Her laptop booted up quickly, and the e-mails were easy enough to find. After she’d discovered Jeremy with that poor grad student, he’d written her message after message. Hourly at first, then daily. Then once a week, before he’d finally had to acknowledge she wasn’t going to respond. She wasn’t coming back.
She could have changed her settings to make those messages bounce. She could have switched her personal e-mail address to something he didn’t know. At the very least, she could have left those letters unread. But even if she’d never, ever given him the satisfaction of a reply, she’d had to know.
Why, after so many years?
Why, after she’d offered him everything she had?
Why, when she’d loved him?
Why, when he’d said he loved her?
Even years later, the worst messages—the ones written after his pleading turned to rage—remained pristine in her memory, each word crystalline, their edges razor-sharp.
No man wants to fuck his mother, Tess, come on.
You’re so good at arranging things, but people don’t want to bearranged.
If you’d paid more attention to my feelings, and less to your schedule, I wouldn’t have—
Some people aren’t made for love or marriage. I suppose you can’t help being that way.
At least she was warm. You won’t even return an e-mail after ten years together, you cold bitch.
Some of the most cutting passages stung less now. After encountering Lucas, she no longer doubted her desirability to the right man. And she didn’t know about marriage, but love had come to her easily enough. So easily it frightened her.
The rest of Jeremy’s bile…well.
Somewhere along the way, she’d internalized it as fact. As objective truths offered by a man who no longer needed to spare her feelings.
But Lucas had dismissed Jeremy’s accusations without even knowing their source. Not just tonight, but repeatedly. He’d staunchly defended her ability to read and respond to emotions. He’d said her pragmatism stemmed from love—or fear. Either way, he’d insisted, there was more to her than the perfect administrator, the practical helpmate.
She supposed she could see for herself.
For the first time since that shattering afternoon in a shared bedroom, she read the e-mails from before that day. Messages she and Jeremy had written to one another as they’d dated, moved in together, gotten engaged, and lived as a committed couple. After a minute of thought, she accessed the old texts too.
What she read didn’t exonerate her. Not really.
It also didn’t convict her.
A man in his thirties—then his forties—shouldn’t have begged her to buy socks or schedule haircuts for him. He shouldn’t have committed her to cooking for his students without asking first. He shouldn’t have gotten angry when she needed to stay late at work and couldn’t immediately proofread his article for him.
But if he insisted on doing those things, he then should have understood that she was fuckingtired. Too tired for frequent sex or even flirtation. He should have understood that she was treading water as fast as she could, showing her love as best she could, in the only way that still felt possible for her.
Then, if all else failed, he should have either suggested couples counseling or broken their engagement before he fucked someone else in their bed.
So, yes, at some point, she really had started addressing her fiancé with the exasperated, exhausted fondness of a mother, rather than a lover. She’d focused on the minutiae of their life together, rather than the greater picture of how their interests, their hopes and passions, had diverged. She’d stopped responding enthusiastically to sexual overtures and innuendo, ignoring them whenever possible and tolerating them when necessary.
But she’d only become his makeshift mother because he’d behaved like a child.
And before all that—before they’d moved in together, before the laundry and the toothpaste purchases and the doctor’s appointments, back when he’d been her lover instead of her charge—she’d asked him about his dreams. Taunted him with glimpses of the lingerie she planned to wear that night. Commiserated when none of his students finished the assigned reading, and the tenure committee was demanding yet more documentation, and his journal article didn’t generate the acclaim he’d hoped.
She’d told him she believed in him, and more than that, would love him no matter what.
You are so good to me, he’d written.When I’m with you, I feel like I can do anything, Tess. Like we can do anything as long as we’re together. Thank you for loving me.
All the accusations, all the petty quarrels of their life together, no longer made her cry.
His message of love did.
