KELLY HARWOOD
THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS Your husband arrives home from work to find the dog eating a flank steak and potatoes au gratin off the counter and the children watching cartoons in the dark. You are waiting on the front porch, with a bottle of wine and a thick stack of printed emails, twenty-seven pages to be exact. Correspondence between your husband and a woman named Amber, found in an email account your husband kept secret from you until today, when you found it quite by accident, blinking on the laptop screen. One day, we are in the middle of a life and the next moment, we arrive at its crumbling edge, by force or by choice. “Tell me about Amber,” you say and her name rolls out of your mouth like a grenade. He falls to his knees right there in the front lawn and looks at you in slow motion anguish, as though he is witnessing a car accident. “It’s nothing. She’s nothing,” he says. You point out, “Three years is a long time to spend doing nothing.” Then you laugh and you can’t stop because for the first time in the history of fighting with your husband, you have nothing else to say. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, and you wonder if sorry has ever meant less to anyone. And this is the part that nobody tells you. In that moment, you don’t feel angry or sad or numb, not yet. Just for the moment, you are exhilarated – joyful even. Not because you suspected he was having an affair, 14
