A Stranger Entered Our Bedroom Every Night Until I Learned Why
Because you had just lost your job, she said. Because watching your mother go through cancer nearly broke you, and hospitals close something in you that takes weeks to reopen. Because you were taking sleeping pills just to get from one day to the next. Because every time I thought about telling you, I looked at your face and thought I was about to put one more impossible thing on top of a man who was already holding more than he should have to hold.
She stopped and looked away.
And because I kept thinking I would tell you tomorrow, she said. And then tomorrow came and I thought the same thing again.
Tomorrow. The same word I had heard through the half-open door that afternoon, in the sentence I had turned into proof of the thing I feared. Tonight then. After he’s asleep.
A medical infusion scheduled for after her husband took his sleeping pill, in the middle of the night, so he would not wake and so their daughter would not see the needles. That was what she had been arranging. That was the secret.
I told her I had believed she was having an affair.
