A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free Page B

bordering on delusional. “You don’t need to throw it over, because you never invited it on board in the first place.”
    He looked at me and grinned. “Nothing wrong with happiness.”
    I T WAS SEVEN months later that he announced he was moving out. You had been gone from the house for a week. It was a bright February afternoon, and we were driving in the car. The sun was making metallic streaks on the windshield. The girls were at home with a sitter. We were returning from Sunday brunch at Mel’s, a tenuousreenactment of what had often been our version of date night. It had been a relief to escape the relative quiet of the house since the holidays had ended and the leavings had begun. First my brother had returned to L.A. and my father to Maine, inviting us all to come visit him there soon. Then my mother left, and finally, Robbie, you did. Things were still strained between your father and me, but he had been the one to suggest the date, and I was encouraged that he was making an effort.
    He squinted forward and lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the glare. Then, without a preamble of any kind, he announced that his author friend who lived in Gold Hill, the one who’d invited us all over on the Fourth of July, was leaving in a few days for a year abroad. He’d offered to let your father move in as a house sitter.
    “You’re moving out?” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “As soon as I pack up.”
    He told me he planned to work in partnership with a team of researchers he’d met in the fall on a major new initiative at the Stanford University Medical Center—the development of content on health-related topics that could be packaged and sold for digital distribution. He was giving up the office space he’d leased in the city for fifteen years. He intended to work directly out of the house in Gold Hill. It made sense professionally and economically. Also, Stanford had made a sizable investment, which would pay all the hospital bills. And he could take a higher salary than he ever had before. We would no longer need to worry about money, at least not in the short term. We’d be fine without the salary I’d been paying myself since the store turned profitable a decade earlier. I wouldn’t have to rush to reopen as soon as the damages from the flood were repaired. I could wait until I was ready.
    We had reached the business district, almost deserted on a Sunday afternoon. The street was deep in the shadow of downtown. He pulled over and parked. He didn’t look at me.
    “You did all this without telling me?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Why?”
    “I guess I feel like we need some time apart.”
    I sat in the seat beside him, stunned. I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience, and our marriage would still be intact.
    I started to cry. Then I groveled. I pleaded. I grew angry. But his mind was made up. He’d thought it all through. He figured the girls could stay with him alternating weekends and an evening or two a week until school got out. Then, in the summer, they could split their time between us.
    He had been facing straight ahead, looking out the windshield, but now he turned to me, and I could see in the relentless blue of his eyes that he was not going to change his mind.
    “Are we getting a divorce?”
    “No, we’re not getting a divorce,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. We’re just … I don’t know what we’re doing.”
    “You don’t know what
you’re
doing,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
    “You’ve done enough.”
    “It was one night, Jonathan. It was stupid. It was pointless.”
    He said nothing. Because the thing that had broken him was not the thing I was trying to explain away.

Five

    S ATURDAY , M ARCH 17 . St. Patrick’s Day. Seven weeks since you left this house, six since your father did, too.
    O N T HURSDAY NIGHT , your father came to collect the girls for an