Chapter 2: The Only Thing That’s Mine
I didn’t knock on that bathroom door. I should have. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since. But at two in the morning, with my heart going like a bad compressor, I was more afraid of what I’d find than of not knowing.
So I waited until Saturday, when Lily was at a sleepover, and I told Jenna what I’d heard.
She didn’t deny it this time. She sat down at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands.
“It was Tyler,” she said. “Okay? It was him. He was going through something with his ex and he called me, and I talked to him. That’s all. I knew how it would look, so I lied. I’m sorry.”
“You were laughing.”
“Because he was trying to make himself feel better. Dan, nothing happened. I swear on Lily. Nothing physical ever happened.”
I noticed the word physical. I noticed it the way you notice a smell of gas. But she was crying, real crying, and she reached across the table and took my hand with both of hers, and she said the thing I’d wanted to hear for two years.
“I want us back. I want to fix this. I’ll do anything.”
So we tried.
We found a marriage counselor named Dr. Ruiz, who had an office over a dentist in Clintonville and a box of tissues on every flat surface. Jenna cried in the first session. I didn’t. Dr. Ruiz asked me what I needed to feel safe again, and I said it plainly.
“I need her to stop going to that gym.”
Jenna turned to me like I’d slapped her.
“No,” she said.
“There are nine gyms within five miles of our house.”
“It’s not about the building.” She was talking to Dr. Ruiz now, not to me. “It’s the only thing in my life that’s mine. After my mom, I was drowning. That place saved me. My friends are there. My routine is there. Why should I lose the one thing that’s working because he doesn’t trust me?”
“Because you lied to me,” I said. “In the middle of the night. In our bathroom.”
Dr. Ruiz asked Jenna gently, “Can you see why continuing to see Tyler would make repair very difficult for Daniel?”
“I won’t see Tyler,” Jenna said. “I’ll switch to the five a.m. class. He doesn’t teach it. I’ll unfollow him. I’ll block him. I’ll show Dan my phone whenever he wants. But I’m not quitting my gym.”
My brother Chris put it better than I could, a week later, over a beer on his back porch.
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “She wants to save the marriage. But she wants to keep going to the place where the guy is. Every morning. In the green pants.”
“She switched classes.”
“Danny. Can you want to fix your house and keep the gas leak?”
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t think there’s a good one. But I’d made a choice, and the choice was to forgive her once. I told her that in the car after our fourth session. Once, I said. I’m doing this one time. She held my hand across the console the whole way home.
For six weeks, it almost worked.
She showed me her phone without being asked. Tyler was blocked. She came home from the five a.m. class sweaty and talkative and made pancakes for Lily on Sundays like she used to. I started to think maybe paranoid had been the right word after all.
Then on a Tuesday night, Lily wanted to show me a video of a dog that could skateboard, and she pulled it up on Instagram on my phone, because her own account was private and limited and she hated that.
“Dad, scroll,” she said. “It’s after the gym thing.”
The gym thing was a post from Iron Peak Fitness. A group photo, twenty sweaty people in front of the logo wall, posted that morning. Our 6AM crew crushed it today! Jenna was in the front row in her teal jacket. Tyler was right behind her. His hand rested on her waist.
The six a.m. crew. Not five.
I didn’t say anything. Lily was laughing at the dog. But my thumb moved on its own and tapped the little heart under the photo, the list of who’d liked it.
Forty-one likes. I scrolled. Tasha. A couple of names I knew from Jenna’s stories.
And one I didn’t.
jen.strong.again
The profile picture was a close-up of a woman’s hand on a barbell. A woman’s hand with a thin gold ring on the wrong finger. The ring I gave Jenna for our tenth anniversary. She’d told me in March she lost it.
