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“A bottle? Not just a glass?”
She made a gurgling noise in her throat as she left the room. I sank back on the couch, frowning as I thought about what she had said. That make-out session had been real, not a drunken fantasy. Shit! If I had known that, I would have done something. Instead, I’d been embarrassed at the lifelike dream and had avoided her for a while.
Faith returned with a brand-new bottle of wine in her hand. She filled her glass and glanced at me, brow hiked. “Do you think I will need it?” She laughed and filled my glass without a word.
She curled herself into the corner of the couch, and I shifted so that I was sitting more sideways, a foot of space between us. “Okay, lay it on me.”
She moved her lips back and forth like she was concentrating hard, then she blew a raspberry with her lips. “Fine, god, I can’t believe I am going to tell you this.”
“Faith, I’m your friend. There is nothing you can say that is going to bother me.”
“We’ll see,” she murmured and shook her head. “Jeremy and I were happy. His new job in the city was hard, and he worked long hours, but after I found a job—a great job—I worked almost as long and as hard as him. We could go a few days without speaking to one other except through a text or email, but we were happy—or so I thought. Then Jeremy started talking about starting a family. It was something that we had discussed, and we wanted kids, but the timing wasn’t right for me. I was working toward a promotion and working longer hours than him. He kept pushing; I kept resisting. I started to see an ugly side of him; the selfish side that I already knew existed, but had tried to ignore, came out with a vengeance. He harped on me about how I wasn’t therefor him, wasn’t home to cookfor him, to listento him, to bend over the couchfor him. Anything you could think of, he would toss in my face.
“He didn’t understand that I needed time to get my career on a more solid footing. He had his career, but he didn’t care about mine. He even suggested that I quit, but that wasn’t happening.”
“I can’t imagine you not working, Faith, especially if you enjoy what you’re doing.”
“Right?” She grew quiet as she sipped from her glass and stared sightlessly across the room. “Then, a few months later, his attitude changed, and Jeremy did a one-eighty. He was happy and encouraged me to pursue my career. We stopped fighting, and he told me that when I was ready, we’d have a child. I was thankful and didn’t think any more about it.”
“What caused the change?”
She laughed. “Oh, we’ll get to that soon.”
“Alright.”
“So we went back to working our asses off, and while he didn’t work the same long hours that I did, he was out almost every night with his work buddies. I didn’t care; I was too tired when I got home after twelve- to fourteen-hour days. Then I finally got the promotion that I’d been working toward for three years. Jeremy was excited for me, and we went away for the weekend to celebrate. I ended up getting pregnant that weekend—by accident—and while I wasn’t sure I was ready for it, Jeremy was thrilled. Our relationship was perfect for a few months, and we were closer than we’d been since we got married. My life was good, and then Luke was born, and within a few months, Jeremy was back to being an absentee husband.
“Now I was working long hours, dealing with a baby and then a toddler, and having no help. Jeremy was around whenhewanted to be, not whenIneeded him. We argued constantly, and we talked about divorce several times too.”
“Why didn’t you divorce him?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. I guess I thought that things would get better, or maybe I was in denial or just didn’t care. I don’t know, Peter. I do know that I was miserable and lonely, and then Luke was three, and Jeremy learned he had cancer. Luke was four when Jeremy died, and he barely knew his father because he was never around. Even when Jeremy was so sick, he would disappear for hours. I didn’t understand it, but Jeremy knew he was dying, and he said there were things in life he needed to do before he died. I accepted that and let it go. While we were living together, we were more like roommates. I took care of him when I was home, but I wasn’t in love with him anymore. Of course, I loved him, but I wasn’tin lovewith him.”
“I understand the difference. What happened when Jeremy died?”
She laughed harshly. “This is where it gets good, Peter. After Jeremy died, I learned what he was doing with his time away from home.”
“What was that?”
“Jeremy was spending time with his other family.”
“His what?”
“His mistress and seven-year-old son.”
I blinked and blinked again. Had I heard Faith correctly? “Jeremy had an affair on you?”
“Oh, yes, for eight years, he had been with this other woman. When she got pregnant with his child, that is when he backed off from pressuring me.”
“Holy shit, Faith. How did you find out? Did she come to the funeral? Did she confront you?”
“She was there, but she melted into the crowd. I didn’t learn about her until I went to the attorney to sign the papers for his will. She was there, and I was bewildered at her presence until the attorney explained that two-thirds of his life insurance policy was to go to Margaret and their son, Tripp. The other third was to go into a college fund for Luke.”
“Wait, Jeremy left you with nothing?”
“Oh, he left me with something, almost two hundred thousand dollars of debt. Jeremy had a lot of medical bills, of course, but he had opened several lines of credit to help support his other family. I got saddled with his debt because I was his wife. But that’s not the worst part.”
“There is worse than that?”
