…Daniel Price. Ellie’s husband. I put the card down like it had burned me. The doorbell rang, and my wife walked past me to answer it, calm as a church. He came in carrying a bottle of wine, and he and my wife greeted each other like old friends. That’s when I understood. They had been talking for six weeks.
“Sit down,” she said again, and I did, because my legs gave out. Daniel sat in the middle. My wife sat across from me. She poured three glasses and lifted hers. “Ellie told Daniel in February,” she said. “Daniel found my number in March. We’ve had coffee every Tuesday since. We decided we weren’t going to scream. We were going to do this like adults.”
Daniel looked at me without any anger, which was worse than anger. “I wanted to hear it from you,” he said. “Not from her. Not from my wife. From you.”
So I told him. Everything. At my own anniversary table, on the good china, I told a man I’d never met what I had done to his marriage. It took twenty minutes. Nobody touched the food. When I finished, Daniel nodded once, stood up, and shook my wife’s hand. “Thank you,” he said to her. Then he left.
I looked across the table at my wife in her first-date dress. “Why all of it?” I asked. “The coffee. The tie. Mom’s recipe.” She smiled, and it was the saddest smile I have ever seen. “Because for six weeks, I wanted you to see every single thing you were about to lose,” she said. “Every day. One at a time. The way I did.”
Her suitcase was already in the car. She kissed me on the forehead before she left and told me the china was mine now. “Use it,” she said. “Every day. So you remember.” I eat off one of those plates every night. It took me a year to stop setting the table for two.
