“You want to spend two weeks alone in a cabin with your ex-boyfriend?”
“When you say it like that…”
“How would you like me to say it?”
She looked down.
“It’s not supposed to be romantic.”
“What is it supposed to be?”
“Closure.”
The word would become one I hated.
Closure.
A word broad enough to contain almost anything if a person needed it to.
“You need fourteen days for closure?”
“We need time to talk without regular life interfering.”
“Regular life.”
I repeated.
“Our marriage?”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“Work.”
“Responsibilities.”
“Phones.”
“Everything.”
“You want to leave our marriage for two weeks so you can figure out how you feel about another man without our marriage getting in the way.”
Laura’s eyes filled.
“That is such an ugly way to put it.”
“It is the literal thing you’re asking.”
“No.”
“I’m trying to deal with unresolved feelings so they stop affecting us.”
“Our marriage wasn’t being affected until you started seeing him.”
Laura looked at me.
“Wasn’t it?”
That question stopped me.
She continued.
“We barely talk anymore.”
“We come home.”
“We eat.”
“We watch something.”
“We sleep.”
“You work.”
“I work.”
“We talk about replacing the deck and whether Murphy needs a dental cleaning.”
“When was the last time we actually talked?”
“We’re talking now.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did.
That was the painful part.
Our marriage had become comfortable.
Maybe too comfortable.
We had stopped dating each other with intention.
Sex had become less frequent.
Not nonexistent.
But predictable.
We had spent two years discussing children without ever deciding whether we truly wanted them or merely assumed marriage was supposed to progress there.
Laura was not inventing every problem.
But there is a difference between noticing cracks in your house and setting fire to the kitchen to see whether you still want to live there.
I sat across from her.
“Do you still love him?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer should have ended everything right then.
Instead, I stayed.
Because eleven years make cowards of people in complicated ways.
You tell yourself uncertainty is honesty.
You tell yourself history deserves patience.
You tell yourself marriage means staying for the hard conversations.
“What happens if you go there and decide you do?”
I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And if you decide you want him instead?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared.
“So I’m supposed to sit here for two weeks while you audition my replacement?”
“That is not what this is.”
“It is exactly what this is.”
She started crying.
I did not comfort her.
That felt cruel.
It also felt impossible.
“I need this.”
She said.
“I didn’t realize how much unresolved stuff I had until he came back.”
“You didn’t have unresolved stuff three months ago.”
“Maybe I did.”
“I just buried it.”
“That is supposed to reassure me?”
“No.”
She wiped her face.
“I need to know.”
“Know what?”
“What I actually want.”
There it was.
Not closure.
Choice.
Laura wanted to compare.
I understood it finally.
Our marriage was no longer a commitment she intended to work on.
It was one option beside another.
We argued for another hour.
I told her if she went, something between us would change permanently.
She said I was threatening her.
I said I was warning her.
She told me I was being insecure.
I told her she was asking for permission to explore an emotional affair.
She said calling it an affair before anything happened was manipulative.
I said something had already happened if she wanted fourteen days alone with him.
Round and round.
Eventually I became exhausted.
Not convinced.
Exhausted.