piece together what was happening to him.
“Is it true? Say something, Jamie! Talk to me! Are you cheating on me? When I asked you this morning, I was only mildly concerned. Now, I'm scared to death. Is there someone else?”
Jamie sighed. “No, there's no one else. Just you.”
“So you haven't talked to this woman? You don't have her phone number? What is your connection to her?”
Jamie stuttered and stammered, knowing how everything was going to look.
“She's an old girlfriend. I haven't seen her since high school.”
“But you've seen her recently.”
“I just saw her today for the first time in years. I haven't slept with her.”
“You can be unfaithful without sex.” Amy seethed. “I need to know the whole story here!”
“I will come home so we can talk about this.”
“You can talk to me now!”
“I think it's better if we do this in person. It’s not what you think.”
“Don't you dare come home!” Amy broke down in tears, although she had vowed not to. “I don't want to see your face right now!”
“Amy...”
“I can either pack mine and Peter's things or you can pack yours. The choice is yours.”
“Babe, please...”
Amy hung up on him.
She collapsed in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor, sobbing so hard her breath came in ragged hitches. This wasn't supposed to happen to her.
What nobody bothered to tell Amy was that, in every war, collateral damage was inevitable.
Those tears flowed even harder a few moments later when a photo popped up in her text folder from a number she didn't recognize. Amy shrieked when she saw a time-stamped picture of Jamie taken at lunch earlier in the day. She didn't have to read the waitress' name tag to know that the raven-haired beauty was Karen. Karen's hand was on top of Jamie's, and she wore a smile reminiscent of any man-eating predator.
It was a look of hunger.
Chapter 7
I didn't get much work done when I got back to the office. I kept looking at Karen's phone number on that receipt and letting my mind wander off in labyrinthine directions. A couple of times I picked up my cell and thought about how the conversation might go if I were to call her. I imagined her voice, thought about the way she had looked at me in the restaurant, and tried to remember the last time Amy had looked at me that way. I was tempted, and no matter how much I tried not to think about her, my mind was like a boomerang, eventually circling back to Karen and her thinly veiled offer.
Your wife never has to know.
I told myself I had some very important choices to make, and I wasn‘t sure what to do. There should have been no choice to make. I should have been doing whatever it took to mend the schism between me and Amy, but somewhere in my perception of the future, the road before me had forked. No longer was there only one path to choose. Now, there were two.
I drove toward the address on that receipt, mulling over my options. I would just cruise past and see where she lived. I wasn’t going to stop. That wasn’t the kind of man I was- I was merely curious. She and I had history, and it was logical that I was interested in the life she had carved out for herself.
Of course, it was an excuse. I was looking for a reason to go over there and see Karen. Since running into her again at the restaurant, I hadn’t been able to get her out of my head.
I guess there was a part of me that wondered what might have happened if Karen hadn’t moved away. I never really stopped caring about her. Sure, over time the love had faded to little more than a series of fond memories that I replayed in my mind every now and again, but we never went through the nasty breakup that tears so many couples apart. We ended on a sad note, but the feelings had never truly gone away. This was a door of opportunity, a gateway to the past that could change everything. I merely had to decide if I was going to walk through that door or let it slam in my face.
I think there was a part of me that didn’t really believe anything would happen. I had never been unfaithful to Amy, and I didn’t really believe I’d allow myself to cross that line. The other part of me