My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 03

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 03 — Ridgefield
I didn’t sleep. I made a spreadsheet.

That’s what I do. Somebody else grabs a bottle; I open Excel. By four a.m. I had color-coded columns and my hands had stopped shaking, because numbers don’t lie to you and they don’t apologize either.

Here is what five years of my marriage looked like in a spreadsheet:

A mortgage, $2,140 a month, paid from an account I’d never seen but which was funded by transfers from our savings, labeled “Q3 tax hold.”

A daycare in Ridgefield: $1,300 a month, labeled “parking.”

A pediatric dental office. A children’s shoe store. A birthing center — dated three years ago in March.

A jeweler, four years ago, $4,800.

I sat with that one a long time. Four years ago I got a bracelet for our anniversary. A nice bracelet. Two hundred dollars, maybe.

And the thing that finally made me put my head down on the table: a recurring monthly $700 to St. Anne’s Fertility Associates. Mine. My treatments. He paid for my hormone shots out of the same account he was paying her mortgage from. He drove me to those appointments. He held my hand in the parking garage after the third one and cried into my hair and said we’ll be okay, Nor, we’ll be okay.

Nine days after his daughter was born.

At six a.m. I showered. I put on jeans and my nicest sweater, which is insane, but I did it. I put on mascara like I was going to a job interview.

Grant texted at 7:12. Morning, gorgeous. Halvorsen people want another dinner tonight, might be late. Love you.

I typed back: Love you too. Drive safe.

Then I got in my car and drove ninety minutes to Ridgefield.

It’s a nice town. That’s what got me. It’s the town we always said we’d move to “someday” — walkable, good schools, a little farmers’ market on the square. He’d sent me a Zillow link once, years ago, for a blue house with a porch. Someday, Nor.

The address from the mortgage statement put me on Winslow Street, third house from the corner.

Blue. Porch.

There was a plastic tricycle tipped over on the front walk. A ceramic frog by the steps. A wind chime made of spoons — the exact kind Mara used to make in our old apartment, the kind she gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday that I still had hanging in my kitchen.

And on the mailbox, in stick-on gold letters:

THE WHITAKERS

I sat in my car for twenty-two minutes. I know because I watched the clock.

I thought about turning around. I want that on the record. There was a whole quiet minute where I thought: you could drive home, delete the spreadsheet, take a Xanax, and keep your husband. Plenty of women do it. You’d get the Christmases and the house and the man who still puts his hand on your lower back when you walk through a crowd.

Then the front door opened.

A little girl came out first, in pajamas with strawberries on them, dragging a stuffed rabbit by the ear. She had dark curls. She had his eyebrows.

And behind her, in a robe, coffee in one hand, calling something over her shoulder into the house — Mara.

Older. Softer. Tired around the eyes in a way that was not unhappy.

She looked out at the street the way you do when you’re checking the weather, and she saw my car.

She saw me.

Her coffee cup hit the porch and shattered.

I got out. My legs did it without me. She grabbed the little girl and pushed her back through the door and shut it, and then she came down the steps in bare feet in November, and she stopped six feet away from me like she was scared I’d hit her.

Honestly, I might have.

“Nora,” she said.

And then, with total, absolute, blood-draining horror on her face, she said:

“He told me you knew.”