"He wants to hold up the façade of our marriage, you know, still make appearances together in public, but pretty much indicated he was done with me in private." My voice faltered on the last few words, my throat constricting with that painful pinch that was always followed by tears, aching. But I pushed it back. I wouldn't cry any more. "He only wants to be my husband when other people can see us."
Sam was quiet for a few moments more, and then she adjusted in her seat and tilted her head to the side. "Why would any man want to continue a marriage without the benefits of marriage? I mean, let's be real. He's a man. I can understand him wanting to stay in the marriage if you were going to try and fix it and work on the intimacy, or I can understand him cutting his losses and wanting out in order to find that intimacy in other places. But what hot-blooded man chooses to stay in a sexless marriage and wants it to remain that way?"
I didn't look up at her and I didn't say anything, afraid to tell her what I'd seen under his shirt collar. Being a terrible husband, being absent and emotionally unavailable, was bad enough. If I told her what I saw, she'd likely be unstoppable in her rage and find him to take her anger out on him. She would also try to pressure me into leaving him, and I knew I couldn't do that. I also knew she'd never be able to understand why. The mistake I'd made before our marriage had even begun would keep me tethered to him.
I sighed loudly and shook my head. "I couldn't fathom the thoughts running through his mind. Perhaps in a few days I can try to talk to him again. Maybe I just caught him at a bad time."
"Your wedding anniversary was a bad time for him to talk to you?" she asked snidely. I didn't take offense. I knew she wasn't angry with me.
"He's stressed at work," I mumbled.
"Don't make excuses for him, Lena."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize either!"
"What do you want from me?"
"I want you to take a stand! Don't let him walk all over you and don't let him make all the decisions! It's your marriage, too, Lena. It's your life just as much as it is his."
I heard her words, felt them sink into me, and then I felt them fall away. I was conflicted. Before I could stop them, the words were falling out of my mouth. "I think he's cheating on me," I whispered.
Sam didn't blink, didn't breathe. She just looked at me as she formulated her thoughts. "Why do you think that?"
"Last night, when he came home, I saw something inside his shirt near his collar. At first, stupidly, I thought it was a bruise. But I eventually realized it was not a bruise. It was a hickey."
"Did you ask him about it?"
"I tried, but he changed the subject and left."
"Hmm. Suspicious," she said, warily. I nodded. We were both quiet for a few minutes. I replayed the whole evening in my mind, running through each and every thing I could have done differently. But no decisions I'd made or words I could have said differently changed the fact that he'd come home with that mark on him. A mark another woman had put on him.
"Why don't you leave him, honey?" Sam's words were a quiet whisper, as if her voice could have scared me away. She was treading lightly, not wanting me to turn away from the direction the conversation was heading.
"I can't," I whispered, just as quietly.
"Yes," she said, placing her hand over mine. "You can." I shook my head slightly, feeling my hair sway back and forth over my ears.
"No," I whispered again. I tipped my head up to look her in the eyes again. "I can't, Sam. Really. It's complicated."
"How can I help?"
I shrugged. My next words were drowning in tears, choked out on sobs. "I don't know." I don't know. Those three words were the answer to a lot of questions I had running through my mind. Was there any hope left for my marriage? Would I spend the rest of my life tied to a man who didn't want to be with me? Would I feel this lonely forever? Would I go the rest of my life without feeling a man's hands on me again? My head fell into my hands as I tried to cry discreetly in the coffee shop. I heard Sam move and then heard her next to me before I felt her arms come around me. I leaned into her and let the tears come, but stifled the sobs, tried to hold at least those in.
"What are you going to do?" Sam finally asked after I'd calmed down a little.
"Well," I said, wiping my eyes. "I guess I'm going to find out if he's really cheating on me."
"The hickey isn't enough proof for you?"
I shook my head again. "Listen," I started, unsure of how I could explain something to her I'd never explained to anyone. Unsure of how to say the words I'd never uttered to a single soul. "I can't just go on a hunch," I said quietly. "I need actual proof."
"For peace of mind?" she asked.
I nodded. "Sure."
She tilted her head to the side again, her eyebrows narrowing at me. "What's going on, Lena?"
"I'm sorry. I can't go into any more detail than that. All I'm saying is, if anything is going to change, I need actual, physical proof he's cheating. Me spying what I think is a hickey on the inside of his collar isn't going to cut it."
"Well, then," Sam said with resolution in her voice. "We'd better get a rental car, some black turtlenecks and ski masks, and brush up on our stakeout skills."
"What?" I said, half laughing.
Sam had a sneaky smile on her face when she answered me, rubbing her hands together. "We're going to stalk your husband."
Chapter Four
I sat in the passenger seat of a black Toyota Corolla, quietly crunching on Cheetos, my eyes glued to the front doors of my husband's work. Cheetos, in hindsight, might have been a bad snack choice when wearing all black, and I struggled to keep the neon orange cheese powder from making its way into the fibers of my new turtleneck. I heard a giggle and looked over at Sam, sitting in the driver's seat.
"What's so funny?"
She took a bite of the licorice in her hand and waved the red rope between us. "We might be some of the worst stalkers ever."
She wasn't wrong, although, we had gotten most of the basics down. Black car? Check. The cover of night? Check. Black clothes to blend into said cover of night? Check and check. But we also might have indulged and turned our rental car into a snack wagon, using our stakeout as an opportunity and excuse to eat gas station fare, which we never really had a valid reason to buy. But under the guise of our stalker outfits, it seemed fitting to break a few rules, even if they were self-imposed.
It had taken two weeks from our original conversation about my husband's possible affair for me to agree to Sam's crazy idea. At first, although it was tempting to see if we could find out what was going on, I wasn't really ready to know. I went home from our coffee shop date and pushed the idea of his affair out of my mind. I had gone back to plan A. If I tried to be the perfect wife, perhaps he would come around and want to be my husband again.
So I baked and cleaned and was waiting to be the doting wife when he came home from work. Only, sometimes he never came home from work, and most of the time, when he did come home, it was so late that I was either crashed on the couch in the living room, or had long given up and was asleep in our bed upstairs. On top of that, he often left for work before the sun came up and I would wake to a house just as empty as it had been when I'd fallen asleep.
I counted eight days in a row in which I didn't once lay eyes on my husband.
I saw proof of him and his presence around the house: a coffee mug in the sink, wet towels in the laundry room, opened mail on the counter. But I never saw him and I hadn't spoken to him since our anniversary. He wouldn't answer when I called him at work, and I was sent directly to voicemail if I called his cell. After about the first five days of silence from him, I stopped trying to reach him at all.
Finally, I decided to take some sort of action, so I called Sam and told her to greenlight her plan. Three nights later we were sitting in a black rental car, watching the doors to my husband's building, waiting for him to exit so we could follow him. It shouldn't have been fun and it shouldn't have felt like an adventure, but it sort of did. It was impossible not to laugh when trapped in a car with my best friend, especially when she was trying her hardest to keep the mood light, trying to entertain me. I knew what she was doing – trying to keep my mind off the idea that we were, in fact, trying to catch my husband in the act of cheating – and I let her do it. I let her make me laugh so hard I cried. I let her rap along to the radio even though she didn't know all the words and made a horrible rapper. And I let her tell me the horror stories of her most recent travels into the world of dating at twenty-nine.