Chapter 3 - The Other Wife
Camille suggested a coffee shop near the train station.
“Public place,” she said. “Daytime. Neither of us needs another secret meeting.”
I liked her immediately for that.
She was around forty, with dark hair pulled into a loose knot and the exhausted posture of someone who had been carrying a heavy box for too long.
She didn’t hug me.
She didn’t say she knew exactly how I felt.
She slid a paper cup across the table.
“I guessed plain coffee.”
“Good guess.”
For a moment, we sat without speaking.
Then she said, “Miles told Lauren we’re separated, didn’t he?”
I thought about the way Lauren had avoided his marriage when I asked.
“She said things were complicated.”
Camille gave a short, humorless laugh.
“That’s his favorite word.”
She showed me a photograph on her phone.
Miles stood beside her at a backyard birthday party, one arm around her shoulders. A girl wearing a paper crown leaned against him.
“Our daughter turned twelve last month,” Camille said. “That was three weeks before California.”
I looked away.
“You don’t have to explain your marriage to me.”
“I know. I’m explaining his story.”
She told me she had discovered messages on a shared family tablet. Not a single relationship. Several overlapping promises, all built around the same idea.
His marriage was practically over.
He just needed time.
The woman he was speaking to was the only person who understood him.
“Was there actually a retreat?” I asked.
“Yes. Two days. He stayed longer.”
“So did Lauren.”
Camille nodded.
We sat with that.
I had imagined this meeting might produce some dramatic new certainty. A hidden bank account. A devastating confession.
Instead, it gave me something sadder.
Perspective.
Lauren had gambled our life on a man who apparently kept spare versions of the same romance.
“Are you leaving him?” I asked.
“I’ve rented an apartment. My daughter knows we’re separating. She doesn’t need the details.”
“That sounds hard.”
“It is.”
Her eyes sharpened.
“But I’m not here to recruit you into anything. I won’t contact your family. I won’t post about your wife. I wanted you to know that whatever you’re being told, you should verify it.”
“Thank you.”
She hesitated.
“There’s one more thing. Miles mentioned you.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did he say?”
“That you were fine with it.”
I stared at her.
“He told you that?”
“He said Lauren and her husband had an arrangement.”
For a moment, the sounds of the coffee shop seemed to move farther away.
I remembered Lauren’s call.
The careful language.
The insistence that she wasn’t asking permission.
She hadn’t simply wanted to continue the affair.
She had wanted a sentence she could quote afterward.
Daniel agreed.
Daniel understood.
No one was being betrayed.
“I didn’t agree,” I said.
“I believe you.”
Those three words nearly broke me.
When I got home, Lauren was sitting on the porch.
She had taken the day off.
“Where were you?”
“Having coffee.”
“With who?”
I stopped at the bottom step.
She heard herself a second later.
Her face changed.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I met Camille.”
Lauren stood.
“What did she tell you?”
“That she and Miles weren’t separated.”
Lauren’s lips parted.
Then closed.
For the first time since Thursday, her shock looked unpracticed.
“He said they were living separate lives.”
“They have a daughter.”
“I know.”
“Did you know about the other women?”
Her face drained.
I didn’t enjoy it.
I had expected some part of me to feel satisfied.
Instead, I felt the dull exhaustion of watching someone discover the cliff after she had pushed us both over it.
Lauren reached for her phone.
I stepped past her.
“Daniel, wait.”
I turned.
“If he lied to you, that matters,” I said. “But it doesn’t erase what you chose to do to me.”
She lowered the phone.
That evening, I went to my first therapy appointment.
The therapist asked what I wanted help with.
I almost said divorce.
Instead, I heard myself ask, “How do I stop feeling stupid?”
She let the question settle.
Then she said, “Trusting someone who promised to be trustworthy doesn’t make you stupid.”
May you like
I looked at the tissue box on the table.
For the first time since the call, I cried.
