After My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Me

The phone woke me at 11:47 PM.

I know the exact time because I looked at it twice — once when I grabbed the phone off the nightstand, and once when I saw it was Murray Hill Urgent Care on the screen and my whole body went cold before I even answered.

Dad had collapsed in his kitchen. A neighbor heard the fall. They were taking him to Mount Sinai.

I was already pulling on my coat over my pajamas when the call ended. Keith was asleep, or at least lying still, facing the wall. I touched his shoulder once.

"My dad's in the ICU. I have to go."

No movement. Just the slow rise and fall of his back.

I called him from the hallway. The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

I called again.

The elevator came. I got in. I called a third time, watching the floors count down, the fluorescent light overhead buzzing like something trapped.

He didn't pick up.

Out on the street, January hit me like a door swung open. Ten degrees, maybe less, the kind of cold that turns the inside of your nose to glass. I raised my hand at a cab and kept calling. By the time one pulled over, I was on call number seven.

Sixth floor. Fifth. Fourth.

Eight. Nine.

The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old vinyl. The driver didn't speak. Outside, Midtown slid past in dark and orange and the occasional lit window of someone else still awake, still waiting for something.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

At some point I stopped counting and just pressed redial in a rhythm. The ring tone. The voicemail greeting. His voice, flat and recorded: *You've reached Keith Marshall. Leave a message.* Over and over, like a door I kept knocking on that nobody was going to answer.

Fourteen times. I stopped at fourteen.

I don't know why that number. I just looked at my call log outside the hospital entrance, saw the column of his name going down the screen, and put the phone in my pocket.

The ICU waiting corridor was under cold fluorescent lights that never changed. No windows. No way to know if it was night or morning except by the clock on the opposite wall, which I stared at until the numbers stopped meaning anything. Around me: a man in a delivery jacket, eyes closed, head tilted back. A woman my age with a baby on her lap who had stopped crying. An older couple who held hands and didn't speak.

I sat in a plastic chair and did not hold anyone's hand.

The doctors came out once, around 3 AM. Stabilized. Critical but stable. Come back in a few hours. I nodded and said thank you and sat back down.

I did not call Keith again.

Somewhere around 5 AM I unlocked my phone to check for updates and the algorithm gave me something I hadn't asked for. A mutual acquaintance's Instagram. A group photo, geo-tagged at an oyster bar on West 44th Street. Timestamped 11:30 PM.

Keith was in the center of the frame. He had on the gray jacket he wore when he wanted to look like he wasn't trying. His head was tilted back, laughing at something, the way he used to laugh at things I said before he stopped finding me funny. His hand was on the neck of a wine bottle, mid-pour, filling the glass of the woman across from him. Candlelight. Oysters on a tray between them. Her face angled toward him, attention undivided.

Maya.

I looked at the timestamp again. 11:30 PM. My father's neighbor heard the fall at 11:42. The ambulance was called at 11:44.

I put the phone face-down on my knee. The clock on the wall said 5:08. Somewhere on the other side of a set of double doors, my father was breathing through tubes.

I sat with it until daylight came.

---

Keith appeared in the corridor at half past ten, wearing the gray jacket from the photo. He had the face he used for difficult meetings — arranged, reasonable, ready to explain.

"I came as soon as I saw your messages. The team dinner ran long, I had my phone on silent for a work thing, I'm sorry, I—"

I looked at him. He kept talking. I watched his mouth move.

Then I looked away, down the corridor, at the door to my father's room.

I went home at two in the afternoon. Keith followed. I put my keys on the counter. I stood in the kitchen in the same coat I'd put on at midnight, and I looked out the window at the street below, and I said it.

"I'm done. We're over. Don't call me."

Three sentences.

There was a pause. Then he laughed — a short, surprised sound, almost amused. "Alison."

"I mean it."

"You've been up all night. You're not—"

"I mean it, Keith."

His voice went harder. "This is insane. I explained. I had my phone on—"

"I know where your phone was."

He stopped.

I still hadn't looked at him. I kept my eyes on the window. A cab turning left. A woman with a stroller. A pigeon on the ledge of the building across the street, hunched against the cold.

He said something else. Then he picked up his keys and left, the door swinging shut behind him with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time after that.

I made tea. Two bags, no sugar. The way my father made it.

From the living room, I heard the futon creak once in the cold. That small, familiar sound — wood shifting, something old giving way along a crack that had been there for months.

I wrapped both hands around the mug.

I didn't call him back.