I betrayed my wife with the woman who nursed her through chemotherapy. Not during—that’s what I tell myself, and technically it’s true, which makes it worth absolutely nothing. It happened eight months later, when my wife was in remission and I had finally stopped being the man everyone praised for being strong. I took the one person who had been decent to us during the worst year of our lives and turned her into a secret I had to keep from my wife.
That woman had held my wife’s hair. She had sat beside her at two in the morning in November when I didn’t know what to say or do. She knew what my wife was afraid of before I did. I told myself that what happened between us was separate from the illness, that the timing somehow mattered. It didn’t. I betrayed a woman who had trusted both of us at the exact moment she had every reason to believe the world was finally safe again.
She still sends my wife a card every December. My wife puts it on the mantel. She has no idea that the person writing those cards is also the person whose name I have spent years making sure never comes up in our house. Every Christmas, I watch my wife smile when the envelope arrives, and I feel the same shame I’ve been trying to outrun since the affair ended. She thinks the card is a reminder of someone who helped save her life. I know it’s a reminder of the worst thing I ever did to her.
This year, there was a letter inside the card. My wife opened it at the kitchen counter while I was standing there. She read the first few lines, then stopped. Her face changed. She read it again, slower this time, and looked across the room at me. She didn’t ask who the woman was. She didn’t need to. She simply said, “Why would she apologize to me for something that happened after I got better?” And then she turned the letter around so I could see the last sentence.
