Way Down We Go

Chapter Fifteen

It wasn't supposed to be like this. My marriage isn't -or, would that now have to be, wasn't- crumbling beneath our feet. We were happy, were we not? Happier than we ever thought possible? It seemed like that was the case until about twenty minutes ago, when he knelt before me to deliver the bomb that put almost any other I had heard to shame. I was surprised, stupidly so. I thought he wouldn't be like the others. I thought he wouldn't be like the other men and boys I had ever known. I thought he'd be different. But the comparison between he and them was slim to none. I could hold a mirror towards any other boy I had known and point it towards my husband and see no differences.

My mind conjured up an image of the two of them together in Paris. His blonde hair and her dark curls meshing together, his intoxicated lips upon her own. Their clothes slowly shedding, inching closer and closer to the bed and-

No. I stopped myself from thinking any worse thoughts. Maybe this wouldn't be that bad. Perhaps we could fix this. Fix it and eventually forget that it ever happened, go on with out disgustingly happy lives and forget about him and her together, maybe we could pretend that it had never happened and I could go on convincing myself that it hadn't. 

Here my husband knelt. Before my feet in the library of our home, the home somebody long dead had built but the home we had made together. He and I and our families that we had built. All of us together, we had built this home. He had confessed about what had happened not that long ago, confessed to every minor detail and begged for my forgiveness, or just any response. Anger, pain or tears. Anything but my silence, I had heard him say. But I couldn't forgive him. How could I? The hard stone of infidelity has hit home, both a stranger and the closest friend to my physical body and mind.

That stone has made the smallest of dents in my perfect, happy life. The long sheet of undented glass I had made in my mind was now dented. But the more I thought about his words and the more I listened to them, that crack got deeper and deeper. The branches grew longer and longer, parting that glass as if parting a sea. They expanded all of their own, like tree branches growing together. Long and separate and beautiful and conjoined in an image nobody would ever truly know. But this wasn't a beautiful image. This was cold, hard reality that I'd have to understand all of my own.

I looked away from him and to the actual, physical window near us. I watched the actual, physical trees dance in the rain and the wind, a waltz all of their own. I watched them dance like others watched me in the not so far away past, that one night that started all of this mess. I sat there, in my perfect, safe and happy library, in my perfect, safe and happy home that he had helped me create. But my husband had created another with someone else. 

One night, he had sworn. One night filled with alcohol and confusion and partying and ended with sweat, limbs and a mistake that we may never, ever recover from.

"Mary," Francis didn't move from his position. Kneeling in front of me, clasping my hands as I sat in that overstuffed, crimson velvet chair. His eyes were big and blue and wide, like little blue buttons that we had played with together as children in that little Parisian town he and I had spent both three years and months inside. Where the branches of our souls had intertwined and had never fully undone. But now, it felt like this man had taken a chainsaw and severed us both from each other, never to see each other again, like we once questioned we'd ever do before.

"Mary, please." he begged, his hands tightening around my own. I turned away even more, not yet having the strength to pull my hands from his stupid, safe, warm grip that made me wish for his stupid, safe, warm arms that made me feel so deceptively safe and warm and protected from any harm. Physical or otherwise. "Please, speak to me."

I shook my head. I was unable to speak. My heart started racing. I was sure he could feel my pulse underneath his large hands that had apparently taken another woman inside not that long ago. How could he have done this? How could she have done this? How could they have done this? How could this have happened?