The wife I forgot to love

Helena shook her hand.

That was the thing she would think about later. Lying in the dark. Replaying it. Of all the things she could have done in that moment, she shook Camila Calloway's hand like they were meeting at a networking event and everything was perfectly fine.

"Helena." She said her own name back like a confirmation. Kept her voice even. Kept her face even. Kept everything even. "Nice to meet you."

Camila's hand was warm. Firm handshake. The kind that said she'd introduced herself to a lot of important people and knew exactly how to do it. She held the shake one second longer than necessary and then let go.

"I've been hoping we'd run into each other," Camila said. "Damian talks about you."

Helena looked at her husband.

Damian had stood up from the table. He was doing that thing where his face was very still and very careful, which on another day she might have mistaken for calm. She knew better now. That stillness was him calculating. Figuring out what this moment needed from him.

"Small city," Helena said pleasantly.

"Isn't it?" Camila smiled. Perfectly warm. Perfectly at ease. She gestured at the table behind her. "We were just finishing up. Would you and your friend like to join us? There's room."

The audacity of it landed somewhere in Helena's chest and just sat there.

"We couldn't impose," Helena said.

"Not at all, we..."

"Helena." Damian's voice was quiet. Direct. Cutting through Camila's sentence in a way that made Camila glance at him briefly. "I didn't know you were going to be downtown today."

"Last-minute thing." She smiled at him. The same smile she'd given him last night in the kitchen. The one that looked exactly like a real one. "Don't let me interrupt. I was just leaving."

"Helena..."

"It was lovely to meet you, Camila." She turned back to the woman beside her husband and looked at her clearly and steadily for exactly two seconds. "Enjoy your lunch."

Then she walked out.

The door swung shut behind her. The afternoon air hit her face and she kept walking, one foot then the other, down the sidewalk away from the restaurant until she reached the corner and stopped.

Her hands were shaking.

She looked at them like they belonged to someone else. Steady all morning. Steady through the photo and the bedroom and Cassidy's coffee and the bread basket and three tables away and Damian's hand on Camila's hand.

Shaking now. At a street corner two blocks from a restaurant because she'd just shaken the hand of the woman her husband was going to leave her for and said nice to meet you.

Her phone buzzed.

Cassidy. I'm right behind you. Don't move.

Thirty seconds later Cassidy came around the corner at a pace that was almost running and wasn't quite. She stopped in front of Helena and looked at her face and didn't say anything for a moment.

Then she said. "You shook her hand."

"I know."

"You said nice to meet you."

"Cassidy."

"I'm not judging you I'm just..." She exhaled. Looked up at the sky briefly. Looked back. "Are you okay?"

"No," Helena said simply. The way you say a true thing when you're too tired to dress it up. "I'm really not."

Cassidy put both arms around her right there on the corner and Helena stood inside that and breathed and did not cry. She was very deliberate about not crying. Not here. Not yet.

"I saw his face," Helena said into Cassidy's shoulder. "When he saw me walk in. He wasn't guilty, Cass. He was scared. There's a difference."

Cassidy was quiet.

"Guilty means he knows he's doing something wrong." Helena pulled back. Looked at her sister. "Scared means he's not ready to deal with it yet. He hasn't decided anything yet. But he's thinking about it." She stopped. "He's been thinking about it for weeks."

"You don't know that."

"I know my husband."

Cassidy looked at her for a long moment. "What do you want to do?"

Helena thought about the rosemary chicken. About learning to make it without lemon because he'd mentioned once, casually, the way he mentioned most things, that the lemon was too sharp. She thought about looking up when his key hit the door. About the pause before I'm happy. About two years of a marriage she had believed in it completely.

"I want to go home," she said. "And I want you to find out everything."

-

She was twenty-two when she met Damian Graves.

She hadn't been looking for anyone. She'd been in her third year at Velmont University with a double major that was eating her alive and a part-time job at a coffee shop on Mercer Street and absolutely no time or interest in anything that wasn't directly related to surviving the semester.

He'd come in on a Tuesday. Ordered black coffee. Sat at the corner table with his laptop and worked for three hours without looking up.

He came back on Wednesday. Same order. Same table.

Thursday he looked up when she set his coffee down and said. "You remembered."

She'd made it before he ordered. She hadn't realized she'd done it until he said something.

"You come in at the same time every day and order the same thing," she said. "It's not complicated."

He looked at her for a moment. "Most people don't notice."

"I notice everything," she said. And went back to the counter.

He left a note with the tip on Thursday. Just a number. No name.

She thought about not texting it. She thought about it for four days and then texted it because she was twenty-two and he had kind eyes and she had learned very early in her life that the things you didn't do had a way of sitting with you longer than the things you did.

They dated for a year before he told her he loved her. He wasn't someone who said things before he meant them. That was the thing she'd loved most. The certainty of everything he said was because he only said things he was sure of.

She'd believed that certainty completely.

She'd built a marriage on it.

Helena was standing in her kitchen making dinner again when she heard the front door. She looked up automatically. She always looked up.

Damian walked in and stopped when he saw her face.

Not what she was showing him. What was underneath it? He'd always been able to do that. See the thing she was holding just below the surface. It was one of the things she'd loved about him once and it felt unbearable now.

"Helena." He set his bag down slowly.

"Dinner's almost ready." She turned back to the stove.

"We should talk about today."

"There's nothing to talk about." She kept her voice light. Kept the spoon moving. "I met a colleague of yours. It was fine."

"She's not a colleague."

The spoon stopped.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Helena put the spoon down carefully. Turned around. Looked at her husband standing in his coat by the kitchen door with his bag at his feet and his face doing that careful still thing.

"Then what is she," Helena said.

Damian looked at her.

He opened his mouth.

And then his phone rang.

They both looked at it. At the screen lighting up in his coat pocket. At the name on it that Helena couldn't see from here but that Damian's eyes went to with an expression she felt like a physical thing.

He looked back at her.

"Don't," Helena said quietly.

He reached into his pocket.

"Damian." Her voice was very still. "Do not answer that phone."

He looked at her for one long moment.

Then he silenced it and put it back in his pocket.

"She's someone I knew before," he said. "Before us. We've been... reconnecting. I should have told you."

Helena looked at her husband. At the careful words. At the eyes that were present now in the way they hadn't been in weeks. At the word reconnecting sitting between them doing a very specific kind of work.

"Reconnecting," she said.

"It's not-"

"Damian." She picked the spoon back up. Turned back to the stove because she did not want to look at him right now. "Go wash up. Dinner is in ten minutes."

"Helena we need to...."

"Ten minutes," she said.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then she heard him pick up his bag. Heard his footsteps move toward the stairs.

She stood at the stove and stirred something that didn't need stirring and thought about a girl of twenty-two who noticed a man's coffee order and texted a number after four days because she'd learned that the things you didn't do sat with you longer.

She thought about what she was doing right now.

And she thought about what she was going to have to do next.

Her phone was on the counter beside her. She picked it up and typed a message to Cassidy.

He almost told me tonight. He got a phone call and stopped.

Cassidy's reply came in thirty seconds.

Who called him?

Helena looked at the message. Then she typed back three letters that she already knew the answer to.

Who do you think?

She put the phone face down on the counter.

Upstairs she could hear Damian moving around. The sound of the shower turning on. The ordinary sounds of a husband ending his day while his wife stood downstairs holding a story together that was already starting to come apart at the edges.

The water ran.

The kitchen filled with the smell of food she'd made with her hands for a man who had someone calling his phone at dinner time.

And Helena stood in the middle of it and made a decision so quiet she barely heard it herself.

She was not going to fall apart.

Not yet.

Not until she knew everything.

And then God help them both.