When I told him, Michael stopped looking for me. He didn’t hug me, he didn’t stroke me, not even accidentally. For eighteen years, we lived like two roommates bound together by a mortgage. Two shadows walked the same corridors, careful not to let even our silence touch. It became polite silence, and I accepted it because I thought I deserved it.
Then I went for my usual annual checkup, not long after retirement. Everything I had built up inside me, the order, the explanations, the days spent in silence, was blown away by a single sentence.
“Dr. Evans, are my results okay?”
Everything in the exam room was too clean. I twisted the leather strap on my bag until my fingers turned white. The light streaming through the blinds cut the wall into stripes, and suddenly I felt as if I were sitting behind bars.
Dr. Evans, a kind-faced woman in her late fifties with gold-rimmed glasses, was looking at her monitor. A deep wrinkle appeared on her forehead. She clicked the mouse, glanced at me, then back at the screen.
“Mrs. Miller, you’re fifty-eight, right?” she asked gently.
“Yes, I just retired from the district,” I replied, trying to remain calm. “Is something wrong? Did they find something?”
She turned her chair toward me. Her face was both cautious and sympathetic.
“Susan, I need to ask you something personal,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Have you and your husband had a normal intimate life over the years?”
The blood rushed to my face. He had hit the spot where I had been guarding the wound for almost twenty years. Michael and I had been married for thirty years. We had a pearl wedding anniversary, we had staged smiles, and we had eighteen years when we became strangers to each other.
It all started in the summer of 2008. We were forty years old. Our son, Jake, had gone to college, and the house suddenly felt too big. The silence echoed.
Michael and I were college sweethearts. We got married soon after graduation, and then settled into a routine. He worked as an engineer, was punctual, reliable, and emotionally reserved. I taught English at the local high school. Our days were safe, yet bland. Like a glass of water on the nightstand, it didn’t hurt, but it didn’t give anything either.
Then I met Ethan.
He was the new art teacher, five years younger than me. He had laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, and his fingers were always stained with paint. He kept wildflowers on his desk and hummed while grading papers. He moved through the world as if he wanted to enjoy it, not just survive it.
One afternoon, he popped into the classroom with a watercolor painting.
“Susan, what do you think of this?” she asked, holding out the hillside covered with wild, colorful flowers.
“Beautiful,” I said, and I really felt that way.
“Then it’s yours,” he replied, pressing it into my hand. “It reminds me of you. Quiet, but full of life, just waiting for the right moment.”
That sentence opened something up inside me. By then, I had closed myself off to too many things. We started staying longer in the staff room, sometimes walking in the garden, drinking coffee. The coffee later turned into wine. I knew how wrong this was. Still, the fact that someone saw me not as a wife or a mother, but as a woman, was like rain on parched earth.
Michael sensed the change.
“You’ve been staying in late a lot lately,” he remarked one evening from the corner of the sofa, by the light of the TV.
“End-of-year rush,” I lied, not looking at him. I went into the bedroom instead, as if I could wash the excitement off me.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t question me. He just sat there.
Her silence made me feel guilty. At the same time, it gave me courage. If she’s not fighting for me, I told myself, then why should I fight to stay?
Then, on a quiet weekend, everything exploded. I told Michael I was going to a faculty workshop. Instead, I traveled with Ethan to Lake Addison to draw. We sat by the water for hours. We talked about art, poetry, how short life is.
As the sky darkened to purple, Ethan reached for my hand.
“Susan, I…”
“Mom.”
The word cut through the air like a slap. I spun around.
Jake was standing about twenty meters away from us. His face was pale, his eyes angry, and he suddenly looked much older. Michael stood next to him, stiff and silent, as if carved from ice.
My husband’s face was blank. His eyes, however, were razor sharp.
My thoughts scattered. Jake had come home from college, intending it to be a surprise. When I didn’t answer the phone, he persuaded Michael to go to my “usual places.”
“Home,” Michael said flatly. Then he headed for the car without looking to see if I was following him.
The drive home was like a funeral. Jake’s disappointment sat in the back with us. At home, Michael sent him upstairs. Then he sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette, even though he hadn’t smoked for years because of me, and looked at me through the smoke.
“Since when?” he asked calmly. His calmness frightened me more than any shouting would have.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed and knelt down in front of him. “I was wrong.”
“I asked since when.”
“Three months,” I whispered. “At first there was nothing between us, we just talked.”
“Enough,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “There are two options. We get divorced, you leave with nothing, and everyone finds out why. Or we stay married, but from now on we’ll just be roommates. Nothing more.”
I just stared at him.
“Jake has his whole life ahead of him,” he continued. “I won’t let this destroy that. Divorce wouldn’t help your career either. So, the second option?”
“Okay,” I said quietly.
He grabbed his pillow and blanket. He made his bed in the living room, on the sofa.
“I’ll sleep here from now on. And in public, you’ll behave like a proper wife.”
That night, I lay alone in the bedroom, listening to the creaking of the sofa in the other room. I expected anger. Instead, he deleted me.
I ended the affair immediately. I wrote to Ethan: it’s over. He replied with just one word: okay.
The years passed in cold politeness. Michael put my coffee out in the morning but barely spoke to me. We went to events, smiling arm in arm like two actors in a long, boring play.
Now, sitting in Dr. Evans’ office, the whole story came back to me.
“So there’s no intimacy,” he said cautiously. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Eighteen years. Is that what’s causing the problem?”
“Not exactly,” he replied, then turned the monitor toward me. “I see significant scarring in the uterus. This suggests surgical intervention.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I’ve never had surgery.”
“The image is clear,” he replied. “It looks like a curettage, sometime in the past. Are you sure you don’t remember?”
Curettage. Termination of pregnancy.
I went home in a daze. Then a memory came back to me, one I had locked away for a long time. 2008, a week after I was caught. I slipped up. I took too many sleeping pills. Darkness, then waking up in the hospital. Dull pain in my lower abdomen. Michael said it was because of the stomach pump.
That night, I confronted him.
“Michael,” I said, trembling. “Did I have surgery in 2008?”
Her face immediately turned pale. The newspaper fell from her hands.
“What surgery?” I asked. “Why don’t I remember?”
“Do you really want to know?” she looked at me.
“Yes.”
“When you overdosed, they did a lab test,” she said. “You were pregnant.”
I felt dizzy. “Pregnant?”
“Three months,” he added bitterly. “We haven’t been together for six months.”
The child was Ethan’s.
“What happened?”
“I authorized the termination,” he said. “You were unconscious. I signed as your husband.”
“You took my baby away?”
“There was evidence!” he exploded. “What was I supposed to do, carry another man’s child?”
“You had no right!”
“I was protecting the family!”
“I hate you,” I cried.
“Now you know how I felt for eighteen years.”
Then the phone rang. Jake had been in a serious car accident.
The hospital was in chaos. Jake was in critical condition and needed blood.
“I’m O positive,” Michael said.
“Me too,” I replied.
The surgeon furrowed his brow. “Your son is B negative. If both parents are O, it’s genetically impossible.”
The air in the hallway stood still.
Sarah, Jake’s wife, was B negative. She gave blood immediately.
Hours later, Jake’s condition stabilized. In the intensive care unit, Michael turned to me. His eyes were empty, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.
“Is he my son?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, too quickly.
“The blood says otherwise.”
Jake came to later. He spoke softly, as if afraid of breaking something.
He said he had known since he was seventeen. He had a DNA test done. Michael remained his father because he raised him, stood by him, was always there for him.
Michael looked at me.
“Who?” he asked.
Memories came flooding back, even before Ethan. My bachelorette party. I was drunk. Mark Peterson, Michael’s best friend, took me home. Mark, who moved away shortly after. Mark, who had type B blood.
“Mark,” I whispered.
Michael’s world fell apart right then and there.
“I didn’t know,” I began. “I was drunk. I thought I passed out.”
“Get out,” he said.
I lived in a motel for a week while Jake recovered. Then we were back under the same roof, but there was still an infinite distance between Michael and me.
One sleepless night, I found him out on the terrace.
“I’m flying to Oregon next week,” he said. “Years ago, I bought a cabin there for our retirement.”
“Take me with you,” I begged. “We could start over.”
He looked at me, tired, as if he had suddenly aged.
“Start over?” he repeated. “I terminated your pregnancy. You let me raise another man’s child. The foundation is rotten.”
“But there was love between us,” I said.
“There was,” he replied. “That’s why it hurts so much.”
Three days later, he left. He didn’t say goodbye to me. He said goodbye to Jake and our grandson.
Now I live alone in the house where we once had a family. Sometimes I can still smell the tobacco in his study. Sometimes I even miss the roommate who at least breathed the same air.
For a long time, I thought my punishment was not being touched. I thought it was silence.
I was wrong.
My punishment is knowing that I built this loneliness myself. Two children, one never born, the other not biologically ours, and a husband who loved a version of me that wasn’t real.
Jake calls often. He travels to Oregon twice a year to see Michael.
“Did he ask about me?” I usually ask.
There is always a short pause.
“No, Mom,” Jake says quietly. “He didn’t ask.”
And I sit in the fading light and listen to the clock ticking away the rest of my life, which I must now finish alone.
