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That matters to me, that I gave him the chance. On a Saturday morning in February, I made coffee the way he liked it and sat across from him at the kitchen table and said, very quietly, tell me about Patrice.
The color left his face so fast, it was almost clinical to watch. His hands wrapped around his mug went completely still.
And then, and this is the part that broke something in me that has not fully healed, his eyes cut sideways, not toward me, toward his phone on the counter, like his first instinct was to call his mother.
Derek, I said, look at me. He did, and he told me. It had been 7 months.
They had met through a work event. He hadn’t planned it. Nobody ever plans it.
That’s always the first lie they reach for. He said he was sorry. He said he had been unhappy.
He said he didn’t know how to talk to me anymore. He said Gloria had been telling him for years that we were mismatched and maybe she’d been right and I held up one hand.
Stop. He stopped. Don’t bring your mother into the explanation of your own choices, I said.
That’s the most disrespectful thing you could do to both of us right now. He had the decency to look ashamed.
We sat in that kitchen for 2 hours. It was not explosive. It was not a movie scene.
It was two people dismantling 6 years of a life across a kitchen table over coffee in a home that I owned.
I cried once, briefly, silently, looking out the window. He cried more than once. I handed him a tissue because that’s who I am, even then.