I shift while seated on the bed, just squirming at first, but I know that I have moved slightly away from her, and I know that that’s where I want to be. Part of it is that I can’t be close to her, can’t touch her for sure, and can’t even smell her. Part of it is also that I want to, as our friend Kath says all the time, “get a good look,” like standing back from a painting at a gallery to see the full thing, to get perspective, not to be distracted by details.

She breaks the silence. “John?”

I haven’t worked out any plan about this conversation, not where to start or end, and not the tone of it either. We led an organized middle-class life before this, and the parts in between the regimen just felt natural even though they were often chaotic or unplanned as well. I have no idea, certainly as I am sitting on the bed, our bed, what I brought her here for apart from revealing the truth.

“John, please talk to me.”

“It wasn’t a one-time thing,” I finally say, “and you’ve had se—you’ve, you’ve been in bed with her, so I don’t know what comes next.”

She touches me on the shoulder and I flinch.

“Jesus,” she says, “do you hate me that much now?”

“I don’t hate you, Sadee. For fuck sake, if I did I wouldn’t be trying to—trying to, I don’t know, what I think about this. Trying to tell you, or ask you, what we do now.”

“So just tell me what you think.”

“First is that I don’t care that it was, that it is, a woman. It might have been even worse if it was a man. I guess I was just naïve or oblivious as we were going on living our life, and it never occurred to me, never ever crossed my mind, that it could get taken away, or changed or whatever, like this. You know, it kind of reminds me of Shawn. I just assumed we would always have him.”

She looks over at me until I raise my head and look her way again.

“John, I don’t have much to say to explain any of this. I’ll tell you that I didn’t plan it. I wasn’t unhappy with how we were—with how we are, and so I wasn’t looking for someone or anything like that.”

“Well, at least that’s good to hear,” I say. I laugh awkwardly in spite of myself.

“John, I love you. Isn’t that obvious? You are literally the best man I have ever met.”

I pause at that. I don’t want to be mollified, I want to be told the truth.

“Just tell me about the first time with her. Oh, and what’s her name by the way.”

“Her name is Sharon. Sharon, but she goes by Shar. We were in my office, talking about her, talking about how she needed to improve her marks. I think it was one assignment which was noticeably worse than even the ones before, and she didn’t have a track history of excellent essays. I was talking to her nicely. I mean, I was talking to her normally like I would with any student, factual, to the point, but hopefully with some empathy as well. But she started to cry, and apologize as if she had done something wrong to me, and I just automatically reached out to her, and held her and patted her back as she kept on crying. But it eventually lessened and when I broke away from us holding each other, her eyes were red, and she just fell, or leaned into me, and held me again, and then she kissed me. Kissed me and held it, not just a peck on the cheek or a light kiss on the lips. We were like that for a while, like, for several minutes. And that’s how it all started.”

I sit up, pretty abruptly, when she comes to the end of that story and at the last few details I consciously pull away, moving myself further along the edge of the bed in the opposite direction.

“John,” she says. “I know this must be hard but—”

“So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, to get to the point, I guess, do you feel that you can’t leave her but you can’t leave me either?”

“That’s exactly it.”

We let that, whatever I might want to call it, summary, or conclusion, we both just let that sit there in the air for a while. A few minutes pass and I feel myself untensing and in a moment I feel pretty clear about next steps.

“Listen, Sadee,” I say. “Let’s leave things as they are. If you’re telling the truth about still wanting to be with me, or even if you just mean that you don’t want to upset our life and especially the life of the kids, then let’s leave it like that. Go on, go ahead and continue your—your relationship with Shar, but I don’t want to hear anything about it any more. I’m okay with it. I’m okay overall. I can feel it.”