Why They Run the Way They Do Read Online Free Page B

were environmentally irresponsible. She allowed herself to think about Michael, but only when she was stopped at a train crossing and alone (completely alone—not even Chloe) in the car, and then the ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack was her permission to disengage from her current situation—her family, her home, her life —and when the train had passed and her car was bumping over the tracks she stopped thinking about him and allowed herself to go on with her day.
    She’d been with Michael six years before, very briefly—one week at a professional workshop in Boston. It had been a whirlwind: three days of friendship, two days of courting, then two frantic, ecstatic days in her room when she felt so unlike herself, so shameless and reckless, so joyfully unguarded, that in moments she wondered if she were dreaming or dead. She told herself on the Sunday morning before they parted, as they lay tangled in bed, You will tell yourself that you did not feel like this. You will tell yourself that it wasn’t extraordinary, but you will be lying in order to not torture yourself. You will tell yourself this didn’t mean anything, but that will not be true. It was a terrible thing, what she did to herself that day. In that tangled moment she pretended it was a gift she was giving to her future self, but really it was pure cruelty—cold-blooded, premeditated murder—because she knew her own weaknesses, and she chose to exploit them, and she knew she would cripple her future self with doubt and misery, possibly for the rest of her life. And yet she—this present Carrie—had thwarted that cruel self, that old murderer. It had taken some time, but ultimately she had triumphed, limiting that self, that curse, to the ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack of the swiftly passing train, and she really did not think about Michael, or that vicious trick she’d played on herself, at any other time, not anymore. It was another life, six years that seemed like sixty, a life before Chloe, before she’d figured out what was important, what she really wanted. It was a stupid mistake, a moment of recklessness. It was not who she was.

    And yet she had written to him for seven months after that weekend in Boston. Dan knew this. Dan knew everything . He had made it his business to find out everything, after she had admitted to it. She’d told him one morning in their bedroom, while they were getting dressed for work. He never knew what it was that finally compelled her to spill it, but when she spilled it she spilled it, nearly vomiting out the truth, standing there in her underwear beside the closet, trembling, weeping the ugliest tears he’d ever seen. She’d never kept a secret in their seven years of marriage, maybe not ever in her life, and watching it wrest out of her was like witnessing an exorcism. She said, she blubbered: “I know you’ll want to leave me. I’ll understand.” And then, the filthy cat out of the foul bag, she had gone to work, with no makeup and wet hair, and wearing two different shoes (he noticed this when he looked out the bedroom window and watched her get into the car), and then he went through the house like a goddamn DEA agent, ripping clothes off hangers, digging into every coat pocket, emptying entire desk drawers onto the floor. He would have slit open the couch cushions if he hadn’t suddenly looked at the computer sitting there impassively on the desk in the living room and sat down and typed what—in a moment of desperate inspiration—he absolutely knew was her email password (though he’d never asked), the name of her childhood cat, and there was everything , in a tiny little mailbox icon marked ETC—ETC!—not only the other man’s emails to her but, more damning and far more excruciating, hers to him.
    But Dan, broken as he was, did not leave. By going to work Carrie had given him a window, a bay window, of several hours to