I’ve looked at my wife asleep and felt nothing but the arithmetic of how many years are left. Not hatred. Not even boredom. Arithmetic. She’s fifty-nine, I’m sixty-two, and I’ve done that calculation in the dark more times than I could ever count. Then morning comes, I make her coffee exactly the way she likes it, and I mean it. I don’t understand how both things can exist inside the same man.
I have never had an affair. People think that’s the line, and I’ve hidden behind it for years. I’ve never been unfaithful, as though a man can’t spend thirty years emotionally somewhere else without ever leaving the house. I know her routines, her favorite mug, the way she takes her coffee, the things that make her laugh. I know almost everything about the woman I married, and somehow I have spent decades avoiding the question of whether I actually want the life we built.
She got a diagnosis in October. The kind that changes the arithmetic. Suddenly the numbers I used to calculate in the dark weren’t abstract anymore. I started counting appointments instead of years, mornings instead of decades, and every ordinary thing I had once taken for granted became frighteningly finite. I expected grief. I expected panic. What I didn’t expect was relief, and the moment I felt it, I couldn’t look at myself the same way again.
She came home from that appointment, sat down at the kitchen table, and told me what the doctor had said. I held her hand and asked what she needed. She looked at me for a long time before saying, “I know you’ve been counting how long you have left with me.” I froze. She said she’d known for years because sometimes I’d look at her sleeping like I was calculating something. Then she whispered, “I just never knew whether you were counting the years you wanted with me or the years you were afraid you’d have to stay.”
