After My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Me

The HR office smelled like burnt coffee and printer toner. Gray light came through the slats of a half-broken blind. The woman across from me—Megan from People Ops, name tag crooked—kept her eyes on the folder, not on me.

"Alison, your role has been eliminated effective today."

She said it the way you'd read a weather report. I nodded. I think I even smiled, the small polite smile I always use when I don't know what else to do with my face. Eight years at marketing desks in this city, and it ended in nine minutes. They gave me a paper bag for the things in my drawer. A planner. A mug. A pen Keith gave me for my birthday three years ago, back when he still gave me things.

Outside, November was throwing a fine, mean rain. Not the kind that drenches you. The kind that gets inside your collar one drop at a time.

I looked at the subway entrance. I looked at my MetroCard. Then I started walking.

Twenty blocks. I told myself it was about the money. It wasn't really. I just couldn't stand the idea of being underground with other people's faces. The rain stuck my hair to my neck. My shoes started making a soft squelching sound. By Twenty-Third Street I was rehearsing.

*Keith, something happened today.*

*Keith, I have news. It's okay, we're okay.*

*Keith, they let me go.*

None of them sounded right.

When I pushed open our apartment door, he was on the couch, laptop on his knees, in the navy sweater I'd bought him last Christmas. He looked up. The first thing his eyes did—I won't forget it—was flinch. A small twitch at the corner. Then he caught it and smoothed it back.

"You're soaked."

"I got laid off."

He didn't move toward me. He set the laptop aside, slowly, and rubbed the back of his neck. "Today?"

"This morning."

A long breath through his nose. "That's—" He paused, choosing. "The timing is bad."

"For me."

"For—you know what I mean. The guys at the office. I just got in there. I was going to bring you to the holiday thing." He gave a thin, embarrassed laugh, like I had spilled something on his shirt. "It's a bad look, that's all I'm saying. Don't make a face. I'm not—I'm just being honest."

I stood there, dripping onto the rug we picked out together at a flea market on Twentieth Street. I waited for him to ask if I was okay. He asked if I'd taken off my coat.

I took off my coat.

---

Thanksgiving came two weeks later, and Dad set the table for four.

Four. Him, me, Keith, and the empty chair where my mother used to sit, which he never moved and never explained. He'd made the brown-sugar glazed ham Keith liked. He'd ironed a napkin. The little porcelain turkey from my childhood was on the sideboard, slightly chipped on the tail.

Dad's apartment in Murray Hill always smelled like cloves and strong black tea this time of year. He was thinner than last Thanksgiving. I noticed and said nothing, the way he noticed things and said nothing. We sat. We waited.

At 6:47 my phone buzzed.

*Networking obligations came up. Can't get out of it. Tell your dad sorry.*

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, slower, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder.

"He's not coming," I said.

Dad didn't look up. He picked up the teapot and refilled my cup, even though it was still half full. The amber stream hit the porcelain with a small, clean sound. He set the pot back down. He passed me the bread.

"Eat, sweetheart."

That was all. No questions. No raised eyebrow. Just bread, and tea, and that empty chair across from me with a folded napkin and a fork that wouldn't be used. I cut my ham into smaller and smaller pieces. Something in my chest went the temperature of the rain on Twenty-Third Street and stayed there.

---

The boutique consulting firm hired me in early December. Commission-only. A title that began with the word *Associate* and ended with the word *Sales*, with nothing comforting in between. The office was on the seventh floor of a building near Bryant Park, and my desk was a half-partition someone had clearly dragged in from a different floor.

Diana Chen took one look at me on my first morning, set down a coffee she had not been asked to bring, and said, "You're overqualified, you know that."

"I know."

"Then we agree. Sit down." She pulled out the chair for me. Black bob, red lipstick, a stare that didn't waste itself. "It's a grind here. But the floor's clean and nobody lies to your face. That's more than most places."

I laughed. It surprised me, that I still could.

That night I brought home the box of cards. Crisp white. My name in a font I hadn't picked. Keith was at the kitchen counter eating leftover pasta out of the pot. He set down his fork, took a card, read it.

His mouth moved. A short, dismissive sound—half laugh, half exhale through the nose.

He set the card back on the box. He did not look at me. He picked up his fork again.

I stood in our doorway with my coat still on and counted the cards in the box without meaning to. Two hundred and fifty. I thought, *I am going to use every single one of these.* It was not a noble thought. It was the first thought in a long time that felt like mine.

---

Midnight, a Tuesday. I couldn't sleep.

I got up without waking him—he never woke for me anymore anyway—and went to the living room. The futon. The one we bought eight years ago at an IKEA in Red Hook, the one I'd slept on alone the week he moved in because we couldn't afford a real bed yet. I sat down on it with my mug of black tea, the way Dad makes it, two bags, no sugar.

That's when I saw it. The frame at the front-right corner had split. A clean fissure in the cheap pine, hairline-thin, running about four inches down. I'd been hearing the creak for months and ignoring it. Telling myself it was fine. Telling myself it would hold.

I ran my finger along the crack. The wood gave, just slightly, under my touch.

I sat with that for a long time.

---

It was after New Year's that he started saying her name.

First it was casual. "There's a new girl in the office, transferred in from D.C. Sharp." Then, a week later, with something almost shy in his voice: "Maya said the funniest thing in the meeting today." Then: "Maya thinks—" "Maya and I—" "Maya was telling me—"

And then, nothing. The name vanished out of his sentences the way a magician vanishes a coin. Smooth. Practiced. *Gone.*

The silence rang louder than any of the mentions had.

He started coming home at ten, then eleven. He bought a new cologne—something darker, with smoke in it—that he kept on his side of the bathroom shelf and never mentioned. He stopped reaching for my hand on the couch. He stopped reaching, period.

The Marshalls used to call every Sunday. Gerald especially, full of warm praise that I now understood had always been a kind of receipt. The calls thinned. Then stretched to every other Sunday. Then a Sunday came and went and the phone didn't ring at all, and when I mentioned it lightly, Keith said, "They're busy," without looking up.

I made my tea that night and sat on the cracked futon and did not drink it. The steam rose. The corner of the frame ticked, very softly, under my weight.

I didn't have a name yet for the thing settling in my chest.

But it was settling.