He sighs and looks around our bedroom like he’s never been here before. “I don’t think it’s right for me to stay here anymore with all this going on. I’m going to leave and come back tomorrow to pack some things, and if it’s okay with you, I’ll come back with a truck next weekend for the rest of my stuff. We should probably talk to a lawyer. I promise I’ll take care of you and the kids. You don’t have to worry.” I can tell by the way he’s talking that he’s thought about all of this before. He’s mulled it around in his mind, trying to figure out what to say and what to do, and now he’s just reciting it.
Divorce. He’s divorcing me. And I don’t have to worry. I’m not even getting a chance to win him back . . . He doesn’t even want to try to make our marriage work. I am floored that he can throw eighteen years of marriage away over some girl he barely knows, who is only a few years older than his own daughter.
I shake my reeling head slowly. “Just like that? We’re over? You don’t even want to try to fix this? We could try couples therapy. Lots of people do that. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and they’re very discrete—”
“Ivy, I’ve been sleeping with another woman for a year. How do we fix that?”
The brutality of his words stuns me. I lost a year of my marriage without even knowing it. How did I not know? How did I miss all the signs?
“I thought you loved me.” My voice cracks. “I thought we loved each other.” I realize I sound pathetic, but these are the only words that come out.
“I do love you, but I somehow fell in love with her, too.” He walks slowly to the closet that we share and throws some clothes into his gym bag. “This has been a mess for me, too, Ivy. It’s been destroying me inside to lie to you for so long. I know you don’t deserve it, and I hate hurting you.”
“Then why did you? Why couldn’t you just stay committed to us? Why would you let someone come between us?”
He approaches me with his overstuffed bag in his hand. “I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer, but I don’t. I never wanted to hurt you. Ever. One thing just kept leading to another. You’re right—I should have stopped it. I’m an asshole. I know that.”
“So you want to leave me and the kids? For her?” I demand.
“Not for her. But for now, I think I need to leave. And I’m not leaving the kids. I’m still their father.”
My heart cracks and shatters into a million little isolated memories of our life together, splattering like blood at a brutal crime scene. This will never be able to be cleaned up or put back together again. He’s obliterated it.
His eyes are on me as I fall apart. I know he can’t see it, but all my hopes and dreams of growing old together with the man I love are climbing into that bag with him to be given to someone else.
“Is it because I’m not as thin as I was?” I ask him, my voice shaking. “I can join a gym, buy new clothes—”
“Ivy, God . . . no. You’re beautiful, and I still love you. It’s not that at all.”
I shake my head slowly back and forth as I try to grasp what’s happening to us. “I just don’t understand what I did wrong.”
He takes a few steps closer to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong, I swear to you. I didn’t plan it, and I wasn’t looking for it. Actually, she kinda reminds me of you when we were young. She’s happy and carefree. I like being with her and not having kids screaming and fighting, or on the other side of the wall or blasting video games and music. I’m sorry.”
“You wanted kids, Paul. They make noise.”
“I know that. But come on, Ivy. We had Macy when you were eighteen and I was nineteen. We were way too young to have a baby. We never got to enjoy ourselves or each other. And as soon as she was able to be by herself a little bit and not need one-hundred percent of your attention, Tommy came along. I guess I want to have fun for a little while, while I’m still young.”
“You should leave now.” My voice is dull, lifeless. I refuse to look at him. I’ve had enough. His resentment toward his own family is making me hate him, and I want to inflict some sort of bodily harm on him.