I read the letter in the car. It was four lines long, and the first line said, “I know you think you were the only one who felt it.” I stopped there for a while. Then I kept reading. She said she had known for years—not because I had confessed anything, but because she had watched the way I looked at her whenever my wife wasn’t looking. She said she had loved me too, but had never crossed that line because she loved my wife more than she wanted a life with me.
The second line was worse. She wrote that my wife had known too. Not everything, but enough. Apparently, my wife had asked her once, years ago, whether she thought I loved her differently. Her friend had said no. She had lied to protect both of us. I thought about every photograph my wife had insisted she be in, every Christmas she had invited her, every time she had told us how lucky she was to have us both. I had always assumed she simply trusted me.
The third line explained the envelope. My wife had found the letter weeks before the funeral, but she hadn’t opened it. She had recognized the handwriting and put it aside. She gave it to me because she believed I deserved to hear the truth from the one person I’d spent twenty-nine years pretending not to love. Then came the final line, and I had to read it three times.
“Your wife knew more than you think, and she loved you enough to let you believe she didn’t.” I sat in that car until it got dark. For twenty-nine years I’d told myself I had been faithful because I never touched another woman. But my wife had been living beside a man who gave another woman pieces of himself every single day. And somehow, even after everything, she was the one who gave me the letter I had been too cowardly to ask for.
