grand finale a door slamming shut followed by muffled screams that can be heard from her pillow.
It wasn’t always like this. When they’d been a family, when Jessica’s father was around, Daff doesn’t remember any conflict with Jessica. Jess would certainly never have dared speak to Daff the way she does now, would have been far too frightened of what her father would say when he walked in the front door and Daff told him what had happened.
It has been just over a year since Jessica’s father left. A couple of months before that, Daff had come to realize that the colleague at work Richard had become such good friends with was more than a friend. But when she’d told him what she knew, Richard had denied that anything physical had happened; he’d admitted to having feelings but said that she—Nancy, the other woman— had a husband, a family, that although he thought she was attractive, that didn’t mean anything, and nothing would ever happen.
Daff had believed for a while because she had wanted to believe. Because the prospect of life on her own had been terrifying; surely the devil she knew was better than venturing out on her own.
She had found out about Richard and his colleague in the worst way possible. She had been running errands near Richard’s office one day at lunchtime and had phoned him, wanting to surprise him. “I can’t leave,” he had said. “We have a huge deal coming up and I’m swamped. I’m sorry, darling, but maybe tonight we can go out for dinner.”
So she hadn’t bothered going to his office, but she had been in the neighborhood and had walked past a restaurant, glancing in the window to check her newly blown-out hair, looking beyond her reflection to see her husband sitting in the corner with a woman, reaching out and stroking the woman’s cheek, with a smile on his face that she had seen before. The smile he used to have when they first met, when he would reach out and stroke her cheek in an identical gesture, one that told her he loved her, would always take care of her.
Daff had frozen. She hadn’t known whether to run in and scream at him, or her, demand to know what was going on, or whether to run away. She had, in the end, walked away. Very quickly. It wasn’t until she reached the corner that she started hyperventilating. Not crying, Daff has never been the type to cry in public, but she was shaking like a leaf, and drove home as if in a coma, unable to believe what she had seen.
During the next few weeks Daff read everything she could about affairs, first about emotional affairs, the reasons why the friendships people form at work can be so dangerous, and then about emotional affairs tipping into real affairs. She knew then that if it hadn’t already happened, it was only a matter of time.
You can heal, her latest book said. With therapy, counseling, honesty, you both can heal and can reach a place where you find happiness again. The trust takes longer, but it is possible to seal the cracks and, on occasion, to build a relationship that is even stronger than prior to the affair.
If that’s the road down which you choose to go.
Richard, it was true, hadn’t planned on having an affair. He had never thought of himself as the type to be unfaithful, he took his wedding vows seriously and, up until he met Nancy, had thought he was entirely happy.
There are those who say that affairs don’t happen without reason, that there is always something wrong in the relationship for either spouse to start looking elsewhere, and there are others who say you are bound to be attracted to other people while you are married, but that you have a choice, and you weigh what you have to lose against what you may gain, and make your choice accordingly.
For Richard it was neither of those things. He married Daff because he loved her, he has never felt there was anything wrong with their relationship, and when it came to Nancy, when the unspoken attraction between them became so strong it was almost overwhelming, he felt there really was no other choice.
Daff has always been his friend, his lover, the first person he calls when anything goes wrong. Or right. Of course the passion had dulled somewhat, but they had been married for sixteen years, so that