never told you how I found out the truth,” I admitted. “I was too ashamed of what I saw, which is why I blamed the texts under that fake name. You didn’t need to know I’d seen you getting hammered by a client.”
“You went through my phone to find video of me?” she asked, acting horrified by the thought.
“No, Sheila. Remember when you kept trying to upload lecture files to my laptop? I guess you hadn’t fixed the settings right because it synced up all your media content to my Mac. And there they were. Plenty of videos.”
“And you kept them?” Her tone suggested she was looking for some way to make me the bad guy in this. The perv who jerked off to images of his wife having an affair.
“I kept them because I didn’t have the strength to go back to the files and acknowledge they even existed. I hoped one day I would, but now I have copies, Sheila. And I don’t give a fuck what you do to me as long as you go down with me.”
“Who is this? Who have you become?” She sounded afraid, like she was the victim.
“I don’t know what I’ve become, but I like it a lot more than that pathetic guy who wept at his computer, thinking it was all him, that he was the one who was broken, messed up, fucked up. But it was you all along.”
“I made a mistake, but—”
“You never made any mistakes, Sheila. Just like you didn’t come to me last night because you wanted to let me know you were going to the police. You never were lost. You never were uncertain. But now you are.”
The tears built in her eyes. “Why would you say these things, like I’m this unfeeling, uncaring person? Who calls their wife a monster?”
“Who stays with a man who tells her he can’t decide if she’s a person who makes mistakes or a monster?”
“You need help, James.”
“You’re right. I really do. But in the meantime, keep in mind what I have on you.”
“Don’t be like this.”
Oh, the big dramatic tears. They fell down her face so effortlessly, taking me back to so many times when she’d done this to convince me to stay. Even then I could see why it had been such a compelling performance.
“Oh, Sheila. I’ve missed your lying face so much.” I pushed to my feet.
“James, wait…” She followed me to the door. “Stay a minute and talk. Sit down. I don’t want to leave things like this. We can work something out.”
“No need to work anything out,” I said as I reached the door. Grabbing the handle, I turned back to her. “By the way, you won’t be able to use that app to keep track of where I am anymore. I should have turned it off a long time ago, but I never connected the dots, that that was how you had this almost psychic timing every time I got home. Clearly I underestimated you, but you also underestimated me.”
When we’d first used it, she’d said it was for her own safety, so I’d know where she was if anything ever happened. I’d hardly thought about it all this time, but I’d checked it after her visit, realizing she’d used something to track my location, to find out where I was, and when I returned home that night.
Her eyes were wide, the tears having dried all-too-quickly. She was stunned that, unlike all the other times, I finally knew what I was dealing with.
A master con.
I turned the knob and opened the door. As I started out, I felt her tug on my wrist. I turned back to her. She didn’t move, didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure she knew what she could say now that the jig was up.
“Let go of me, Sheila.”
She took a breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how hard I’d grabbed you.”
“I wasn’t talking about my arm. Goodbye.”
She released me, and for the first time in any fight we’d ever had, she was frozen.
That must have gone about as contrary to what she’d been expecting as possible.
There was this feeling within me that maybe I was wrong, that maybe she would take it to the police anyway, if she was genuinely concerned about doing the right thing, but a brief reflection on our relationship was all I needed to remind myself that wasn’t going to happen.
Because she had never been innocent, or kind, or even decent. I wasn’t blinded any longer