my eyes wide open. I saw the good in Isabel underneath her illness, and I desperately wanted to help her. When things were great, and when the full sunlight of her being shined on you, there was nothing like it. She was a magnetic, beautiful soul, and I was in love with that part of her. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I thought that if she had a stable husband by her side, a husband who could help her properly manage her mental health issues, everything would be okay.
But things were not okay. After Chloe was born, the hormones really messed with Isabel, and she struggled with horrendous postpartum depression. She started hating me and blaming me for all her problems, and we stopped sleeping together. (I mean in the same bedroom, because we hadn’t been physically intimate since before she took off for Maui.) She only wanted the baby in the bedroom with her. And the nanny. It was an unusual arrangement, to say the least.
One day she woke up and it was as if nothing had happened. I moved back into the bedroom, the nanny and Chloe went into their own room. Isabel was a loving wife for the first time in over a year. She went back to work, and we went back to being the social couple about town. I could focus a little more on my work again, and Wu Microsystems went through another terrific growth phase. Isabel became pregnant with Delphine, and I thought the worst was behind us.
Then suddenly, things turned on a dime again. This time it was less dramatic—there was no sudden whirlwind romance with a mysterious stranger, no fleeing to Istanbul or the Isle of Skye. Instead, Isabel’s new behavior turned out to be more insidious and destructive. She claimed she was having secret affairs with married men. Three of them at her law firm—as you can imagine it made for insane office politics. She was also involved with a high-profile judge, whose wife found out about the affair and threatened to go public with everything. I will spare you the rest of this story, but by this point, Isabel and I were for all intents and purposes living totally separate lives. I was at the flat in the Mid-Levels, and she was at the house on The Peak with our daughters.
When you came back into my life, I realized two things: First, that I never stopped loving you. You were my first love, and I have loved you since the day I met you at Fort Canning Church when we were fifteen. And second, I also realized that, unlike me, you had moved on. I saw how much you loved Michael, and how you wouldn’t give up on your marriage. I knew that I had been unfair to Isabel from the start—since I wasn’t truly over you, I had never given all of myself to her. But I was determined to change things. I was ready to let go of you at last, and that would be the key to saving my marriage, to saving Isabel. I wanted to be able to love her free and clear, and to love my daughters as much as you love Cassian.
And so I redoubled my efforts, and you became my de facto marriage counselor. All those e-mails we’ve exchanged over the past two years were a beacon in the night for me as I tried to rebuild my marriage. But as you can clearly see, nothing has worked. The mistakes are all mine. Isabel and I might finally be heading to the bottom of the ocean once and for all, but it has been a long time coming.
This is my rambling way of trying to explain to you that you should not feel a single ounce of regret about what happened between you and Isabel in Venice. And more important, I want you to know the real story, because I can no longer live with any dishonesty between us. I hope that you’ll be able to forgive me for not being truthful with you from the start. You are one of the few bright spots in my otherwise fucked-up life, and now more than ever, I count on our friendship.
With all my heart,
Charlie
Charlie sat in front of his computer, reading over his e-mail again and again. It was almost 7:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. It would be high noon in Venice. Astrid would probably be having lunch poolside at