After Eighteen Years, I Walked Away

1: 1

Six in the evening, in my counseling office, and the young woman across from me called herself a love diagnostician.

Her voice was thick with a grievance and a hurt that wouldn't dissolve.

"Dr. Mason, do you really believe there's such a thing as love that lasts a lifetime?"

She said she'd tested countless couples, husbands and wives, and not one of them had ever withstood the temptation.

"I only want to help women see the truth in the hearts of the men beside them. But everyone calls me a shameless mistress, a deliberate seductress."

There was a tangled struggle in her eyes.

"Lately I made a married man fall completely in love with me, and I've come to like him too. Now I don't know what to do. Should I confess the whole truth to his wife?"

I soothed her gently. "Don't deny real love. This year makes eighteen years my husband and I have been together, and neither of us has ever wavered."

"A brave confession can at least keep a broken marriage from lying to itself, from making the same mistake over and over."

The struggle and pain on the girl's face fell away all at once.

She raised her eyes to me, every word soft.

"That's good, then. I was worried you might fall apart in despair, Dr. Mason, if your husband's heart ever changed."

……

My fingertips froze, and the pen bled a spreading blot of black into the page.

The front sheet of the case file, in plain black and white.

Client's name: Shirley Barnes.

A thing I'd let slip past me came surging back into my mind.

A few days ago, Stanley James had suddenly spent a small fortune buying the naming rights to several stars.

He'd said it was to please a partner firm, to help push a project through.

And one of those stars, it happened, had been named for one person alone — Shirley Barnes.

The girl in front of me was young and bright, vivid and dazzling.

Nothing like the steady, worldly partners in their thirties and forties Stanley dealt with day to day.

So the whole partner-firm deal, from beginning to end, had been a lie he'd invented.

There was a soft knock at the office door, and the next second someone pushed it open from outside.

Stanley's voice was gentle, the way it always was. "Patsy, aren't you done with work yet?"

His eyes went past me first, landing straight on Shirley Barnes.

Across them flickered a flash of joy he couldn't hide, and a trace of panic tangled in with it.

I thought of a line from a psychology text: the very first place a person's eyes turn, without thinking, is always toward the one who matters most to them.

The last thread of luck in my heart sank into a bottomless well of ice.

Shirley didn't flinch from my gaze in the slightest.

She smiled, gentle and glaring at once, then rose and walked straight into Stanley's arms.

"Stanley, did you come just to pick me up?"

His body stiffened, and he hesitated, turning his head to look at me.

"Shirley's been in a bad way these last few days, anxious day and night, can't sleep. I don't feel right leaving her alone. I'll take her home first and come back later to explain everything to you properly."

The ache came in waves through my chest.

Ten years married, eighteen years side by side.

From the day I started practicing, even though we'd long had a full-time driver, Stanley never once broke his habit, come rain or shine, of driving me to work and home again.

He said he couldn't bear to miss a single minute of the time we spent together.

And now, for another woman, he had broken with his own hands the routine he'd kept for years.

My assistant pushed the door open, and seeing me alone in the office, she asked, puzzled.

"Patsy, how come Mr. James didn't come get you? Isn't he the one who dotes on you most?"

"Doesn't he know you were up till the small hours last night, that you shouldn't be driving tired today…"

I tugged at the corner of my mouth and gave a small shake of my head.

I only picked up my bag in silence and took a cab home.

I sat alone in the empty, cold living room, waiting from evening until one in the morning.

At last a very faint sound of the door came from the entryway.

His movements were careful, as if he was afraid of waking the sleeping me.

Stanley saw me sitting upright on the couch, and there was a note of surprise in his voice.

"I thought you'd have been asleep long ago."

He reached out to hold me.

"Can't sleep? Let me help you get to sleep, all right…"

The heavy, sharp reek of liquor hit me in the face, and in an instant it shattered every bit of restraint I had.

The smell of liquor is the thing I hate most in this life.

Because my father drank himself into a habit of it, beat my mother and me for years, breaking and smashing and cursing as a matter of course.

Every muscle in me went taut, and my voice came out sharp.

"Don't touch me!"

His arm jerked to a stop, and something like an apology crossed his eyes.

"Sorry. I forgot."

My eyes rimmed red, every word trembling.

"When did it start?"

After a long silence, Stanley's voice was flat, almost cruel.

"Six months ago."

"Shirley knew I was married. She made a bet with me. She bet on whether my feelings for you, after all these years, could hold without a single crack. Seven days, she bet she could make me fall completely in love with her."

"If she won, I'd let her make three demands. If she lost, she'd stay away from me for good."

He lifted his eyes to me, and there was a trace of something matter-of-fact in his tone.

"Patsy, she won. I've fallen hopelessly in love with her."

"You're too steady, too calm. Our days never changed, like a pool of dead water. She's the one who's bright and alive like sunlight, who brought me something new I'd never felt, who made me really understand what living is."

I wept as I smiled, every word catching in my throat.

"Then what about me? Eighteen years of feeling, ten years of marriage, what does any of it count for?"

His brow knotted, and his voice was irritable and dismissive.

"I still love you too, I…"

"Shut up."

"Don't talk to me about love. It only makes me sick. Back then you promised me with your own mouth that you'd give me your whole heart, for a lifetime…"

Those sealed-away memories came flooding in.

On the most hopeless day of the past, my father drank himself into a rage and smashed a bottle.

He held the broken base of it against my mother's neck, forcing her to hand over money.

It was Stanley, young then, who rushed in, shielded my mother and me in our wretched, ruined state, and warned my father off in a hard voice.

He lit up the gray years of my youth. He was the one salvation of my whole life…

My emotions broke free of me completely, tears spilling down without restraint.

"Bang—"

The red wine from the cabinet was hurled hard to the floor by Stanley.

It overlaid perfectly with the nightmare of my childhood.

He gave a low, impatient roar.

"Patsy Mason, have you had enough yet? Endlessly running down me and Shirley — can you stop acting so high and mighty!"

"Have you forgotten? Back then I was the one who didn't mind that some thugs took nude photos of you. I was the one who insisted on marrying you!"