Chapter 3: I Just Need Time
I couldn’t open the account. jen.strong.again was private, eleven followers, no bio.
But my wife has one blind spot, and it’s technology. She’s brilliant with people and hopeless with passwords. Every device she’s ever owned is still logged into everything, and the oldest one in our house is a cracked-corner iPad we bought when Lily was five. It lives in the kitchen junk drawer under the takeout menus. Jenna uses it for recipes.
I waited until Thursday. Jenna was asleep by ten after a double shift at the dental office. Lily was asleep. I sat down on the living room couch with the lamp off, plugged the iPad in, and opened Instagram.
It was logged into jen.strong.again.
I’d like to tell you I hesitated. I didn’t. I opened the messages.
There was one conversation, with tyler.lifts.ohio, and it was so long the iPad stuttered loading it. I scrolled to the top first, because I needed to know when it started. I needed to know how much of my life had been a stage set.
The first message was from August of last year. Fourteen months ago. Two months before the night her phone lit up on the counter. Two months before she looked me in the eye and said friend.
You were amazing today. I can’t stop thinking about how you looked on that last set.
Stop 😳 I’m married.
I know. That’s the only reason I haven’t kissed you yet.
I read every message. I don’t know how long it took. The lamp across the room clicked off on its timer at midnight and I didn’t get up. The iPad’s glow was the only light in the house.
They met in his truck after class. They met at a park by the river. They met, twice, at his apartment on Mondays, when I take Lily to her piano lesson. She sent him photos of herself in the green leggings in our upstairs hallway. I recognized the carpet. I’d installed the thermostat on the wall behind her.
She wrote about me. Not much, and that almost hurt worse. He’s fine. He’s just boring. He’s a good dad. Once: He asked me to quit the gym, lol. Over my dead body.
The week after our first counseling session, Tyler wrote: How did therapy go?
And my wife answered: He cried in the car. I’ll give it a couple months, make it look real, then I’ll tell him I tried.
I had not cried in the car. I’d held her hand.
Then I got to September, and I stopped breathing for a second.
I’m going to marry you, Jen. I’m serious. I already looked at rings.
And her answer, sent at 1:16 a.m. on a night I’d been asleep a foot away from her:
I want to be your wife. I just need time.
I read it four times. I want to be your wife. My wife wrote that. My wife, whose name is on the deed to this couch, this house, this life.
I just need time.
Time for what? To finish the counseling we were paying for? To let me keep fixing the furnace and coaching Lily’s softball team and making the mortgage while she picked out rings? I thought about all the little reassurances of the past six weeks. The pancakes. The hand-holding. The phone she held out to me so proudly, so empty, because the real one was in my kitchen junk drawer the whole time.
The anger came up slowly, the way water heats. Not loud. Just everywhere.
And then the iPad buzzed in my hands.
A new message at the bottom of the thread. Not old. Right now. 12:51 a.m.
tyler.lifts.ohio: Is he asleep? Come down to the driveway. I’m outside.
I looked up from the screen.
Through the living room window, past the edge of the curtain, I saw a pair of headlights at the curb go dark.
