I was sometimes alone, which is different.
On Sunday mornings, those specific Sunday mornings that had once been the site of a recurring, unexamined absence, I made my own coffee and sat in the terracotta kitchen with the newspaper and Biscuit at my feet, and the absence of Daniel felt increasingly like space rather than loss.
As for Daniel and Rebecca, I learned most of what happened secondhand through Carol and the inescapable information channels of a town the size of Naperville. I did not seek it out, but some things found their way to me anyway. Rebecca’s legal action against Daniel had complicated things significantly. She had made major life decisions based on his assurances that he would eventually leave the marriage. With the LLC findings in the public record of my divorce, her attorney had substantial documentation to work with. The case settled out of court on terms that were, by all accounts, painful for Daniel. His commercial real estate business contracted. Professional relationships built on trust do not survive eleven years of documented financial concealment becoming public record. Two significant clients left. His income, when Tyler mentioned it neutrally one evening, was a fraction of what it had been. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment in a suburb I didn’t know well. He was no longer with Rebecca. Rebecca had sold the house on Fieldstone Drive. Whatever future she had waited eleven years for had not materialized.
I felt something when I considered this.
Not triumph. Not pity, exactly.
Something more like the recognition I had felt reading her attorney’s letter. Deception does not discriminate. It damages everyone in its radius, including, in the end, the person doing the deceiving.
I didn’t think about Daniel much anymore. When I did, it was in the context of the children, Tyler’s schedule, Hannah’s university records. He was their father. That was a permanent fact. I had made my peace with it.
What I thought about on those Sunday mornings with my coffee and my dog in my terracotta kitchen was the woman I was now. She was quieter than before. More certain of herself. Less interested in being managed and more interested in being known. She had a lawyer she trusted, a therapist she saw monthly, a best friend who had talked her through a parking lot in February, a sister who called every Sunday, and children who were, against the odds of the year they’d had, fundamentally okay. She had a small watercolor on a terracotta wall.
She was, I thought carefully, without jinxing it, happy.
