier when his company sponsored an agricultural-equipment display.
The booth was half sales event, half networking spectacle, and Nia was hired through a staffing agency to manage a hospitality tent, greet visitors, and help with evening vendor functions. David had gone without Linda that year because she was in Springfield caring for her mother after knee replacement surgery. They had been under strain for months before that, he said. Linda cut him off immediately. “Do not you dare use my mother’s surgery as the preface to your erection.” He apologized, which in that moment meant nothing.
Still, facts accumulated.
David and Linda had indeed been going through a rough stretch that year. They had fought about money after David invested in a friend’s doomed landscaping business without telling her. They had fought about his hours, about her resentment over being the one who remembered every family obligation, about whether the two of them were ever actually going to grieve the quiet death of their hope for children instead of simply pretending the topic had faded.
They had not, however, been separated. They had been married, sleeping in the same bed, sharing the same house, and carrying on all the ordinary rituals of a still-intact marriage while slightly bruised by adulthood. David had simply wanted the relief of being seen as newly available by a woman who did not know any of his history.
The affair began on the third night of the state fair.
There had been a vendor barbecue, too much beer, and the peculiar false intimacy temporary event work can create when adults are tired, flattered, and outside their regular routines. David told Nia that he and his wife were “all but done.” He said they were only waiting until after some financial loose ends and family obligations settled. He said things that had just enough texture from real marital frustrations to sound believable, because the most effective lies are built out of selected truths.
Nia had been newly divorced, financially stretched, and lonelier than she liked admitting. One bad decision became several. By the end of the fair they had exchanged numbers.
Afterward, David told himself it was over.