I’ve been in love with my wife’s sister since 1994, and I have never done one thing about it. Not a word. Not a look I’d be ashamed of. Thirty-one years of holidays, birthdays, family dinners, and Christmas mornings, and I’ve been careful every single time. I want credit for that, because I know exactly what the credit is worth. But what it cost me was everything else. You cannot hold something down that hard for that long and have anything left over.
My wife thinks I’m simply reserved. She’s told me, gently, that I’m not an expressive man, and she has even apologized for wanting more from me. Her sister has no idea. I have made sure of that. I never crossed a line, never gave myself permission to turn a feeling into an action, and convinced myself that restraint was the same thing as being a good husband. The truth is that the effort of not loving my wife’s sister has become the thing I have given my marriage instead of love.
Her sister has been ill since March, and my wife has been driving down every weekend to help her. Last Sunday she came home late, still wearing her coat, and sat on the edge of our bed. She looked exhausted. I asked how her sister was doing, and my wife didn’t answer immediately. She stared at the floor and told me that her sister had said something to her that afternoon. Something she’d apparently been carrying for years. Then my wife looked at me and said, “She told me she always thought you were in love with someone else.”
I felt every year of silence collapse into that one sentence. My wife asked whether there was someone, and I told her no because there had never been anyone I had touched or pursued. Then she asked the harder question: whether there was someone I had loved without acting on it. I couldn’t answer quickly enough. She saw it in my face. She didn’t ask me who. She just whispered, “It was her, wasn’t it?” And after thirty-one years of making sure nobody ever knew, the only person I had spent all those years protecting from the truth was the woman sitting across from me.
