Part I
Each spring, an osprey couple returns to the same nest on our property on Martha’s Vineyard. The nest is on the edge of a lake that leads into the Vineyard Sound, facing west. In lucky years, eggs appear in the nest in May, chicks in June. In July, the juvenile ospreys learn to fly. By September, the family is gone, headed to the Caribbean or South America for the winter.
When we bought our house in 2005, my husband, James, became obsessed with the osprey couple, with the magic of their annual return to the same location. He was always anxious, waiting to see if they would appear, if they would produce eggs, if the eggs would survive raccoons and crows, our local predators. Every year, he celebrated when the juveniles flew for the first time.
He drew me and our three young children into the drama of the ospreys, pointing them out as they soared above us, leading us in yelling “Hi, Ossey!” and waving at the sky. He took us into the woods to see their nest wedged high in a tree. He befriended two local osprey experts, older men who invited us to watch them tag an osprey at dawn. They attached a device that would track the bird’s movements during the winter. The kids, still in their pajamas, were awestruck by the creature that looked so much larger on the ground than it did in the sky. The experts named the tagged osprey after me and sent us updates on Belle’s progress throughout the winter. We worried for her and toasted her return.
After raccoons ravaged the ospreys’ eggs two years in a row, the experts installed a pole in the same area as the original nest, designed to deter climbing animals. The tree stayed empty for a few years and then, to our astonishment, a small nest appeared. The nest grew steadily, becoming more majestic every summer, a landmark visible to swimmers and boaters
across the lake. After a decade, it measured more than four feet wide and three feet tall, one of the biggest nests on the island.
When we arrived on the Vineyard in March of 2020, the nest was empty. The birds were still warming themselves in the southern hemisphere, perhaps beginning their pilgrimage back to the island, making their way over the Caribbean Sea and Florida, continuing north, hugging the coastline, as a virus, first found in China, made its own explosive journey through the United States. My husband and I walked around the pole in our wool hats and parkas, our boots sinking in the marsh. The nest was intact, unchanged from the previous fall. Even in the bitter air, even with sharp sticks poking out of every side, it looked strong and stable. Welcoming. We smiled at each other and talked about the couple’s return. Would we be here to see it?
—
After the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered New York City, where we lived most of the year, we decided to quarantine on Martha’s Vineyard with our two youngest children, then fifteen and twelve. It made sense to move to the Vineyard; our house there was isolated and it was our favorite place in the world. The hedge fund where James worked had gone remote, and my legal work could be done from anywhere.
We arrived on March 15. The island was still firmly in winter, with temperatures in the thirties, the trees barren, and the light flat. An icy wind whipped around us as we unloaded the car, unpacking sweaters and boots, the girls’ textbooks and cellos, one larger than the other. James set up his home office on a card table in the living room, rising at 4 a.m. to worry over the markets. He cut three different kinds of wood and built gorgeous fires in the late afternoon. He made me whiskey sours as the sun set (we believed reports that whiskey would kill the virus) and locked every door of the house at night, even though the island’s population was sparse and, like New York, in lockdown. He seemed proud of his role as father and husband, nurturing us, protecting us.
I went for walks, tried to keep up with house cleaning and laundry, and watched the news throughout the day. There were images of overflowing emergency rooms, hospital tents in Central Park, refrigerated trucks filled with corpses. More than 20,000 people had died in New York City. There was no vaccine, and no timeline for one. Even in our isolation, even with our privilege, I was afraid.
I often sought out James in the woods. Out of our daughters’ earshot, we would talk about the latest pandemic news, whether we should wear masks or gloves to the grocery store, if we needed to isolate grocery bags and packages before we unpacked them. James would kiss the top of my head as I hugged him, gripping the back of his sweater.
Our younger daughter, Carrie, discovered Fortnite and played remote games with her friends in our guest bedroom, her small body dwarfed by a giant armchair. Our older daughter, Evie, wanted to learn to make fresh pasta. She started with gnocchi and served it for dinner on March 21, the first night of spring. James made a roast chicken to accompany Evie’s dish, using our outdoor grill as an oven, standing on our deck in the dark, adjusting the knobs, making sure the temperature stayed at four hundred degrees. It came out perfectly: moist and golden brown.
We ate at our rectangular wooden table in the kitchen. I wore pajamas with a thick wool sweater and socks, my hair still wet from the shower, piled into a bun on the top of my head. The wind howled as we ate. James seemed distracted and kept eating the gnocchi directly from the bowl rather than serving himself, a pet peeve of mine. He removed the oyster from the chicken, the piece he’d taught the kids to covet, and gave it to Carrie.
I FaceTimed our son, Finn, who was staying with his friend’s family on Long Island, joining a group of teenagers. At seventeen, we knew he would be happier with his friends, and we thought his time away from us would be limited, a couple of weeks at most. I held up my phone so we could all see his face. We told him we missed him.
After we finished eating, James left the kitchen to make a work call.
The girls went to the living room to watch television. Alone, I soaked the pans, loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the table. As I was filling a bucket
with water and white vinegar to mop the floor, my cell phone rang, glowing and vibrating on the kitchen island. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voicemail. When my phone pinged to register the message, I put down the bucket and pressed play. It was a man’s voice. He sounded young and nervous.
He said, “I’m trying to reach Belle.” He paused. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” He gave his name and number.
I froze, feeling dizzy. The words didn’t make sense. I gripped my phone and pressed the play arrow again, listening to the man’s soft voice for the second time. I thought, This can’t be true. This must be a mistake. James will explain this.
I leaned the mop against the island and went to find him, descending our stairs just as he ascended them. He was coming to find me. He looked anxious, worried.
He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me into the guest bedroom, the room set up with Fortnite, with empty packets of Cheddar Bunnies on the rug. He sat down on the couch. I sat in a chair to his right.
There was a long pause, as if he was collecting his thoughts, searching for the right words to make this go away. I thought he would do that—he would make it go away. I waited.
He took both my hands, leaned forward, and looked me straight in the eye. He said, “I promise you, this meant nothing. It’s over. I love you and only you. I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”
I asked, “How long has it been going on?”
He answered, “Only a few weeks.”
I looked down at his hands, at my body, and felt ashamed of my matronly pajamas and my socks, an oil stain from dinner on the thin cotton of my pajama pants.
His platinum wedding band, on his ring finger, looked scuffed from years of wear. My fingers, underneath his, were bare. I had taken off my rings, including my diamond wedding band, the day before. A friend had told me that the virus could hide under rings, evading Purell and soap, so I
had pulled them off, dropping them in a jar of jewelry cleaner. For a split second I thought, Did taking off my wedding ring cause this? Did I shake
something loose in the universe?
“What is her name?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“I’m going to call her husband back, so you might as well tell me.”
He said the name. It was generic and, like my maiden name, alliterative;
it sounded sweet.
“Where did you meet her?” I asked.
He said she was a banker. They’d met through work. He said, “We had this attraction.”
He pulled his hands from mine and held them up to demonstrate the force pulling them together, his hands cupped, fingers spread, like he was holding a basketball. “But, I swear, it didn’t mean anything.”
“Does she have children?” I asked.
He nodded and said, “She has two kids.”
“How old are they?”
He paused and said, “They are little. How old are kids when they go to
nursery school?”
“Two or three.”
He nodded again. “That’s how old they are.”
I thought, How does a woman with a big job and two toddlers have the time, the energy, for an affair?
Carrie called for me, “Mommy? Can you make us turnovers?”
I jumped, hearing her high, sweet voice reorienting me. The girls. We would need to pretend everything was fine, that a bomb had not just
exploded.
I called back, “Okay.”
I left James in the guest room and returned to the kitchen. I turned on the oven and set two frozen Pepperidge Farm raspberry turnovers on a baking sheet. My kids had loved them since they were little. I had too, as a child. I put the sheet in the oven.
No longer able to contain what felt like a rising explosion, I walked to our bathroom, stepped into our shower, and closed the glass door to muffle my gasps, my wails. I sat down on the shower bench, between the shampoos and soaps, and texted the man who had called me, “Can you tell me how long this has been going on?”
It felt like the most important thing in that moment—to know when the affair started, to know if James had told me the truth.
He responded, “I think a month. But I can’t text because my wife has tried to kill herself. She’s in an ambulance.”
I felt panic then. James’s betrayal was going to cause waves of damage beyond me, beyond our family. This was a crisis we would need to manage together. I began to worry too, for the young woman in the ambulance, speeding through the empty streets of New York, undone by what had transpired that night, in her house and mine, as if she were my daughter and not my husband’s mistress.
I left the bathroom and went to find James again, moving through the living room and down the stairs, wanting to relay the news quickly, as if my speed might save her. I found him standing outside the guest room. He was on his cell phone.
I knew, somehow, that he was talking to her. I asked, “Do you know?”
He put his hand over his phone and said, “Yes. I’m trying to hear what she is saying.”
I waited as he walked away from me, into the guest room, to finish the call. His posture—the hunch of his back, his free hand cupped over his mouth—looked intimate, caretaking.
When he came back, putting the phone into his pocket, he said, “She took a few sleeping pills. She’s fine.” He looked relieved.
My sympathy, my worry, shifted to astonishment. She had taken the pills the moment I—James’s wife of two decades—had learned about her?
Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to fall apart? Wasn’t he supposed to be worried about me? She had captured my husband’s attention, his care, when I needed it most.
I don’t remember exactly how I spent the next hours.
I know I took the turnovers out of the oven. They had cooked too long,
becoming too crisp, too brown.
I know I returned to the bathroom.
I know I called my stepmother, Susan, and told her what had happened.
She yelped in shock. While I was on the phone with her, Evie knocked softly on the door. The doorknob turned slowly, cautiously, and then stopped. I had locked it.
“Are you okay, Mom?” she called through the door.
I steadied my voice, raising it an octave. “Yes, sweetheart, I’m fine. A friend is going through something.” She told me later that James had sent her to the bathroom. He had said, “Go check on Mommy.”
I texted two close friends, Maria and Anna, “James is having an affair.”
They both answered immediately, confused, writing “What??” They called me in succession. I didn’t answer.
I curled into a ball on the cold tile and stayed there for a long time. I imagined the weeks ahead in lockdown, keeping things stable for the girls, doing therapy with James on Zoom. We were stuck together, in the same house, on an island. I thought, This is going to be a nightmare. I could not imagine forgiving him, but I also could not imagine a life without him; I loved him so completely.
At 3 a.m., I walked through the quiet house and found James sleeping in Finn’s bed. He looked peaceful, breathing steadily, like nothing was wrong. The girls were asleep in their room next door, both turned to the wall in their twin beds, under their matching yellow-and-white-flowered duvets. I hadn’t put Carrie to bed, something I still did every night. I thought, She must have been happy, staying up past her bedtime, assuming I had forgotten.
I went back to our room and got in our bed, James’s side undisturbed. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I felt leaden with dread. The scenes of the night kept replaying in my mind—the voicemail, James’s admission and apology, the suicide attempt—and I could not make sense of it. I could not place what had happened with what I knew of my husband, a kind and mild man,
a devoted husband and father. I hadn’t drawn the curtains, so I saw the sun rise over the lake. I could tell it would be a beautiful day, crisp and sunny.
At 6 a.m., James walked into our bedroom fully dressed, in heavy boots and a black parka, the same clothes he’d worn the night before. He was holding a large canvas tote bag. His green eyes were narrowed and icy, an expression I had never seen before, entirely different from how he had looked at me the previous night. Before he said a word, I knew that something, everything, had changed.
He said, “I’ve decided I want a divorce. I’m leaving.”
As he spoke, I could not absorb what was happening, what he was saying. I thought the end (or the survival) of our marriage would be my choice.
He said, “You’ll be fine. You’re still young.” I was fifty.
I asked, “Are you going to see her?”
He said, “Yes, I would like to make sure she is okay.”
I told him that her name did not appear on her firm’s website. I had done a google search and thought, maybe illogically, the whole thing could be a scam. He scrolled through his phone and showed me an announcement of her recent promotion. She had an impressive résumé, including a degree from an Ivy League business school. He looked proud, impressed. And then he walked out the door.
—
The girls were still asleep when he left. When I heard their movements, their steps on the stairs, my door opening, I pulled back James’s side of the duvet to make it look like he had slept there. They got in bed with me, warm in their matching monkey-print pajamas, their hair tousled with sleep.
I tried to smile as they curled against me, hoping I could hide the red blotches on my face.
I said, “Daddy had to go back to New York for work.”
Carrie asked, “Why didn’t he say goodbye?”
I paused, trying to find an answer. “He was in a rush to make the first ferry.”
I called James repeatedly over the next five hours, while he was on the road, but he didn’t answer. He called back when he reached New York. I could hear him park the car in the garage, hand the keys to the attendant, walk down the street.
He said, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.”
He said, “I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done.”
He said, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
Of all the words he said, it was custody and house that took my breath away. He was giving up our kids? And the Vineyard? This was not just an affair. This was not just a rejection of me. He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.
—
In the days that followed, I continued to try to hide the truth from the girls.
A therapist I spoke with said I should wait to tell them until the pandemic was less scary. It was still March, the second week of lockdown. We thought it would be over soon. Or at least that the worst of it—the deaths, the shutdown, the unknowns—would end.
But instead of easing, the pandemic had become more frightening. And so had I, appearing at dinner with swollen eyes and unwashed hair. I cried quietly as I did laundry and scrubbed our toilets. I spent hours behind the closed door of my bedroom. I decided not to drink, knowing it would make me sadder, but I also found it hard to eat, my appetite disappearing, my throat thick.
I called James every few hours, in closets, bathrooms, the garage, the woods, anywhere the girls couldn’t hear me, crying in heavy jags, begging for some explanation. He was always nearly silent. He wouldn’t tell me what was lacking in our marriage or in me, or how long he had felt this
way. He denied that it was because he was in love, a reason that would have hurt but at least made some sense. When he spoke, he was completely calm, his voice low. His composure made me feel like I was wrong to be upset, to be so messy and confused, like what was happening was something I should absorb quickly and easily.
I never asked him to change his mind. I knew that this was not possible; he was too certain. But I wanted him to at least try to walk me through his decision, for him to show some concern for me and the kids, even if he was leaving. He gave me nothing. It was like a wall had been erected between us, me on one side flailing in my despair; him on the other, cold as ice.
His only answers were “I don’t know.” And once, “You didn’t do anything wrong.” I begged him to do therapy with me on Zoom. He refused. And then he stopped answering my phone calls.
He texted, “I’ll answer what I want, when I want. I’ll speak when I want. I’ll decide when I want.”
Had life been normal, had we been in New York, had I been able to find him on the street and make him look me in the eye, maybe I would have some understanding of what was happening. But I was on one island, and he was on another, and I knew nothing, only the shock of his disappearance.
I texted him, “I think I’m going to die.”
He didn’t answer.
In the middle of one night, I became convinced that he had fathered the toddlers, the children of the woman with the alliterative name. In my shock and disorientation, even this seemed possible. When I called him at 1 a.m., he answered, the late hour taking him off guard. I said, “Are they yours?”
He answered, “Stop. You have lost your mind.” And then he hung up the phone.
I felt like I had lost my mind, like his exit had transformed me, suddenly, from an intelligent, stable wife and mother to an unhinged lunatic. A madwoman. Somehow, I had become the dangerous person in the story, the volatile character, rather than he, the man who had left his family.
While he refused to talk to me on the phone, he sent one clear message by text: he planned to tell people that our separation was amicable, a joint
decision. He said it would be better, for my own well-being, to say that I had wanted it too.
He assumed I would agree to this false narrative. His expectation made sense. In most things, for twenty years, I had deferred to him. I believed in his wisdom, that he knew the right answer. I tend to be a compliant person generally. I didn’t break a single rule in school. I was an obedient daughter, a diligent lawyer. My older brother loved to call me “Belle the Good.” I am also shy, private, and avoidant of confrontation. I didn’t talk at all until I was three years old, and I rarely spoke as a child after that. Every teacher comment on every report card, from kindergarten through college, noted that while bright and performing well, I needed to say more in class.
Whenever I did speak, my face would turn bright red. As an adult, I learned how to make small talk but stayed quiet, remote, sharing my intimate thoughts and problems with only a few close friends.
For what felt like the first time, I refused James’s advice. I replied, “No.
I won’t say that.”
I would not lie about this, about what was happening to me. This boundary felt clear to me, even in my confusion, even in my despair.
James refused to tell his own family—his mother, brother, and sister— that he had left us, so I told them, sending an email two days after his departure. They were upset and worried. His brother, sister, and I texted back and forth throughout the first bleak days, trying to figure out what had happened, as if this were a puzzle we could solve together. James’s sister was outraged by the LinkedIn photo of the woman James was seeing; she was thirty-five but looked twenty. She tracked down the woman’s parents, trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the affair.
And then, suddenly, on April 1, eight days after James walked out, his family cut me off. In a joint text, his siblings said that in order to support James, they could no longer be in contact with me. The bluntness of the message, their coldness matching James’s, stunned me. I’d been a part of their family for twenty years.
—
Carrie didn’t seem to sense anything was wrong. She was a child who saw only what was in front of her—her classes on Zoom, a TikTok dance, her Fortnite games. She arrived at the table ready to eat, not caring what her sister and I gave her, as long as it was piping hot. She accepted the story that her father was working, even though all of Manhattan was shut down.
Evie texted me in the middle of the night, a few days after James left, saying something cryptic about how she knew I had a lot on my plate, that I shouldn’t worry about her. When I read the text in the morning, I went to find her, my heart beating fast. I didn’t know what I would say to her. She was still in bed, alone in the girls’ yellow room. I sat down at her feet.
I said, “Can we talk about your text?”
She answered softly, “No, it’s fine.”
“What did you mean by it?”
“Mom, please, it’s fine, I don’t want to talk right now.” Her voice was firm now, definitive. She pulled up the duvet and rolled over, turning away from me.
I thought, Should I press her? Should I insist on an answer? What if she doesn’t know?
I waited a few more minutes, hoping she would give me some kind of signal, some direction, but we both remained silent.
She started cooking for us almost every night. I thought it was a new passion, an expansion of her interest in pasta making. I know now that she was trying to feed me. She made risotto with saffron and used the leftover rice to make arancini the next day. She baked homemade falafel and served it with hummus, warm pita bread, Israeli salad. She perfected a pan-seared steak, learning how to spoon butter and thyme over it as it cooked. She found a Bolognese recipe on Instagram that was much better than mine. She watched me carefully as I ate. I tried to take a few bites of the meals she placed in front of me, even though I felt no hunger.
I called the parents Finn was staying with, people I had never met, and told them what had happened. They were separated, on their way to divorce, but living together during lockdown. They promised to keep my secret until I was ready to tell Finn. By April, they had almost a dozen kids
staying with them, a group they called their “quaran-teens.” They made sure Finn attended Zoom school, ate well, and got some exercise. The mother taught him to do his laundry. The father worried over his sleep apnea and ordered him a special pillow from Amazon.
When I thought about Finn so far away, I felt a deep ache. I yearned to have him under my roof, to have my eyes on all three of my children. But I was also relieved that he was not with us, that he wasn’t stuck in a house of girls, a house that felt heavy with sadness, without any of his friends. And that he was protected, for a time, from knowing that his father was no longer there.
I tried to get through each hour, each long day. Lockdown meant that no one in my family, none of my close friends, could get to me. No one could pick me up off the bathroom floor. No one could enter the house in a friendly bluster, distracting the girls with games or movies. No one could sit with me on the couch and grip my arm as I recounted what had happened. I do not like the phone; as a shy person, it makes me anxious. But it was my only lifeline.
When I told my mother, calling her from the garage the first morning after James left, she was outraged, and fierce in her defense of me. She had always loved James, but she had experience in the end of relationships, the end of marriages, the disappointment of unfaithful men. To her it was not murky. She said, “You must cut him out of your heart, like a cancer.”
My brother, Carter, and his wife, Charmaine, called often, both shocked that James had cheated on me, that he had left us during lockdown. My brother said, “Give him time. I’m sure he will come back.”
Two friends called me early every morning. Anna, a friend from boarding school, worried for me as one would a sister. We had known each other for thirty-five years, having met in our small dorm when I was fifteen and she was fourteen. She was compassionate and wise, her personality completely authentic, with no channel for falseness. When I heard her voice asking gently, “How do you feel today?” I knew she really wanted to know, that she would wait and listen. Our conversations often lasted for over an hour, beginning as early as 6 a.m., continuing as the sun rose.
A friend from Brooklyn also called early, never missing a morning. She was casual and chatty, talking about the pandemic, sharing a funny story about teaching her fourth-grade students on Zoom, discussing her plans to adopt a dog. We rarely delved into the drama unfolding in my life, but her calls were comforting in a different way than Anna’s. I knew, even in her breeziness, that she was checking on me, trying to make me feel less alone, less scared.
Maria, my Swedish friend, was there at night, at every hour. We communicated by text, a format we both preferred. I think she must have slept with her phone in her bed, with alerts on, so she could text me back right away. Those were the darkest moments, at night. There were times when I thought I could not make it to the morning, the pain was so intense.
My stepmother, Susan, called me several times a day. We were very close, bonded from the moment she entered my life in 1972. She wept with me, both of us quiet as we cried. She was the only person who tried to reach James. She emailed him in the second week, writing that in her forty-five years of practice as a family therapist, she had never seen someone leave a marriage so cruelly. She begged him to speak to me, to do therapy with me, to try to end the marriage kindly, honorably. He was furious. He texted me that, because of what Susan had written, he was going to continue his affair.
He texted me that because of what she had written, he would give me nothing at all.
—
April on Martha’s Vineyard feels like a snowless February. The light is flat and the temperatures stay low, the wind brisk. It rains a lot. Flowers and trees don’t bloom until May.
Easter was late that year, exactly three weeks after James left us. I made cinnamon rolls, a laborious recipe requiring the dough to rise twice, and they came out of the oven as hard as hockey pucks. I trudged around the woods hiding plastic eggs with clues inside, a treasure hunt for the girls, a family tradition since I was a child. I wore a dress, trying to appear festive,
and boots to manage the muddy areas. An hour into the effort, I realized I had messed up one of the connections between clues and had to redo the hunt, starting from the beginning. I felt desperate in this moment, like I had reached the point when I would break into pieces, a sad middle-aged woman in a dress and boots, disintegrating into the lake.
But as I moved toward the osprey pole, planning to hide an egg at its base, I saw wings rise and a head appear. And then another head. They were back. I thought, I need to tell James. He will be so happy. And then I remembered he was gone.
—
By late April, I knew I could not keep hiding the truth from the kids. I texted James that it was time to tell them and that we needed to do it together. We hadn’t spoken in several weeks. He said he thought it would be better if I told them alone.
Initially, I agreed with him. I was afraid that he would expose us to COVID. He was not in quarantine; he was having an affair in the middle of New York City. We decided we would do a family Zoom call to break the news.
James’s boss texted me the next day. He was a kind man, and a friend to both of us. He wrote that he understood why I was angry, but I needed to allow James to be there to tell our kids. He spoke from experience, having been divorced, having broken the news to children himself. He wrote that he was giving James his seaplane and pilot to fly to the Vineyard.
I tried to defend myself, explaining that James did not want to come, that he didn’t want custody, that he was having an affair, that he was unrecognizable to me, that it was dangerous to have him appear in our house. But as my text bubbles appeared, as I reread each note, I could see how I might be perceived—a bitter woman lashing out against the man who had left her. And potentially jeopardizing James’s job, his livelihood. I needed to be calm. I needed to be accommodating. I needed to shut up. And he was right—James should be there, in person, to tell the girls.
I thanked him for giving James the plane.
James met the pilot at an airport in Connecticut. Before he boarded, we called Finn together. James told him that we were divorcing. Finn was quiet. James and I kept talking, alternating back and forth, trying to assure our son that everything would be okay. For several minutes, we didn’t realize that Finn had hung up, maybe as soon as he heard the headline.
I called the parents he was staying with, asking them to go look for him.
I imagined him running across an open field, trying to flee the terrible news, but they found him in their basement, surrounded by his friends. The father said, “Don’t worry. We’ve got him.”
James landed on the Vineyard just before 2 p.m. He drove down our driveway in a Jeep our caretaker had left for him at the airport, a model similar to the one he’d driven onto the ferry a month earlier. He walked up the brick path to our door. He wore a mask, so I couldn’t see his whole face, but my first thought was that he seemed happy, his step brisk and optimistic. He was carrying an empty duffel bag over his shoulder.
He said he had only ninety minutes until he had to return to the airport.
We gathered in the living room, on the side we rarely used, where two white couches flanked a large coffee table. I sat between the girls on one of the couches, my arms around both of their small shoulders. James paced back and forth in front of us, still masked, the glass doors of our living room and the expanse of the lake behind him. He said, “Mom and I are separated and we’re going to divorce. I haven’t been happy.”
He continued to pace while he spoke, not looking at either of the girls, not looking at me. I watched him, thinking, The way he is moving and talking is so different. I don’t recognize his body, his voice. Is he having a breakdown? Is he in love? Is he just delighted to be free of me, of us?
As soon as he said the word divorced, Carrie twisted her body to face the back of the couch. She was smiling; she thought he was joking. Then she looked at me, saw my grave expression, and shrieked. I tried to grab her, but she fled down the stairs, wailing in agony.
Evie sat still and silent, with her arms crossed.
James turned to me and said, “I’m starving, can you make me a sandwich?”
I stared back at him, shocked. I didn’t know what to say in front of Evie. I tried to reason out an answer, Wouldn’t a good mother make their child’s father a sandwich? Wasn’t this how the world said you were supposed to behave in a divorce? Be nice to each other in front of the kids?
I said, “Okay, but please go find Carrie.”
I went to the kitchen. With my hands shaking, I toasted slices of sourdough bread, spread mustard, layered turkey, sliced avocado and tomato, sprinkled sea salt. I thought, If I’m doing this, I’m going to do it well. I will not make a shitty sandwich. Maybe part of me thought that it would make him regret what he was doing. How could he leave a wife who made such good sandwiches? I thought this even though, in that moment, I didn’t want him—this version of him—to stay.
I put the sandwich on a white plate with a bamboo rim and sliced it in half. I looked at our collection of cotton napkins and selected one in a blue flowered print. I roamed the house looking for him, carrying the plate and the napkin. He wasn’t with either girl. Carrie was in the guest room, curled on the couch. Evie was in her bed, the covers pulled up, looking at her phone. Evie told me later that before she’d gone to her room, James had taken her out to the lawn with one of his slingshots, explaining that it was now her job to keep the geese away. He showed her how to insert the pellet, pull back the sling, aim, and shoot.
I finally found him in the basement. He had several cardboard boxes at his feet. He was squatting in front of them, rummaging through the contents —papers and folders and notebooks. I watched as he pulled down two more boxes. He was sweating with the effort. I asked him what he was doing. He turned to me with the same cold green eyes I’d seen the day he left.
He said, “I’m looking for our prenup. If you have it, you have to give it to me.”
The prenup was missing. My lawyer from 1999 had died, and his firm had no record of the document. James couldn’t reach his lawyer, now retired. And neither of us had a signed copy in our email.
I stood there, at the top of the basement stairs, holding the plate, watching him. I told him to stop, to be with the girls during his remaining minutes in the house, but he continued, pulling box after box off the shelves. His duffel sat open on the floor beside the boxes, ready to receive what he found.
He finally gave up his search when it was time to go back to the airport.
He ate the sandwich quickly as he stood by the front door. I told the girls to come say goodbye. They leaned against the banister, staring at him.
He said, “The ospreys are back.”
I nodded. “Yes, we’ve seen them.”
When he walked to the borrowed Jeep, the girls and I got in our Toyota, a big family car, to pick up Chinese takeout from one of the only restaurants open on the island. I wanted to leave first, before James. I didn’t want my daughters to see their father drive away, his car disappearing over the hill. I feared the image would stay in their minds forever. I should have known it was the image of him pacing in his mask, not looking at them as he delivered the awful news, that would stick.
The girls and I ate together at the kitchen table, watching Gilmore Girls as we did each night. We’d seen every episode multiple times, and the familiarity was soothing. My phone pinged. It was a text from James: “That was a great visit!”
I stared at the sentence, stunned. He had rewritten the wrenching scenes we’d just lived, making them something different, something happy.
I didn’t write back.
A few weeks later, he sent an email with no message, only an attachment. It was a scan of the prenup. His lawyer had located it in a storage facility. When I opened the document and scrolled to the last page, I stopped at the sight of my own name. My signature looked innocent and hopeful, in blue ink and careful script, dated five days before our wedding.
