The wife I forgot to love

Cassidy went silent for exactly one second.

Then she said a word. One word. The kind that came from a place so deep and so furious that Helena had never once heard it leave her sister's mouth in thirty years. It landed in Helena's ear and somehow that single word, more than the phone call and the rooftop photo and the hand across the restaurant table, was the thing that finally made Helena's eyes sting.

"I know," Helena said quietly.

"She went into his phone," Cassidy said. Her voice had gone to that flat, dangerous place. "She went into your husband's phone, found your number and called you. At work. To tell you about their history."

"Yes."

"And she said it like she was doing you a favor."

"Yes."

A long pause. Helena could hear Cassidy breathing on the other end.

"What are you going to do?" Cassidy asked.

"I'm going home," Helena said. "And I'm going to talk to my husband."

"Helena, "

"Not to fall apart. Not to beg." Her voice was very steady. "I'm going to look him in the face and tell him what I know. And then I'm going to let him decide what happens next. Because I am done making decisions based on half the information."

Cassidy was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You want me to come?"

"No," Helena said. "This one I do alone."

She sat in her car outside their house for four minutes before she went in.

She looked at the front door. At the house she had kept for two years. The window boxes she had planted in April because she liked the way they looked when she came home. The small things you did for a life you believed in.

Then she got out of the car.

Damian was in the kitchen when she walked in. Standing at the counter with a glass of water, still in his work clothes, jacket off. He looked up when she came through the door. He looked like a man who had been waiting.

"Helena," he said.

"She called me," Helena said.

She watched his face. Watched something move behind his eyes and then go still. He set the glass down slowly.

"What?" he said.

"Camila. She called me at my office today. She got my number from your phone." Helena set her bag on the chair by the door the way she always did, the way she had done a thousand times. "She told me about your history. About why she left Velmont. About coming back." She looked at him directly. "She was very thorough."

Damian looked at her for a long moment without speaking. That stillness of his. She used to find it solid. Right now it felt like a wall.

"I was going to tell you," he said.

"When?"

He did not answer.

"Damian. When were you going to tell me?"

"I don't know," he said. And it was the most honest thing he had said to her in weeks and somehow that made it worse.

Helena looked at her husband. At the man she had made coffee for and cooked for and looked up for every single time his key hit the door for two years. At the man who had said I'm happy with a pause before it that she had been turning over ever since.

"Do you love her?" she asked.

The kitchen was completely quiet.

Damian closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before and could not fully read. Not guilt. Not denial. Something more tired and more honest than either of those.

"I don't know what I feel," he said.

Helena nodded once. Slowly.

"That's an answer," she said.

"Helena, "

"That is an answer, Damian. I'm not asking you to explain it." She picked up her bag again. Her hands were steady and she was grateful for that. "I'm going to ask you one thing and I need you to say the true thing. Not the careful thing. The true thing."

He looked at her and waited.

"Do you want to stay married to me?"

The question sat between them in the quiet kitchen. The stove was off. The window box outside was dark. Somewhere down the street a car passed and kept going.

Damian looked at his wife. At the face he had come home to for two years. At the woman standing by the door with her bag in her hands and her eyes completely clear and steady, giving him the kind of direct question he had never been able to dodge because she had always known exactly how to ask what she needed to ask.

He opened his mouth.

The silence before his answer was three seconds long.

Three seconds. Helena counted every one.

"I think I need some time," he said. "To figure out what I want. I'm sorry. I know that's not, "

"It's okay," she said.

"Helena, "

"No, Damian. It's okay." She said it simply and completely and meant it in a way that had nothing to do with everything being fine. "I appreciate you telling the truth."

She walked to the stairs. Put her foot on the first step. Then stopped.

"I want you to know something," she said without turning around. "In two years I never once stopped choosing this marriage. Whatever you decide, I need you to know that was never the question for me."

She climbed the stairs and sat on the edge of their bed and looked at the ceiling crack that ran from the light fitting toward the window. The one she had stared at so many nights thinking about nothing in particular.

She sat there for a long time.

Then she picked up her phone and called Cassidy.

"Well?" Cassidy said immediately.

"He needs time," Helena said. "To figure out what he wants."

A pause. Then Cassidy said, very quietly, "Oh, Hels."

"Don't," Helena said. "Not yet. I'm okay."

"Are you?"

Helena looked at the ceiling. At the crack. At the ordinary plaster of an ordinary room in the house she had kept for a man who needed time to decide if he wanted her.

"No," she said. "But I will be." She lay back on the bed. "Come over tomorrow. Bring coffee."

"I'll be there at seven," Cassidy said.

"Eight," Helena said. "Let me have one morning."

"Eight," Cassidy agreed.

Helena ended the call and lay in the dark for a long time.

She did not know what three days meant. She did not know what time looked like when a man was deciding whether to keep his wife. She only knew that somewhere down the hall her husband was lying in the guest room thinking about a woman who had moved back to Velmont four blocks away and Helena was in their bed counting the seconds of a silence that had already told her everything she needed to know.

She was not going to wait for him to decide.

She had already decided for herself.