I’ve read my wife’s journals for thirty years and used what’s in them to win every argument we’ve ever had. Not to hurt her. That’s what I’ve told myself—I used it to know where the soft ground was so I could stay off it, and it made me look like a man who understood her. She has said, more than once, that I’m the only person who’s ever really seen her. I know what she thinks about her father. I know what she’s never told her sister. I’ve known all of it since 1995 and I’ve used every bit of it.
She’s started leaving them out. That’s new. Six months now, on the nightstand, not the shelf. Last week I opened one, and the handwriting is the same and the dates are current and it is addressed to me. The first entry is from October and it starts with a sentence I recognized immediately: “I know he reads these, so I’m going to stop writing what I think and start writing what I need him to see.” I read the rest of that page twice.
There were six months of entries like that. Every detail I thought I’d discovered about her had been placed there deliberately. Every insecurity, every fear, every private memory I had used to steer a conversation—she knew I was reading. She had been watching me use her own words against her for years. Then I reached the last entry. It was dated three days earlier, and underneath it she had written one line: “Tomorrow I’m going to ask him why he thinks knowing everything about me gives him the right to control me.”
She asked me at breakfast. I started to deny it, and she put the journal on the table between us. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She just opened it to a page from 2001 and read something back to me that I had used against her during an argument twenty years ago. Then she closed the book and said, “You thought these were secrets you were collecting. I was collecting the moment you finally admitted you were reading them.” I had no answer. She picked up the journals, put them in a box, and walked out of the room. This time, for the first time in thirty years, I realized I had no idea what she was thinking.
