Part Eight: What I Said to Him
He came back Saturday evening to collect more of his things. I had asked him to wait until Talia was asleep, which he did, which was one of the few things in the previous week that had been done correctly.
We stood in the kitchen.
The floor had been cleaned of the eggs. The bacon smell was gone. The kitchen was clean and ordinary and looked like the kitchen it had always been, which was strange.
He stood near the counter where he had stood on Saturday morning, and he looked like a man who had been thinking for a week about what to say and had arrived at something that might work.
I waited.
“I was panicking,” he said. “When I found him on the step. I wasn’t thinking clearly—”
“You were thinking clearly,” I said. “You made a decision. You carried him around the side of the house. You considered where to put him. You went back upstairs and waited.” I watched his face. “That’s not panic. That’s a plan.”
He looked at the floor.
“I was afraid of what you would think—”
“What I think,” I said, “is that you have been lying to me for eighteen months. That’s one thing. That’s the infidelity. That breaks things in a specific way and takes a specific kind of time and work to repair, if repair is possible.” I stopped. “But you know what you did on Saturday morning. You know exactly what it required.”
“Izzy—”
“You looked at our daughter’s morning routine,” I said. “You knew she went out with the watering can. You knew the garden. You placed him where you knew she would find him. You went back upstairs and you came down with me and you stood in my kitchen and you said who would do this while you already knew.” My voice was steady. I was surprised by how steady it was. “You made Talia the person who found him. You made her carry that into the house. You made her the one who held him while he was cold.”
He had nothing to say to this.
Because it was simply true, and he knew it was true, and there was no version of it that was a misunderstanding.
“I’m not angry at you,” I said. “I thought I would be. But I’m not. I’m just — done.”
He looked at me.
“There’s a door,” I said. “Take what you need tonight. We’ll arrange the rest through lawyers.”
He opened his mouth once more.
I looked at him with an expression I didn’t have to construct or manage. It was simply what was on my face.
He picked up the bag he had brought.
He left.
